Working with and against climate finance

Abstract

Refusing simple narratives that equate the state of climate action to the quantity of finance flowing in its name, Climate Finance shows that financial instruments and ideas are built on moral and political assumptions about what is valued, whose risks need protection, and who is responsible for redressing harm. Departing from both mainstream and critical approaches to climate finance, the authors neither take financial logics and dynamics to be inevitable and essential, nor dismiss its possibilities for real climate action. Instead, they investigate finance as a dynamic space of political contestation, in which unevenly situated actors envision, negotiate, and build diverse climate futures. In doing so, the book not only offers us vital tools and frameworks to understand what climate finance is and does. Rather, by recognizing the need for a multiplicity of strategies to address our planetary predicament, Climate Finance also pushes for a more expansive imagination of the possible in relation to the actual.

Each year I teach and advise several Masters’ students with interests in environmental policy and politics. Intelligent and curious, they are keen to make a difference in the world, albeit in very distinct ways. Some, I imagine, will go on to work in the field of green finance. Others might work with climate justice movements. While there appears to be little that unites these two sets of students and their perspectives on the planet, Gareth Bryant and Sophie Webber’s Climate Finance: Taking a Position on Climate Futures provides something of a bridge, reaching out to multiple audiences through serious engagement with often opposing points of view. It offers valuable insights for both sets of students (as well as the many others who might fall between or outside of these categories) by illustrating that both are deeply political and moral positions on the roots of the problems we face, and outlining possible solutions. The book rigorously unpacks the commonsense equation between the state of the climate crisis and the large quantity of finance flowing in its name (p. 7). Refusing this simple narrative, the authors show that financial instruments and ideas are built on moral and political assumptions about what is valued, whose risks need protection, and who is responsible for redressing harm.

In compelling and clear prose, Gareth Bryant and Sophie Webber consider two of the most deeply influential global processes (unevenly) shaping all our lives: climate change and finance. Building on the premise that “climate finance is an indicator and mediator of climate futures” (p. 6), each chapter examines distinct “positions” on climate finance, and the futures envisioned and enacted through these specific financial instruments, markets, and policies. Moving from green bonds to resilient infrastructure, index insurance to climate reparations, the authors present a detailed and comprehensive framework and typology for grasping the vast and often invisible architecture of climate finance, and outline the stakes of each mode of addressing climate change.

As they assert at the outset, “The politics of climate change is now being fought on the terrain of climate finance” (p. 1). This interest in politics lies at the heart of the book, demonstrating that supposedly neutral, technical instruments are built on political and moral presumptions, but also that they are contested, negotiated, and retooled in unexpected ways. Crucially, the text maintains a critical focus on relations of power and inequality constitutive of global finance while attending to the pragmatic and productive contestations that unfold within and against it. There is much to be commended about this ambitious book, but in this short discussion, I will focus on its attention to finance as a dynamic space of political contestation, in which unevenly situated actors envision, negotiate, and build diverse climate futures.

In offering a clear-eyed and sober assessment of this vast field of actors and institutions, Climate Finance is distinct from both mainstream and critical approaches to climate finance, neither taking its logics and dynamics to be inevitable and essential, nor entirely dismissive of its possibilities for real climate action. Recognizing its many limitations and failures, Bryant and Webber nonetheless refuse, for instance, characterizations of climate finance as a “financialised spectacle of climate change action which obscures both the empirical reality of ecosystem and biodiversity loss, and the uncomfortable imperative of how our ways of living need to change” (Bracking, 2021: 256). Rather, they agree that certain positions offer more opportunities for “rapid, fair, and democratic action on climate change than others” (p. 16), but also that none have predetermined outcomes, and all are rife with contestation, contingency, and contradictions.

Focusing our intellectual and political energies on the terrain of climate finance raises the risk of allowing elite financial actors and institutions to set the terms of the debate. The authors are aware of this. In their concluding comments, they admit that the “green capitalist imaginary” saturates even the more progressive discussions of climate finance, constraining policy, and public imaginations of the possible. As critics of liberal notions of climate justice ask, “What possibility exists to remedy climate change and its uneven impacts within the remit of the laws and political institutions designed by the same broad set of actors that created these problems? How can climate justice be realized within a world system that, from its inception, has thrived on the exploitation of devalued places and people not recognized as fully human?” (Thomas and Rhiney, 2024: 1). The same could – and should – be asked of climate finance.

Yet, the book brims with curiosity and openness, alluding to the possibilities of climate finance otherwise. Here, I am drawing from anthropologist Haverkamp’s (2021) concept of “adaptation otherwise” as “a decolonial practice that discontinues the coloniality of power within climate change planning,” remaining open to difference and advancing political projects of self-determination, dignity, and redistribution (p. 9). Indeed, as Bryant and Webber write, “the boundaries between climate finance positions are malleable and evolving,” open to contestation and contingency (p. 155). While they note their investment in two “positions” in particular – big green states and climate justice finance – for their internationalist, reparative, publicly funded orientation, the authors recognize that all positions contain their own fissures, tensions, and contradictions that can be deployed to diverse ends. They are, in other words, alert to “transformative possibility in unanticipated places” (Appel, 2014: 603). That is, rather than solely looking to the outsides of capitalism for inspiration, Bryant and Webber also urge us to look to its centers as spaces of contestation and potential.

Climate Finance presents several existing cases of transformative action on, through, and against finance. Divestment movements, for example, adopt what the authors call “risky politics” that “makes financial arguments against investment in fossil fuels” as an unacceptable financial risk (p. 53). That is, activists take on the hegemonic vocabulary of risk and turn it into a tool for progressive change – by making climate change a financially material risk. Similarly, the Stop Adani campaign against a proposed coal mine in Queensland, Australia, deployed a range of tactics including direct action, climate litigation, and targeting financial flows. Emphasizing the risk that the mine might become a stranded asset and a legal liability, activists sought to block financial flows to the project – with partial but limited success.

If the Adani case reveals a familiar – but no less violent – story of the trampling of Indigenous land rights for fossil fuel extraction, and the limits of climate finance politics, the authors also offer a rather different and more surprising story. Delving into the archetypal villain within climate discourse – carbon offsets – Bryant and Webber explore how the Yurok tribe in California deployed the cap-and-trade system to further their own goals of political and economic sovereignty, buying up stolen land, reviving their economy, and revitalizing their cultural practices. Mobilizing “Indigenous community- determined methodologies and contracts” (p. 75), this and other examples of Indigenous-led carbon projects vividly illustrates the reparative potential of climate financial flows.

My own work on agricultural insurance in India – a very specific and state-dominated form of financialized asset protection – attests to the limits and affordances of finance (Matthan, 2025). On the one hand, addressing weather-related crop losses through index insurance can exacerbate uncertainty while also worsening inequalities between the insured and the uninsured (often poor smallholders and landless farmers). More broadly, while marginalized communities bear the costs and risks of climate change, investors and financiers (in this case, private insurance companies) reap substantial financial benefits, largely through state subsidized insurance premiums. Indeed, as Bryant and Webber write, financial instruments “produce a large-scale transfer from different, often marginalized, publics to financial privates, reproducing socio-spatial inequalities” (p. 40). On the other hand, I have also found that agriculturalists deploy insurance as a political terrain to vis-a-vis state officials and insurers – engaging in negotiation, bargaining, manipulation, and protest to demand what they see as their rightful compensation for crop damage. These findings resonate with the “glimmers of progressive redistributive potential” that Bryant and Webber locate in precision markets, whether through pooled risk that produces regional solidarities among climate vulnerable nations or collective compensation within loss and damage mechanisms (p. 81).

Such openings are most clearly and explicitly outlined in the chapter on climate justice finance, understood as a broad set of demands and movements that insist on the principle of common but differentiated responsibility. Unlike the other markets, instruments, and asset classes discussed in the book, climate justice finance takes inequality as its starting point, recognizing that climate change, its impacts, and redressal are unevenly experienced – here, climate change cannot be solved through technical and financial fixes but represent “another symptom of capitalism and imperialism” (p. 130). Yet, as the authors acknowledge, “climate justice finance” – whether international public finance or the Green New Deal – is always mediated by powerful interests and not necessarily democratic or equitable. Instead, as a space that is relatively more amenable to direct control by policymakers and publics, these financial flows must be made transparent, democratic, and accountable.

Perhaps the most radical and transformative form discussed is climate reparations, a demand premised on an understanding of climate change as a “debt relation” accrued over centuries of extraction, dispossession, and pollution. In this light, reparations are neither gift nor loan, but a return and recompense based on what is owed. While some scholars might end their analysis with this broadly progressive declaration, Bryant and Webber dig deeper into the technopolitics of reparations, laying out the complexities of measurement and quantification – how much, since when, against what metrics? In doing so, they demonstrate the expansiveness of their argument that dynamics of political contestation unfold as much in the streets as on the balance sheets.

Elsewhere, Webber (2024) has argued that the current “political economic-climate conjuncture” calls for new, creative, and strategic engagements with “climate capitalism,” “grappling with the ambiguities, ambivalences, and potentials of existing ‘climate capitalist’ responses to climate problems while nurturing and scaling their more reparative ends” (p. 15). As such, the book not only offers us vital tools and frameworks to understand what climate finance is and does; recognizing the need for a multiplicity of strategies – working both through and against finance – to address our planetary predicament, it also pushes for a more expansive imagination of the possible in relation to the actual.

In Envisioning Real Utopias, sociologist Wright (2010) eschews both wishful thinking and cynicism, calling for grounded empirical research that “fully recognize the complexity and dilemmas as well as the real potentials of practical efforts at social empowerment” (p. 151). In many ways, this book takes up this task and invites further analysis and debate on the multivalence and unpredictability of finance. Bryant and Webber show us that while engagements with climate finance rarely offer up much that is utopian, they are nonetheless essential to building truly democratic and just climate futures.