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.