Decentring Urban Climate Finance

Abstract

Financial agendas centering on the global fight against climate change have increasingly turned to cities and urban re/development projects as ideal candidates for supposedly ‘future proof’ investment. In the last decade, research has witnessed the development of policy programs, risk assessments, and project pipelines, amongst other efforts to materialize this agenda in the city. Drawing on critical urban geographies of what is loosely known as ‘climate finance’, this Special Feature, ‘Decentering Urban Climate Finance’, proposes to expand and provincialize these dominant agendas. The five contributions in this Special Feature employ the notion of decentering in four distinct ways: by putting a broader range of theoretical lenses to use and rereading the workings of climate finance through them; by highlighting the modes of omission through which dominant understandings of climate finance narrow its operations to a limited set of solutions, approaches, places, and imaginaries; by turning a view onto under-examined sites of finance and climate adaptation; and by imagining alternative transformative imaginaries of urban climate finance.