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.