Defining Climate Finance Justice: Critical Geographies of Justice Amid Financialized Climate Action

Abstract

Given the exponential growth in financial investments to support climate change mitigation and adaptation, particularly shaped as capital flows from the Global North to the Global South, an incredible amount of research has come out in recent years interrogating various modes of climate finance. This article provides an overview of “climate finance justice,” an emerging subfield of scholarship that asks “What kinds of justice and injustice do we see in climate finance? How does climate justice influence flows and constructions of capital? And how can finance be more just?” As climate finance is often framed as a response to calls for climate justice, climate finance justice offers a space in which to rigorously and comprehensively analyze the outcomes of these flows of capital, finance and power. Yet the field is still new, and would benefit from further inclusion of a broader array of fields and influences, including postcolonial, poststructural, feminist, indigenous, urban, post-political and other critical perspectives to inform scholarship, and challenge dominant conceptualizations of justice and equity. This article highlights the field of climate finance justice and explores the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and voluntary carbon markets (VCMs) as a means of understanding its applied implications. It situates the evolution of the subfield within the broader literature on neoliberal natures, political ecology, and the critical geographies of the carbon economy.