Presentation short abstract

This study examines how the Bahamas and Barbados pioneer “blue economy” finance through tools like debt-for-nature swaps. It analyzes how NGOs, banks, and investors use debt to link conservation with finance, recasting oceans as assets while raising issues of sovereignty, and financial dependence.

Presentation long abstract

Among Small Island Developing States (SIDS), the Bahamas and Barbados have emerged as key testing grounds for innovations in ocean management and its financing under the banner of the ‘blue economy’. This research interrogates how new forms of blue finance are negotiated and advanced, and the actors shaping this agenda, with particular attention to the adoption of debt-based financing instruments with a unique focus on oceans, marketed as a new way to resource environmental governance - such as debt-for-nature swaps (DNS). Drawing on fieldwork and interviews, this research explores how debt restructuring has become a key channel for integrating conservation and environmental goals with financial tools, under frameworks promoted by NGO actors such as The Nature Conservancy (TNC), multilateral development banks, and private impact investors. Moreover, the study tries to trace how these actors advance forms of ‘blue’ development that hinge on financial risk redistribution rather than structural transformation. Situating “blue bonds” and DNS within the broader architecture of blended finance and climate finance, the study analyses how nature, and specifically ocean spaces and resources, are recast as investable assets. It interrogates the promises of climate adaptation and debt sustainability attached to these deals, while highlighting concerns around ownership, sovereignty, additionality, and the limited participation of local communities. These instruments seem to reinforce existing hierarchies of financial subordination and extend the logics of financialisation into environmental governance, raising critical questions about hierarchies of ownership and subordination and about the politics and limits of market-led solutions.

Presentation short abstract

This paper is a feminist political ecology analysis of the uneven labor burdens resulting from a climate adaptation project implemented among women farmers and home gardeners in Sri Lanka's dry zone.

Presentation long abstract

Over the past two decades, gender mainstreaming has been adopted as a central component of climate change adaptation interventions around the world. Women farmers in Sri Lanka’s North Central dry zone region have been described as particularly vulnerable and in need of climate adaptation interventions due to rainfall variabilities which have had pronounced impact on agrarian communities. This paper draws upon insights from feminist political ecology and literature on the politics of climate change adaptation to develop an approach for understanding uneven adaptation through an intersectional lens. Here, we present findings on how adaptation programs frame ideal adaptation subjects, and how gender mainstreaming efforts produce uneven labor burdens for female farmers participating in the climate adaptation project. We use a combination of methods which includes mental maps and qualitative semi-structured interviews, to de-emphasize the so-called positivist stances which currently govern adaptation interventions. By focusing on a major climate change adaptation project in Sri Lanka’s dry zone, this paper demonstrates feminist political ecology is a useful approach to not only understand how social, economic and ecological differences are produced between farmers but also how pre-existing precarities may contribute to uneven adaptation outcomes.

Presentation short abstract

Examines how climate finance logics in India turn participation into unpaid labor. Using an implicit labor lens, shows how audit metrics render work invisible, shifting adaptation costs onto households and revealing the politics of who performs, and sustains, climate action.

Presentation long abstract

Global climate finance architectures shape not only who receives adaptation funds but how adaptation is enacted. This paper advances an implicit labor lens: much of the work that makes projects possible - travel, training, coordination, implementation, and maintenance - remains unacknowledged in design, accounting, and evaluation. Tracing the downstream effects of audit and procurement logics in India, I show how international climate finance systems, in their current form, emphasize measurable, tangible metrics recast beneficiary participation as community contribution, rendering labor invisible while redistributing costs downward. Using document analysis of Indian adaptation project reports and fieldwork with farmers (project beneficiaries) in Uttarakhand, I identify three recurrent forms of labor: compensated, required in-kind, and unpaid voluntary, and demonstrate how households weigh immediate labor demands against uncertain benefits, producing both constraints and informed refusals. Reading these patterns through a political ecology of labor reveals how financing architectures normalize exploitation as participation and privilege accounting over accountability. Centering implicit labor reframes beneficiaries as adaptation laborers and surfaces project design choices, such as budgeting time, funding upkeep, aligning calendars that share the labor of adaptation more fairly and improve the odds that climate interventions endure.

Presentation short abstract

The paper explores whether and how law could reorient the distribution of financial resources towards a blue economy that prioritises socio-ecological wellbeing in three registers:value (what is measured as success), risk (how it is allocated), and agency (who controls resources and accountability).

Presentation long abstract

Marine and freshwater ecosystems have become the latest frontiers of impact investing during the last decade. Blue finance transactions like blue loans, blue bonds, and debt swaps aim to support the sustainable use, management, and/or conservation of such environments. The underlying narrative suggests that these products deliver environmental and social benefits while simultaneously raising profit for their investors.

However, there is consistent empirical evidence that the benefits of growth-focused blue finance investments are inequitably distributed. Because of such blue injustices, a growing body of literature on well-being economy and post-growth financial models advocates for a shift away from economic growth and profit maximization towards models that are cognizant of ecological limits, sufficiency, a needs-based economy. While this literature has predominantly focused on financing the well-being economy and post-growth economic activities, legal scholarship on post-growth sustainable finance remains scarce.

Such tension not only raises questions about whether existing blue finance arrangements comply with international environmental law. It also demands international (and transnational) legal imagination for post-growth blue finance legalities. This paper explores whether and how law could reorient the distribution of financial resources towards a blue economy that prioritises long-term socio-ecological wellbeing. To imagine such a (utopian) project, it investigates post-growth legalities in three registers: value (what is defined and measured as success), risk (how it is allocated), and agency (who controls resources and accountability). It argues that legal techniques that place ecological and social reproduction at the center of financial practice can align blue finance with a sustainable blue economy.

Presentation short abstract

Drawing on nine well-regarded East African carbon projects, we show that even best-case initiatives are shaped by unequal exchange, Northern institutional dominance and depoliticising narratives. This reveals limits to “decolonial” offsets and points instead toward reparative funding.

Presentation long abstract

Carbon offsets have become a rapidly expanding form of climate finance across the Global South, commonly framed as win–win interventions that deliver mitigation while supporting local livelihoods. Drawing on nine case studies from Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda (2014–2025)—including plantations, smallholder agroforestry, rangeland conservation, and REDD+—this paper interrogates whether such initiatives, even when explicitly designed to generate community benefits, can meaningfully be considered “decolonial.”

We show that forest carbon projects reproduce—and at times intensify—colonial power relations through three interconnected mechanisms central to contemporary climate finance infrastructures.

First, unequal economic exchange: carbon finance is celebrated as a North–South transfer yet operates through pricing that devalues Southern land and labour, enabling low-cost Northern offsetting. After consultancy fees, audit costs, and bureaucratic compliance burdens are extracted, communities receive only a fraction of the value they help generate.

Second, institutional asymmetries and epistemic gatekeeping: technical carbon accounting systems create profound knowledge hierarchies. Farmers lack access to basic price information; implementers struggle with complex audit cycles; and accredited verification bodies remain overwhelmingly Northern, positioning intermediaries as indispensable but value-capturing brokers of climate action.

Third, narrative depoliticization: dominant discourses present climate change as a universal ‘we’ problem, obscuring historical responsibility and structural inequality, naturalizing the idea that Southern landscapes should absorb Northern emissions.

We conclude that while community-rooted projects can yield local benefits, the offset mechanism itself remains structurally colonial. Decolonizing climate finance requires moving beyond offsets toward deep Northern emissions cuts paired with non-offsetting, reparative funding for locally grounded initiatives designed for quality rather than scale.

Presentation short abstract

Drawing on a qualitative study of two international climate finance projects, this paper critically examines the political economy of and barriers to climate finance localization in the Nepal Himalaya, highlighting structural, institutional, procedural and coordination hindrances at scales.

Presentation long abstract

Climate finance (CF) seeks to support mitigation and adaptation actions to address climate change (CC) impacts. Nepal’s CC Policy 2019 recognizes the risk of climate-induced disasters and envisions to achieve socioeconomic prosperity of the nation by building a climate-resilient society through adaptation and mitigation measures. While the country has made noticeable progress in developing policies, Nepal’s aspiration to localize CF is undermined by a confluence of structural, institutional, procedural and coordinational challenges rooted across scales. Such dichotomous and entangled climate financing thus illustrates (1) the governmentality of designing hasty policies to please donors without gauging their material implementation and impacts, and (2) the politics of scale where sub-national and local governments are provided with authorities without resources, reflecting incomplete decentralization. These complexities thus warrant unpacking the political economy of CF in Nepal. Informed by qualitative research conducted in two international CF projects in Nepal and framed through the lenses of governmentality, the paper scrutinizes what factors and actors bar and mar localizing CF in Nepal. Findings highlight that the centralized tendency of the federal government on CF management, both in terms of decision-making and resource allocation, has barred the decentralization mandate enshrined in the national climate policies. Despite the rhetorical policy on 80% benefit sharing with communities, local governments lacked the institutional mechanisms and skills to administer climate adaptation effectively. The barriers to localizing CF therefore are marred by disconnected policy designing, project implementation, and siloed sectoral administration. We therefore recommend restructuring CF governance given the Himalayan exposure to vulnerabilities.

Presentation short abstract

This paper explores the potential of a green extractivism lens to investigate the capitalist logic of carbon finance and its uneven geographies, trying to examine the dynamics of value extraction along the commodity chain and among the multiple actors involved in a carbon forestry project in Kenya.

Presentation long abstract

The voluntary carbon market (VCM), allowing the trading of emissions and offsets at national and international levels, is one of the most controversial key tools of climate finance. By translating greenhouse gas reductions/removals into compensation credits, these initiatives attribute a tradable economic value to nature, distributed along the carbon value chain between investors, project implementers and intermediaries.

This paper examines an Afforestation/Reforestation (A/R) project in Kenya, around the Mount Elgon Forest ecosystem. Although presented as simple intervention and highly beneficial for local communities and territories, the project reveals a long value chain that connects the tree planted in Kenya by small farmers to the credit exchanged on international markets. The complex architecture lying behind includes a French investment fund, created by big companies such as Danone, Hermès and others, pre-funding the initiative; a Swedish NGO implementing the activities with other small Kenyan organizations; two certification bodies responsible for the credits (Verra and Gold Standard); and the local farmers and their lands, central to the project’s success.

Drawing on desk research of grey literature and project documents, the intention of this paper is to explore the process of value extraction, the unequal power relations and the multi-scalar dynamics behind the carbon commodity chain through the extractivism lens. An exploratory mission in Kenya is also planned for February 2026, to collect interviews with key actors and to orient future fieldwork. The aim is therefore to test its potential to highlight (neo)colonial power dynamics that connect local realities to global capital flows.

Presentation short abstract

This contribution analyzes the anchoring of global climate finance in local hydraulic projects and how transcalar efforts to secure investments and shape urban hydrosocial futures depend on highly selective, fragmented and volatile financial flows.

Presentation long abstract

Critical literature often portrays financialization as an unstoppable force able to reconfigure all facets of socioecological existence. This contribution offers a more nuanced understanding of the local landing of global financial flows tied to environmental, climatic, or sustainable investment opportunities. We examine two Brazilian cities where local officials have been seeking to secure investments for initiatives aimed at taming, governing, and managing urban waters. Through document analysis and semistructured interviews with local officials and international practitioners, we show that the anchoring of finance into local hydraulic projects is dependent on active efforts by transcalar networks of stakeholders differentially engaged in attracting volatile financial flows circulating across diverse circuits. In making the case for sustainable investment opportunities, we identify that traditional mechanisms of bankability, leveraging, and de-risking are intertwined with green future-making claims in which the managing of the hydrosocial cycle takes center stage. This produces the project as a ring-fenced arena defined by dense interactions among orbiting agents seeking to draw and fix investments from sources such as development banks, multilateral funds and institutional investors. Yet, due to the spatial, temporal, and geopolitical selectivity of global finance, anchoring efforts are often partial or unsuccessful. Consequently, urban hydrosocial futures remain uncertain, contingent as they are on financial flows that might never fully materialize or may fail to land altogether. By framing global finance not as an all-encompassing strucutre, but rather as a set of fragmented and inconstant circulations, this contribution advances a more complex reading of financialization by Political Ecologists.

Presentation short abstract

Indonesia seeks to accelerate climate finance in its oil palm sector by reconfiguring financial architectures, yet these efforts reproduce colonial land governance and shift risks onto smallholders, revealing how subordinated climate finance forecloses rural futures.

Presentation long abstract

This paper examines Indonesia’s attempt to accelerate the circulation of climate finance through its oil palm sector at a moment of ecological and economic crisis. After two decades of planting, roughly 40 percent of Indonesia’s smallholder oil palm plots are dying. The state interprets this uncertainty as a strategic opportunity: by replanting the sector and reconfiguring its financial architecture, it seeks to secure the plantation economy’s future investability and position it within emerging green markets. Yet the program has consistently failed to meet its annual targets.

Drawing on ethnographic research among state planners, financiers, and corporate managers in Jakarta, the paper extends the notion of the “de-risking state” (Gabor 2021) to show how climate finance infrastructures are designed to accelerate capital uptake while redistributing risk downward. I trace how a new plantation fund management agency, the restructuring of state-owned plantation companies, subsidized banking channels, and state guarantees collectively produce a financial circuit that constructs the plantation as a green investment frontier – performing the work of subordinated climate finance by prioritizing legibility, scale, and investor confidence over ecological repair and distributive justice.

The paper highlights two interlinked dynamics. First, state speculation about the plantation’s green investability reproduces colonial logics of corporate-led land governance under the guise of climate action. Second, the risks generated by this strategy are offloaded onto smallholders, who become responsible for sustaining the very debts required to maintain Indonesia’s green-finance narrative. The paper reveals how climate finance not only governs futures but also forecloses alternative rural futures.

Presentation short abstract

This piece explores the Green Climate Fund’s ‘mentalities’ and operational logics by a governmentality analysis of 19 low-carbon energy projects, demonstrating how financialization shapes energy projects in terms of depoliticization, externalization, and transnational governmental alignments.

Presentation long abstract

Green funds have become an influential force that shapes the design, discourses, and materialities of climate adaptation and mitigation projects. Yet fund-driven transformation processes seem prone to financialization and may reproduce hegemonial or even neo-colonial forms of governance and knowledge production. This refers for instance to interventions into sovereignty or to the creation of epistemological dichotomies that privilege western bodies of knowledge. We argue that the shift towards fund-driven climate mitigation ensues three interrelated transformations: a turn towards bankability, a turn towards postliberal stakeholder governance, and a turn towards results-based management within the hitherto politicized sphere of climate adaptation and mitigation. Altogether, these turns establish new financial, economic and epistemic dependencies while further constraining the limited spaces for local ownership in transition processes. Focusing on the world’s largest public climate fund, the Green Climate Fund, this paper seeks to “think like a fund”. This means, through a governmentality analysis we shed light on the Green Climate Fund’s ‘mentalities’ and operational logics thereby contributing to the small but significant debate on funds-driven green transformation. Our work contributes to the debate on green governmentality and also engages with recent debates on green financialization. Based on an empirical sample of 19 low carbon energy projects, we analyse how the logics of green funds shape green transformation projects in terms of depoliticization, externalization of governmental authority, and creation of transnational governmental alignments.

Presentation short abstract

We examine how Senegal's €2.5 billion climate financing deal with France, Germany, the EU and other partners maintains colonial continuities by repackaging European economic interests as "just transitions" and how JETPs help institutionalise both green and fossil extractivism.

Presentation long abstract

Just Energy Transition Partnerships (JETPs) have been lauded by European governments as novel and ambitious instruments of climate cooperation to support the energy transition of fossil-fuel dependent countries in the Global South. However, JETPs have sparked criticism for offering mostly debt-based financing in the form of concessional loans, double counting of already committed finance, and a lack of transparency from donor governments. Unlike previous JETPs, Senegal's Agreement contains a notable exception for gas development and no phaseout conditionality. Signed amid Europe's energy crisis in 2023 and subsequent quest to diversify gas imports, Senegal's JETP thus reveals new tensions and conflicts of interest in European climate cooperation. Simultaneously, the JETP, which claims to support Senegal's green economic development and achievement of universal electricity access, will ultimately support utility-scale projects developed by European companies, furthering an enclosure of Senegalese land for renewable projects and a sovereign debt crisis inherited by the new Faye Administration. While an energy future defined by green growth is not altogether imposed, it conceals a development agenda that is not locally determined. This study contributes to the emerging scholarship on the role of international climate finance in expanding Europe's frontiers of extraction and maintaining colonial dependencies via debt traps in green and fossil infrastructures. Through the lens of Senegal’s JETP, we demonstrate how international climate finance merely defines the terms under which governments de-risk private green investment, while simultaneously consigning Global South governments as de-risking agents for fossil fuel projects from which they receive little local economic benefit.

Presentation short abstract

Based on ethnographic research at international climate negotiations and interviews with negotiators, this presentation will explore Small Islands Developing States' diverging narratives and negotiation performances on sources of climate finance and carbon crediting schemes.

Presentation long abstract

The sobering outcome of the New Collective Quantifiable Goal (NCQG) on climate finance is increasingly creating a competitive and rivalrous market for 'developing countries' to attract climate finance. Meanwhile, negotiations over carbon markets are further establishing carbon credit schemes as transition finance providers. In this context, the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS), known for its successes in gathering microstates into influential players and for consensus often being the order of the day, has not been immune to this divisive negotiation stage. Indeed, AOSIS members with large amounts of biodiversity such as Papua New Guinea, Belize and Fiji, with for i.e. vast forest covers and mangroves, have "much to gain" from carbon crediting initiatives, as opposed to low-lying atolls such as Tuvalu. Further, perceptions over the commodification of nature, environmental safeguards, and integrity in Article 6 negotiations are a 'grey zone' for AOSIS, while some of its members are also joining the Coalition for Rainforest Nations (CfRN). In this contentious context, the present paper seeks to investigate how AOSIS member states have framed varying narratives around sources of climate finance and to uncover the negotiation strategies used to compensate for their lack of unity. To explore these power performances, the paper uses ethnographic participant observations at COP30 and SB64, combined with a set of negotiators’ interviews. These sources prove relevant to investigate not only the ‘what’ in terms of discourses deployed, but also the ‘how’, as to the forms of influential resources enacted across and beyond negotiations.

Presentation short abstract

This paper explores on the one hand central banks as potential key actors in promoting socio-ecological transformation towards climate justice, and on the other hand how central banks can delay and/or obstruct climate action.

Presentation long abstract

Central banks have emerged as key actors of the financialised capitalist economy. Through their monetary policies they exercise significant power in shaping economic and financial geographies. Given this power, central banks can potentially play a pivotal role in transforming our economies in the age of climate disruption. By radically reshaping financial flows (and financial chains) they can usher a much-needed transformation towards greener, decarbonised, fossil fuel-free economies, fairer and healthier societies and lead the way in promoting climate justice around the world. However, central banks can also act to block transformative climate action and use their power to maintain the environmentally harmful and socially destructive status quo.

This paper first contrasts these two roles – exploring on the one hand central banks as potential key actors in promoting socio-ecological transformation towards climate justice, and on the other hand how central banks can delay and/or obstruct climate action. The paper then examines how the actions and monetary policies of leading central banks map onto these two contrasting roles. Contributing to the growing debate on the ways central banks should be responding to climate disruptions, this paper also expands the emerging literature on climate obstruction in banking and finance.