Presentation short abstract

This paper examines how the climate–sustainable-development industrial complex (CSIDC) is reshaping water governance in Africa through techno-financial interventions that convert racialized precarity into new sites of capital accumulation.

Presentation long abstract

This paper examines how the climate–sustainable-development industrial complex (CSIDC) is reshaping water governance in Africa through emerging regimes of financialization that deepen global ‘water apartheid.’ Through a political ecology and racial capitalist lens, drawing on qualitative analysis of policy documents produced by the World Bank, OECD and affiliated multistakeholder bodies, I examine how climate resilience and sustainable development are mobilized to convert racialized precarity into new opportunities for accumulation. Interrogating the focus on Africa as both a site of acute humanitarian need and an untapped investment terrain, I analyze how predatory practices promoted as ‘innovative financing solutions’ for water-related climate adaptation and sustainable development serve to facilitate the extraction of profits from vulnerable communities. As ecological and financial crises intensify, these strategies expose the racial capitalist drives through which international development is being reconfigured to guarantee the reproduction of Northern capital rather than to secure water for marginalized communities.

This analysis is grounded in collaborative research with water justice organizers in Cape Town, South Africa, whose everyday struggles illuminate the intimate impacts of urban entanglements with finance capital. Their experiences reveal how techniques of financial discipline entrench historical racial injustices while producing new vulnerabilities in the context of climate chaos and financial austerity. Through multi-scalar analysis connecting global finance, international development and household-level utility struggles, this paper shows how techno-financial interventions of CSIDC intensify the social reproductive burdens of historically marginalized communities and how insights from frontline water justice struggles can help articulate more just futures.