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Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the limitations of climate finance in South Africa. It questions the idea behind climate finance and demonstrates that its implementation is divorced from existential realities of communities as it imagines and treats these citizens as passive victims rather than active agents.

Paper long abstract:

The human cost of climate change induced flooding in rural South Africa is well documented. However, there is a dearth of scholarship that explores post-flooding adaptation and resilience building at local community level. Informed by empirical evidence from Port St Johns Local Municipality in the Eastern Cape Province, this paper explores the limitations of piecemeal and reactionary climate finance in addressing underlying vulnerability drivers, recovery and resilience of communities at the coalface of the flooding crisis. Not only does the paper question the idea and thinking behind climate finance but goes further to demonstrate that its genesis, understanding and implementation in the rural South African climate programming space is divorced from the existential realities of communities as it imagines and treats these citizens as passive victims rather than active agents in adaptation and resilience building. Further, the disconnect between public (government) and private (NGOs) socio-political and financial interests in post-flooding relief and recovery efforts partly explains why there is no sustainable and long-term resilience action plan. While not claiming to advance a panacea intervention, the paper argues that climate finance should not be differentiated from ‘traditional’ development finance at local government level as this inadvertently relegates it to a secondary budgetary and local development item. Instead, it should be part of local integrated development planning and budgeting as this will place climate programming at the center of local development implementation.