The multipolarity and geo-politics of climate finance

Abstract

This review critically engages with Gareth Bryant and Sophie Webber’s Climate Finance: Taking a Position on Climate Futures. It contends that there are two unwritten themes that operate across the text that are important to the analytical framework and the operations of climate finance itself. Firstly, a dialectic of multiple forms of uncertainty around climate change (finance) and the attempts to contain, navigate and accumulate across these geographies. Secondly, the need to take seriously the intersections of geo-politics and climate finance amid the increasing multipolarity of the world system.

Thinking through climate finance in a rapidly changing world

The book Climate Finance offers a critical overview that captures, distils and sets out the ways in which both international responses and geographic scholarship have undergone something of a financial turn (see Knuth et al., 2025; Long and Rice, 2019: Robin, 2022: Taylor et al., 2025). As Bryant and Webber suggest in the opening pages, ‘the politics of climate change is now being fought on the terrain of climate finance’, showing how this recognition has developed through their own work over the years and how this shapes the motivation to write this exciting book.

There are two unwritten themes that work across the book’s chapters that feel important to the analytical framework and the operations of climate finance itself. The first is a dialectic of multiple forms of uncertainty around climate change (finance) and the attempts to contain, accumulate from and navigate them. These uncertainties play out in so many ways that are brilliantly examined in the book. The second is the expansive ways in which ongoing and multiple attempts, forms, experiments and countermoves of measurement and standardisation are attached to the political economy of climate finance. The issues swirling around the measurement and standardisation imperatives also pose a broader question that surfaces from the book. That is whether financial sectors and actors understand climate change as a completely new form of risk and accumulation frontier—or whether this is simply another form of risk and accumulation frontier re-packaged within ways of doing business.

Given the comprehensive treatment of climate finance throughout the book, I believe its analytical framework might offer a foundation towards a broader dialogue into other big economic and financial debates. There are some interesting parts of the book that make clear the intersections of geo-politics and climate finance, and the authors suggest ways we might consider how climate finance will account for both longer term geo-political trends and more recent forms of turbulence. Given the core argument of the book is to make clear that climate finance cannot remain on the broader terrain of finance, markets and speculation, there are some interesting openings presented that point to how this might extend more systemically into contemporary geo-political debates and studies. Firstly, both domestically and increasingly internationally, the role of China is coming to the fore in thinking about climate finance (Bhandary et al., 2022). While this is not always explicit in nature (i.e. tied to infrastructure investments via the Belt and Road Initiative), Bryant and Webber note the emergence of new kinds of lending criteria, forms of lending and operations of state-owned financial institutions such as the China Development Bank with emphasis on renewable technologies and sustainable development criteria. However, in the conclusion, the authors note that ‘climate finance remains structured by ideas, instruments and actors emanating from the centres of global finance in the Global North’. Perhaps this means we need to expand the idea of climate finance itself, because if the book is reflective of ‘the balance of political economic forces in the world of climate finance’, (p. 155) what would it look like to think this from a China-centric perspective? What kind of work is required to stretch climate finance beyond the terrain of the Global North to account for other flows and circulations of climate and climate-adjacent finance from China, or indeed the Gulf, or multilateral banks such as the Asian and African Development Banks? These financial actors are integral to much of the ‘resilient infrastructure development’ (e.g. low carbon technology transfers) proceeding in some regions of the world (Liu et al., 2022).

Connected to this contention is how the book and its approach is well set up to consider the multipolarity of the world system and associated economic nationalism. While this is already mentioned in the book through carbon allowances to strategic industries such as steel production, recent years have shown that these forces are increasingly pushing away from a market led approach to long-term security concerns. I am interested in how the framework proposed in the book might extend further into these imperatives. For instance, if we think about green extractivism (Riofrancos, 2025), particularly in the race to secure rare earth materials, I wonder if the authors could envisage a more expansive political economy of climate finance to integrate these geo-political/geo-economic processes—perhaps as part of a next book! This tension is particularly evident in the ‘Big Green State’ chapter. In Europe, this ‘position’ is likely to be overshadowed by the rise of the Big Military State, even as countries like Germany promise to make at least 20% of this trillion Euro militarisation ‘green and climate friendly’. ¹ Given the rapid breakdown of aid flows from the West—much of which would constitute bilateral and multilateral climate finance packages that have been developed—how might this political economy of climate finance, future risks and the developing impacts of climate change itself address militarisation and potential conflict taking up more and more financial resources?

Finally, I found the sections on disinvestment very interesting politically and think this is because it is in these political spaces that the most agency for social movements and campaigners might lay. Given the intensifying efforts of disinvestment strategies that have been mobilised in recent years most notably here in the UK in the targeting of Israeli arms manufacturer, Elbit Systems (Turner, 2022). Bryant and Webber present a clear understanding of how ‘disinvestment aims to put fossil fuels at risk through its own actions, bringing future risk forward to today as a kind of political feedback from the climate crisis into the corporate and financial world’ (p. 59). I was also interested to hear how the authors might imagine climate finance politics spilling beyond existing strategies into various other terrains of political struggle and action.

Overall, this book offers both a detailed introduction to the world of climate finance, and a serious engagement with the various ways in which climate finance will likely be shaped, contested and refashioned through a dizzying array of actors at a time of profound ecological, economic and political turbulence across the planet. Bryant and Webber have opened up a dialogue that has long been forming and now is fully in the open in geographic and associated scholarship; this book will be invaluable in navigating these debates.