Becoming ready,remaining disciplined? Access to climate finance and the double bind of accountability in Vanuatu

Abstract

The climate crisis is a lived reality in the Pacific. In Vanuatu, slow-onset and extreme weather events threaten coastal infrastructures, food security, and socio-cultural practices. Addressing these impacts requires substantial financial resources to address adaptation and losses and damages. Multilateral climate finance has been positioned as a mechanism of climate justice, yet access to these funds remains highly constrained. Drawing on a governmentality-informed political ethnography grounded in Pasifika scholarship and fieldwork in Vanuatu's climate finance nexus, this paper shifts analytical focus from flows of finance to its infrastructures of access. It argues that green funds – particularly the Green Climate Fund – operate as disciplinary regimes that produce parallel governance structures and donor-centred accountability relations. The paper shows what it means to become ‘ready’, yet remain disciplined in a global system that continues to equate justice with compliance. Via projectification, audit cultures and risk frameworks, green funds restructure local institutions around donor logics, often undermining locally defined priorities. Engaging Tracey Banivanua Mar's notion of imperial literacy, the paper further illuminates the epistemic labour required to navigate legibility and compliance within climate finance governance. While remaining contested in Vanuatu, these practices normalise external control and translate historically entrenched inequalities into seemingly neutral technical standards. By treating climate finance as a constitutive site where accountability, discipline and legibility are produced, the paper adds empirical depth to critical climate geographies by extending debates into the highly technical – yet deeply political – empirical and epistemic terrain of climate finance access infrastructures.

Introduction

Pacific Island Countries contribute less than 0.03% of global greenhouse gas emissions (SPC, 2025). Yet, they are among the most severely affected regions in the world. Estimates suggest that the average GDP of the 65 countries most affected by the climate crisis could fall up to 64% by the end of the century if current climate policies persist (Andrijevic and Ware, 2021). Since 1990, the world's five largest emitters have collectively caused an estimated US$6 trillion in lost income for Global South economies (Callahan and Mankin, 2022). Inversely, Fanning and Hickel (2023) calculate that overshooting countries owe US$192 trillion in compensation to undershooting countries of the Global South. These numbers underscore what Pacific scholars have long articulated: climate change is not merely an environmental crisis but a continuation of colonial and capitalist injustices that allocate responsibility and vulnerability along historical lines of power (Jetn̄il-Kijiner, 2023; Naupa, 2024; Solnit and Young Lutunatabua, 2023).

In Vanuatu, these dynamics are acutely visible. The country loses an average of 6% of its GDP annually to climate-related disasters, with single events such as Tropical Cyclone Pam in 2015 costing up to 64% of GDP (The World Bank Group, 2021). Estimating the costs of inaction in a currently more than likely 3°C warming scenario, this will result in 57% of GDP reduction in Vanuatu until 2100 (Climate Analytics, 2018). Beyond metrics of loss, climate change transforms livelihoods and social fabrics: communities are forced inland, food systems shift towards imported staples, women's care work intensifies, and sacred kastom sites erode under the rising sea. These transformations are shaped by a global political economy in which those least responsible for the crisis bear its highest costs.

In response, multilateral funds such as the Green Climate Fund (GCF), Adaptation Fund (AF) and Loss and Damage Fund (LDF) were established as mechanisms of justice: as instruments to redistribute resources and support adaptation in the world's most affected regions. In practice, however, this promise remains only partially fulfilled. Despite billions pledged, only a fraction of global climate finance reaches the most impacted countries, and even less flows directly to communities (Ciplet et al., 2013; Khan et al., 2020). Vanuatu's experience exemplifies this paradox. Although it has long been a vocal advocate for climate justice (Wewerinke-Singh and Salili, 2020), its access to multilateral climate finance has been slow, fragmented, and externally mediated. Until October 2025, the country lacked accreditation to multilateral climate funds, meaning that resources had to be channelled through intermediaries. While Vanuatu's recent accreditation to the GCF represents an important milestone, it also raises critical questions about what kind of ‘readiness’ is being recognised – and on whose terms.

These tensions resonate with a growing body of scholarship that examines the political implications and effects of contemporary climate finance governance. Skovgaard et al. show that the coordination of climate finance remains ‘depoliticized by treating it as a technical exercise’ (2023: 125) rather than as political struggles over responsibility and power. At the same time, recent work indicates that climate finance reproduces broader patterns of inequality and control, including subalternisation, subordination and dependency (Alami et al., 2023; Koddenbrock et al., 2020; Perry, 2021; Zylinski, 2024). As Saddington argues, ‘adaptation funding is intrinsically shaped by external power relations, international relations and colonial legacies’ (2025: 449).

Moving beyond questions of distribution and control, Perry (2021), drawing on Sylvia Wynter's work, conceptualises climate finance as a deeply colonial project of subject formation and provides an ontological refinement regarding power relations: as Perry argues, climate finance seeks to ‘transform formerly colonized peoples into modern subjects, while maintaining the ‘space of otherness’ (Wynter, 2003: 296) that define their relationship with the world system’ (Perry, 2021: 362). Pasifika works have long critiqued the insufficiency, colonially structured and donor-driven governance of climate action (Anantharajah, 2024; Bordner et al., 2020; Firth, 2010; Fry, 2019; McDonnell, 2020; Naupa, 2024; Wesley-Smith, 2013), emphasising the need for Pasifika governance, localisation, and decolonial approaches to climate action that challenge extractive and technocratic models of aid (Meki and Tarai, 2023; Ratuva et al., 2024; Solnit and Young Lutunatabua, 2023).

While a growing body of scholarship treats climate finance as a governing regime shaped by unequal political economies in Oceania (Anantharajah, 2021, 2024; Korovulavula et al., 2020; Morgan and Petrou, 2023; Munro, 2021; Owens et al., 2025; Treichel et al., 2024; Webber, 2013), Vanuatu's landscape is treated mainly through adaptation, resilience, land and knowledge politics rather than climate finance architectures per se (McDonnell, 2020; Rarai et al., 2022; Reuhr, 2022). Fine-grained analyses of climate finance access industries and empirical research on how climate finance is governed on the ground remain sparse, even when these actors appear ethnographically in studies of the aid complex (Denton, 2018; Rosier, 2024). Drawing on a postcolonial political ethnography grounded in Pasifika scholarship, this paper builds on these debates by shifting the analytical focus from flows of finance to its infrastructures of access. With a focus on the GCF, it asks: how is the multilateral climate finance access industry navigated in Vanuatu, what governing techniques and disciplinary mechanisms emerge, and what subjectivities and accountabilities are produced along the lines?

The paper's core argument is that barriers to accessing multilateral climate finance are not merely technical or economic – they are socially constructed and sustained through disciplinary regimes of governance. Rather than remedying inequalities, green funds – such as the GCF – often reproduce inequities by creating new forms of compliance (Treichel et al., 2024) and disproportionate accountability regimes. Based on interviews and ethnographic research in Vanuatu between 2023 and 2025, I show how the pursuit of ‘readiness’ – i.e., ‘a country's capacity to engage with the GCF’ (GCF Watch, 2016) – disciplines local actors into particular ways of managing the crisis while invisibilising its (post)colonial infrastructures. The next section outlines the theoretical framework, situating climate finance governance within Pasifika and postcolonial debates on discipline, imperial literacy and audit cultures. After describing the empirical context and methods, the analysis proceeds in three parts: first, I examine the proliferation of external governance and parallel structures in Vanuatu's climate finance landscape; second, I analyse the capacity traps and audit cultures that emerge; and finally, I discuss the double bind of accountability characteristic of the multilateral climate finance regime. While the research was conducted prior to Vanuatu's accreditation to the GCF in October 2025, I include analytical reflections on how this reform may shift governing modes. The discussion reflects on what it means to ‘be/come ready’, yet ‘remain disciplined’ in a global system that continues to equate justice with compliance.

Governmentality, imperial literacy and the climate finance access industry

Genealogies of external rule in Oceania

Governing from outside is neither new nor exceptional in Oceania: colonial intervention fundamentally reshaped Oceanic political orders by imposing European notions of territory, authority, and bureaucracy onto societies that had – dependent on their pre-colonial context and on ‘which colonial power was involved’ (Fry, 2019: 44) – long operated through fluid, localised, and kastom-based forms of governance (Wesley-Smith, 2013; see also Macdonald, 1982) and within an ‘interlinked, interdependent and highly contingent world of shared markets, trades and desires’ (Banivanua Mar, 2013: 2). ¹ Casting Oceania as confined to its island geographies from the colonial vantage point (Hau’ofa, 1994) created the epistemic grounds on which such interventions were legitimised; it ‘created the context in which the establishment of imperial control of these societies was thought possible, and indeed became part of the imposition and management of empire’ (Fry, 2019: 43). These historically sedimented forms of governing from outside did not end with independence. Pasifika scholarship has extensively demonstrated how nuclear violence, militarisation and extractive industries operate as techniques of rule that continue to discipline lands, bodies, and political possibility in the Pacific (Farbotko, 2010; Goodyear-Kaʻōpua, 2019; Teaiwa, 1994, 2021; Teaiwa, 2014).

Postcolonial governmentality, imperial literacy and audit cultures

As Katerina Teaiwa writes, ‘[p]ost-war programs of development and economic structural adjustment encouraged by former colonial powers, now aid and development partners, have particularly undermined local systems of governance and cultural resilience’ (2020: 601–602). Rather than direct coercion, these programmes are institutionalised through the shaping of conduct, expectations, and subjectivities vis-à-vis the developmental discipline. Against this backdrop, postcolonial governmentality studies show how development functions as a discursive and material apparatus that reproduces colonial hierarchies of progress, modernity, and alleged deficiency, constructing the Global South as an object of technical intervention (Escobar, 1988, 1995). These forms of rule operate less through overt domination than through administrative routines, technical expertise, and institutional practices that render societies governable. Greg Fry aptly describes such arrangements as ‘practical way[s] of rationalising administration over a number of territories’ (2019: 44) in the Pacific, while paternalistic and racialised discourses continue to frame Pacific island countries as perpetually lacking, geographically constrained, and in need of external oversight (Hau’ofa, 1994; Kabutaulaka, 2015). Here, Pasifika scholarship and critical development studies have drawn attention to the material interventions, administrative routines and epistemic violences through which former and new colonial powers continue to shape conduct, dependencies, and political horizons of possibility (Escobar, 1988; Ferguson, 1990; Ratuva, forthcoming; Teaiwa, 2014; Tunn, 2025).

Within these debates on postcolonial governance, the production of subjectivities has become a central concern. Rooted in the logics of colonial capitalism, development interventions have long framed communities as manageable and governable, producing self-disciplined subjects through what DuBois describes as ‘developmental disciplines’ (1991: 22). ² Whilst participatory elements have become the sine qua non of development projects, Tania Murray Li has further shown how developmental tropes such as ‘agency’ and ‘ownership’ ultimately become ‘coercive element[s]’ (2007b: 7) within which actors are expected to behave. ³ Similarly, the rendering ‘technical’ (2007a: 265) of socio-political ills operates as a mechanism through which such subtle coercion is normalised within developmental interventions. In this sense, subject formation becomes a central modality of governance, in which actors may be shaped into auditable and responsibilised subjects.

Rather than treating governance simply as external imposition, an adaptation of Tracey Banivanua Mar's concept of ‘imperial literacy’ (2013) foregrounds how imperial rule operates through the cultivation of particular forms of competence, credibility, and legibility. ⁴ In her work, Banivanua Mar shows how learning to navigate the imperial administrative, legal, and moral grammars of the colonisers, that is, gaining ‘imperial eloquence’ (2013: 21), was an ambivalent process that has also enabled protest movements in the context of Pacific settler-colonialism. From the perspective of imperial literacy, these subject-constituting effects do not merely discipline individuals; they demonstrate a ‘deeply adaptive quality’ (2013: 19) in cultivating competence and credibility that render actors legible. In this sense, imperial literacy can be understood not only as a historical strategy of navigating imperial rule, but also as a contemporary administrative competence required to access resources. Viewing governance through the lens of imperial literacy thus foregrounds relationality and resistance, highlighting how actors strategically adapt the administrative and epistemic grammars of external governance regimes.

Yet, the grammars of the developmental discipline are rarely neutral. They are embedded in histories of (post)colonial segregation, in which ‘[t]he measure of the “development” of a society – and therefore race – was according to how similar to or different from European forms of government it was’ (Kabutaulaka, 2015: 114). These dynamics resonate with DuBois’ reflections on the long afterlives of colonial domination, which produce discipline via racialised hierarchies of competence and authority on the societal level. As he notes, ‘[t]he key to disciplinary power […] is the manner in which it works at the personal level, where it “makes calculable individuals of us all”’ (1991: 18). Critical work on audit cultures provides an analytical bridge indicating how this logic of calculability becomes institutionalised as a ‘form of coercive and authoritarian governmentality’ (Shore and Wright, 1999: 557) under neoliberal paradigms. Justified in the name of accountability, audits enact surveillance and behavioural normalisation that restructure institutions. Their power lies in their claim to neutrality: metrics and benchmarks appear objective, yet they encode normative assumptions about what constitutes legitimacy, competence, or modernity. Steven Ratuva's critique of ‘social indexology’ demonstrates how rankings, metrics, and risk indices operate as racialised technologies that naturalise asymmetries of power under the guise of scientific measurement. This ‘metric fixation’ (Ratuva, 2021: 2100, based on the work of Muller, 2018) produces moralised hierarchies of development and transforms bureaucratic life into an arena of perpetual self-assessment, where ‘low risk’ and ‘high capacity’ become proxies for trustworthiness and reliability, while Global South states are cast as objectively lacking, requiring constant monitoring and correction. ⁵

While postcolonial governmentality studies unsettle linear narratives of development and make visible the subtle, often technocratic forms of rule that sustain imperial arrangements in new institutional and material guises, Pasifika scholarship further asks how people in Oceania relationally live, negotiate, and resist within these structures. Through this recalibration, we can pay attention to the epistemic labour required to navigate and become legible within such regimes that expect actors to ‘make ourselves intelligible [and to] render ourselves in hegemonic and often Othering terminology’ (Lim-Bunnin, 2020: 87). In doing so, Pasifika scholarship unsettles externally imposed governance regimes, while foregrounding the material infrastructures and epistemic violences through which colonial power continues to shape Oceanic futures – not least in the context of the climate crisis (Farbotko, 2010; Jetn̄il-Kijiner, 2023; Perez, 2021; Teaiwa, 2018).

Climate (finance) governance and the governmentality of green funds

These relations become visible in climate governance and its finance architecture, where technocratic and financial rationalities increasingly shape Oceanic futures. Oels (2005, 2010, 2013) and others (Ciplet and Roberts, 2017) conceptualise climate governmentality as the set of techniques that render climate change calculable and governable – primarily through expertise, modelling, and professionalisation. This shift has transformed climate politics away from debates about justice toward paradigms of risk management, cost-effectiveness, and technical optimisation (Mikulewicz, 2019). Steig and Oels’s (2025) concept of ‘Cli-Mentality’ extends this critique, arguing that climate governance in the Paris era operates through ‘organised irresponsibility’ (2025: 10): a regime in which responsibility is diffused and technocratic instruments obscure political and historical inequalities – aspects that have been well articulated by scholarship on the governance and depoliticisation of compensation and loss and damage in the Pacific (McNamara et al., 2021; Wewerinke-Singh and Salili, 2020).

These logics resonate strongly with claims that climate capacity projects ‘replicate the oft-observed pitfalls of international aid programs’ (Pfalzgraf, 2021: 165, see also; Bordner et al., 2020; Marino and Ribot, 2012; McDonnell, 2020). I argue that Pfalzgraf's characterisation of climate capacity projects as ‘scientific aid programmes’ (2021: 165) – and thus as a continuation of developmental interventions – also applies to the multilateral climate finance regime and its Climate Finance Access Industry (CFAI). ⁶ From this perspective, climate finance access becomes a deeply political programme shaped by historically conditioned rationalities through which institutions and individuals are rendered governable. The CFAI can therefore be understood as an ensemble of discursive and non-discursive practices (Junge, 2008) that both produce and substitute norms (Merlingen, 2003). This perspective allows me to conceptualise climate finance access in Vanuatu not as a technical procedure but as a disciplinary site structured by particular regimes of truth and ‘parameters of legibility’ (Vázquez, 2011: 28), in which green funds and their access infrastructures are both ‘agent[s] and product[s]’ (Miller, 2004: 48) in the co-production of Oceanic futures.

Methodology

This study is based on seven months of fieldwork between 2023 and 2025, during which I conducted 47 interviews ⁷ with stakeholders working in the climate finance nexus in Vanuatu, including NGOs, activists, and community representatives in Port Vila and on Emao, Shefa Province. Fieldwork followed a nodal ethnography and snowball approach and was facilitated through the opportunity to work with the Department of Climate Change's STRENGTH-project. The study adopts a political ethnographic orientation that foregrounds ni-Vanuatu interlocutors as epistemic authorities (Nabobo-Baba, 2024), treating their accounts as situated analyses of the structural asymmetries that shape the climate finance access regime and as conceptually generative expert insights into how multilateral climate finance is navigated in practice.

Methodologically, the study combines a governmentality-informed political ethnography with critical discourse analysis, informed by a localist approach to conducting interviews (Qu and Dumay, 2011); that is, to see ‘the interview process as an opportunity to explore the meaning of the research topic for the respondent and a site to be examined for the construction of a situated account’ (2011: 241). To embed these situated accounts, I began with in-vivo coding and inductively developed thematic clusters using participants’ own terms and expressions (Saldaña, 2013: 91). The theoretical framework served to sensitise rather than predetermine the analysis; for example, Ratuva's notions on social indexology (2021) informed interpretation only after patterns had emerged from the material. Following poststructural understandings of discourse (Ahmed, 2021; Jasanoff, 2004), I approach discourse not only as linguistic utterance but as an ensemble of practices, institutional arrangements, material infrastructures, and epistemic orders. In the empirical section, I thus aim at examining four interconnected dimensions:

discursive practices: e.g., how do actors frame access, trust, and efficiency?

subject positioning: e.g., who is constructed as in/capable and through which criteria?

governing techniques: e.g., how is accountability distributed through audits, reporting obligations, and fiduciary standards?

imperial eloquence: e.g., how do actors navigate the administrative and epistemic grammars through which credibility, competence and access to climate finance are organised?

With this approach, I aim at illuminating materialised forms of colonial continuity – fragmented funding systems, disciplinary project logics, technocratic evaluation procedures, epistemic labour – not as external to discourse but as institutional and infrastructural manifestations of it. These tensions guide the paper's practical and analytical questions: What does the climate finance access regime do in Vanuatu? How is it navigated, and through which governing techniques and disciplinary mechanisms? What subjectivities and accountabilities are produced along the way? Before turning to the findings, the next section provides a very brief outline of Vanuatu's climate finance landscape.

Context: Multilateral climate finance in Vanuatu

Vanuatu has become one of the central sites of multilaterally funded climate interventions in the Pacific. As one of the countries most exposed to extreme weather and slow onset events, Vanuatu has long occupied an insistent position in global climate justice debates: from its early 1991 call for an international mechanism to compensate the impacts of sea-level-rise (UNFCCC, 1991) to its recent initiative seeking an Advisory Opinion from the International Court of Justice (Vanuatu ICJ Initiative, 2022). At the same time, Vanuatu's access to multilateral climate finance is heavily mediated by external actors. During the period of fieldwork, the country did not yet hold accreditation with the major multilateral climate funds. As a result, projects had to be channelled through accredited regional bodies such as the Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme (SPREP) and the Pacific Community (SPC), or through international implementing agencies including the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and Save the Children. This configuration has resulted in a highly project-based climate finance landscape characterised by multiple administrative layers operating alongside national institutions. Interview partners frequently pointed to the reporting obligations and externally managed procurement processes as defining features of the current climate finance landscape. These arrangements raise questions about how responsibility and control are distributed within the climate finance regime.

Since 2017, Vanuatu has made accreditation to the GCF one of its core objectives. Concurrently, the multi-facetted contextual reality of pre-accreditation not only shaped governance dynamics in Vanuatu's climate finance space, but also the interview encounters themselves: both in how accreditation to the GCF took centre stage in many interviews, and how interviewees framed critique and aspiration. For example, while accreditation to the GCF was a shared aspiration of many respondents, perceptions of when this might happen varied greatly among interview partners. As Qu and Dumay (2011) write, it is crucial to ‘understand the way the interviewees perceive the social world under study’ (2011: 246), while we must acknowledge that ‘the interview data only represents the interviewee's world view at a particular point in time in a particular context’ (2011: 246). My own positioning within the landscape also shaped these encounters. For example, having previously been an ‘insider’ of the adaptation industry allowed me to engage closely with the technical and institutionalised language used by many interview partners. The interviews are therefore treated as situated accounts produced within a specific institutional and temporal configuration, while offering analytical insight into broader dynamics of climate finance governance. As fieldwork took place prior to Vanuatu's GCF accreditation in October 2025, I analyse the empirical findings in its pre-accreditation context and return to the implications of accreditation in the discussion, where I argue that this reform rearticulates – rather than resolves – the disciplinary dynamics identified in this paper.

Disciplining access: Governing climate finance in practice

External governance, parallel structures and invisible labour of climate finance access

Despite Vanuatu's longstanding climate leadership, the governance of climate finance in the country remains profoundly shaped by external actors and architectures. In the absence of national accreditation at the time of fieldwork, climate finance flowed primarily through multilateral and regional intermediaries – SPC, SPREP, and a suite of International Non-Governmental Organizations (INGOs) and access consultancies. This arrangement is often framed as a temporary necessity while ‘capacity’ is developed. Yet the empirical material shows that external involvement generates its own system of parallel governance: one that fragments institutional space, drains resources, and subtly redistributes authority away from national institutions. This architecture has produced a fragmented landscape of overlapping projects and administrative structures that run alongside national institutions. Interview partners consistently described this dynamic as both disempowering and materially burdensome (i4, i6, i7, i13). As one respondent (i2) explained:

A lot of our time is spent preparing projects that directly respond to what the donor wants to fund. So all the donors say ‘no, you tell us your priorities,’ but we know that there is a scope that the donor will fund and what they won't. So even when we prepare our own priorities, all of our projects are prepared with that donor expectation in mind, which definitely shifts from what we would do or what we wouldn't do.

This observation reveals a core tension between rhetorical commitments to ‘country ownership’ and structural realities of ‘always hav[ing] the donor's interest at heart’ (i17). Rather than adhering to local priorities, ministries and local organisations must develop literacy in donor epistemologies and anticipate donor preferences while ‘always trying to keep up with donor requirements’ (i17). In this sense, ‘ownership’ becomes performative: local actors authenticate donor mandates and occupy the visible face of participation, while substantive decision-making remains externally driven. Interviewees further emphasised that INGOs often circumvent government processes (i5, i7) – stating that ‘they do what they want’. (i3) and that ‘agencies like UNDP are rather looking for business, not engagement with government’ (i9). These perspectives underscore the sidelining of national institutions and the prioritisation of organisational interests, echoing broader critiques of aid governance in Vanuatu that highlight superficial alignment and donor-driven modalities (Rosier, 2024).

A central manifestation of this externalised governance is the projectification of climate action. Interview partners described how project-based implementation and externally staffed units produce a landscape that is simultaneously saturated and incoherent (i13, i14). These dynamics are not merely procedural; they reshape the state's ability to plan and act. Parallel structures – access units, multiple accredited entities, third-party implementers – draw labour, expertise and time away from public institutions (i1, i16, i14). A climate finance advisor (i17) notes how managerial logics increasingly displace political decision-making, shifting the terrain from addressing the climate crisis to managing it through compliance, reporting, and trust-making:

We're just trying to manage. We're not in control of the process. We're just managing making sure that we have proper records, making sure that it comes through the proper channels and it's disseminated appropriately.

These practices also reshape institutions internally. As a representative of the Ministry of Finance and Economic Management (MFEM) noted (i10), preparing for accreditation required extensive restructuring and the creation of a new, donor-mandated unit:

We were assessed for a year. We had to tick all the boxes […]. All we wanted was just [them saying]: ‘hey, you've got an accounts team; you've got a debt management unit already. You're already working on projects every day.’ Just ‘you don't need to create another unit. Just realign everything together.’ However, it needs to be in a special unit, you know?

The GCF's insistence on reshaping MFEM into a ‘fit-for-climate-finance’ institution reflects a disciplinary logic in which institutional legitimacy is contingent upon alignment with external bureaucratic templates, administrative grammars and managerial infrastructures. In this process, existing national structures are rendered inadequate, while donor-mandated units, procedures, and managerial norms are naturalised as the only credible form of governance. This compels the ministry to remake itself in the donor's image – an institutional redesign framed as a technical requirement rather than direct political imposition. Framed as technical compliance, such reforms appear neutral, yet may reorganise state institutions under the guise of technical expertise and into projectised, semi-autonomous structures.

Interviewees further described the fragmentation that occurs when donors negotiate directly with ministries, especially under conditions of limited staff capacity and high turnover: ‘It's just a disjointed effort and a lot of resources I’m very sure get lost’ (i10). These conditions enable the emergence of a glocal ‘broker’ class of consultants and intermediaries who mediate donor requirements and climate finance access. Respondents noted that even regional organisations outsource proposal writing, reinforcing a system in which expertise and authority circulate outside the state (i4, i6). One interviewee (i16) characterised this as boomerang aid (Mückler, 2016; Pailey, 2020: 736), highlighting how aid and climate finance often circulate back to donor-country institutions and consultancies, thereby reproducing historically rooted and racialised hierarchies of expertise and authority:

I mean the whole structures are created to enable that, right? This whole boomerang aid that goes on here all the time, where every single aid project involves paying white people [and where] a huge number of white people take a lot of money out of all of these pools of climate finance.

The resource drain associated with these parallel systems was repeatedly emphasised. One respondent described the administrative burden as ‘ludicrous’ (i16), with another noting that staff spend disproportionate time navigating the demands of ‘ten pipeline projects’ (i7) rather than implementing climate action (i4). An employee of the ministry of climate change (i14) added with regards to the required epistemic labour:

We have whole dozens of people in this ministry who are just dealing with climate finance and trying to write things the right way and tick the right boxes and do the reporting.

Another respondent (i10) adds the material and relational aspects of these burdens:

At the end of the day, money is spent not really the root cause of the problem or the thing that we want. It disturbs the balance as it is in here, in the community and in the system. We've spent a lot of time trying to tick boxes for donors and not really addressing the root cause of the problem.

As Wilén (2009) argues, the ambiguity of ‘capacity-building’ functions as a legitimising discourse that often masks practices better described as ‘capacity-taking,’ where external actors extract skilled staff, authority, and decision-making power from local institutions. Taken together, these dynamics show that external governance is a core modality of Vanuatu's climate finance regime, embedding a fragmented infrastructure that reproduces Vanuatu's constrained institutional position in climate finance access, and one where enormous epistemic labour is devoted to producing legibility ‘by using Western criteria’ (Kabutaulaka, 2015: 118). One interviewee (i4) expresses this misalignment succinctly:

It's just an injustice. If I were to put a figure to the type of adaptation that's going on in Vanuatu - is it adaptation to climate change impacts? We are adapting to suit the needs of the donors.

Capacity trap – Vicious cycles of projectification and dependency

A further recurring theme across interviews was the reproduction of a capacity trap ⁸ – a self-reinforcing dynamic in which donor distrust in national systems leads to the outsourcing of projects to INGOs and consultants, in turn depriving government institutions of the very experience and authority they need to directly access multilateral climate finance. Parallel systems thus become both symptom and driver of this vicious cycle, as one respondent (i12) vividly describes:

We're already stressed. We're already bureaucratically stretched in every sense. And yet you're building a parallel system in one of the more complex fields. It's totally illogical. And then they complain that it doesn't work, and therefore they use that as a justification for building more layers in a parallel system instead of just accepting that it is the parallel system that's the problem.

This quote captures the paradox at the heart of donor-imposed governance arrangements: failure is not treated as a signal to rethink the system, but as justification for further layers of control. The more the system fails, the more complexity is introduced through additional compliance requirements: ‘and when you reach those guidelines, then there's new ones coming. And it's always from outside’ (i8). As Shore and Wright (1999) argue, such proliferating oversight regimes are not neutral but form part of an audit culture that operates as coercive governance, where complexity and documentation become normalised instruments of control rather than support.

The GCF is frequently mentioned as an example of this contradiction, especially with regards to its accreditation requirements (i4, i8, i10, i15; see Treichel et al., 2024), which assesses whether countries ‘are capable of strong financial management and of safeguarding funded projects and programmes’ (GCF, 2023). Yet because climate action is largely projectified and externally managed, ministries have little opportunity to demonstrate precisely these capacities. As one respondent (i5) noted:

The GCF is completely fixated on its compliance with financial policies. They want to enhance direct access for the government, yet they just keep making their policies and standards harder and harder so countries can't actually get accredited or access resources […] It's a major discrepancy because the governments just don't have the capacity to execute what they want.

Here, the development paradox becomes visible: standards designed to ensure ‘capacity’ systematically prevent it from being built, reinforcing Vanuatu's dependence on external actors (i15). While funds like the GCF rhetorically – and through readiness funds also materially – promote country ownership and accreditation aspirations, direct access is systematically undermined by compliance demands, leaving stakeholders ‘just going around in circles’ (i10). Projectification and compliance mechanisms thus render Vanuatu's institutions perpetually in need of capacity-building, never quite reaching the threshold of ‘readiness’. This state of permanent deficiency legitimises the continued dominance of external actors in agenda-setting and financial management.

A further dimension of this vicious cycle arises from context-blind benchmarking. Respondents highlighted that implementation costs in Vanuatu – including logistics and procurement – are structurally higher than in continental contexts, yet are frequently misinterpreted as inflated or inappropriate during funding reviews:

They don’t really account for the context […]. That's a major frustration for the countries because they don't want to see their budgets reduced. [But then] the countries will just say, ‘Okay, fine, we'll take the money.’ But then when it gets to actually executing the project, they don't have the resources that they need to do a good job. Then they fail to reach the targets. So performance is lacking. It's this wicked circle of things. (i9)

Under-resourced projects thus generate underperformance, which is subsequently mobilised as evidence of incapacity. Interviewees also described how by the time funds are disbursed, proposed adaptation measures are often no longer viable, as conditions on the ground have already changed or communities just ‘did it themselves’ (i17). In this regard, one respondent (i10) noted:

We've got perfect case studies where [funding cycles] are just taking too long. And it's not because the country isn't ready. It's because of the systems.

Revising projects, however, requires further documentation and time, reinforcing delays. In a context of intensifying climate impacts, this temporal mismatch produces maladaptation and undermines credibility towards the funds, as a ni-Vanuatu adaptation expert (i13) notes:

It is not good for our image. They would say ‘oh you guys took a lot of funding, but you never implemented.’ We implement things. But it can't stand.

As a result, documentary compliance becomes the primary measure of effectiveness, shaping donor trust and future access while deepening the very capacity trap it claims to resolve (i1, i4, i10, i13, i17). Audit regimes further entrench this logic. A CROP representative (i5) described how annual audits focus exclusively on procedural compliance, regardless of contextual constraints:

All they look at is, ‘did you follow the process’? […] They don’t look at the challenges of implementing these things in the country on the ground. It doesn’t matter how you try to explain it to them. [They just say] ‘Didn't document it properly’. That's a red flag from a donor's perspective and it affects our credibility as an organization.

In this system, compliance with and legibility within institutionalised administrative grammars becomes the primary measure of credibility, shaping donor trust and future access. This reflects the logic of audit cultures, in which documentary compliance replaces contextual competence as the measure of legitimacy, reshaping institutions through a regime of surveillance and behavioural normalisation. As a loss and damage expert (i2) noted succinctly:

It's almost like cutting ourselves off at the knees before we even take a step in the race by designing it this way. And this is common. You know, we talk about locally led and trusting local systems. But at the end of the day, we’re not enabling that.

Capacity is not absent, but constrained. As such, incapacity emerges not as a pre-existing condition, but as an effect of the very technologies designed to measure and remedy it (Pfalzgraf, 2021; Pierre, 2020; West, 2016).

The double bind of accountability, risk and trust

This dynamic is further maintained through a double accountability regime, characterised by a disjuncture between formal accountability mechanisms – audits, reporting standards, and fiduciary compliance – and the responsibilities of ni-Vanuatu institutions towards frontline communities. Green funds prioritise procedural compliance over responsiveness, leading to a dynamic where government representatives ‘come into ministerial budget committee rooms with their hands tied up’ (i10). As several respondents highlighted, donors are primarily concerned with whether ‘you follow the process: were these things approved? Is it in line with your procurement or financial [rules]?’ (i5). Here, accountability is rendered as a technical exercise in institutional compliance, as indicated by an expatriate respondent (i9) from a regional accredited entity:

[Let's] say we'll give the money to Vanuatu, and they would execute the project through whatever ministry and extension structure they're going to use. In those cases, the procurement systems, etc., all need to go through a capacity assessment and then [our] legal agreements will come to either we trust your systems and you can use your systems, or we have to pass down [our] systems on you. And then we have to monitor those. And that extra step of monitoring and government organization is very costly in terms of human resources, time and just continual backstopping. […] And it just becomes quite burdensome on me to manage that. So it's an additional layer of complexity. [But] if we are executing a project, we’re in control of the procurement, of the legal contracts, of the staffing, of all the financial flows.

While this quote captures the paradox of imposing external administrative structures – labour that is framed here as ‘burdensome’ but constitutes a daily administrative reality in Vanuatu – it also exposes how accountability is operationalised as control. While the speaker presents the design of these projects as technical (e.g., purchase of material), they reveal its deeper political effect: the tendency of these mechanisms to constrain sovereignty. Legal liability frameworks and financial risk discourses function as governance tools, shaping control over resources and decision-making and replacing local agency with bureaucratic surveillance. Crucially, this isn’t framed as a political decision – it is framed as rational risk management. From a postcolonial perspective, this dynamic reflects the depoliticisation of political relationships, positioning Vanuatu paternalistically as inherently in need of oversight (Ratuva, 2021). It mirrors what Li describes as the ‘rendering technical’ (2007a: 265) of development problems: transforming deeply political questions of justice and ownership into ‘risks’ to be managed through audit and bureaucratic procedure. More so, these audit cultures can be read as contemporary technologies of (imperial) literacy (Banivanua Mar, 2013), as they translate political trust into administrative metrics that national institutions must learn to anticipate, perform, and internalise.

Here, accountability operates less as a bridge between state and society than as a steward of donor expectations and as a mechanism that alienates frontline communities from the climate action they are entitled to (i6, i11, i12, i13, i15, i16), which ‘really hampers how transformative and paradigm shifting these investments can be’ (i3). This accountability structure is far from neutral – it disciplines local actors into trust-generating behaviour through technocratic surveillance. The conditional trust regime implies fundamental suspicion toward ni-Vanuatu institutions (i13), whereby legitimacy is granted only through adherence to foreign systems and compliance checklists. It becomes apparent that liability in this context is not a shared ethical responsibility, but a disciplinary apparatus – a way of maintaining vertical authority over climate finance access that is fundamentally diametrical to Pasifika values of accountability. On the contrary, Vavaitamana stresses: ‘accountability is not a checklist. It's not a model that can be transferred. It is a relationship – built over time, shaped by context, and sustained through shared commitment’ (Vavaitamana, 2025). In contrast, risk is calculated to determine who can be trusted to ‘control’ funds; and in the process, local governance actors are discursively positioned as perpetually ‘not ready’. In this regard, a loss and damage expert (i2) notes:

During implementation, so much of our time is spent on reporting and monitoring for donor thresholds. That's a trust issue. It's a trust issue that we're going to do something wrong. […] After so many years of being independent and after so many millions of dollars being spent, I would have hoped that we would have moved beyond that. Yeah, that we're not trusted enough to think about our own priorities, implement them, report on them without, you know, some massive corruption. So budget support to me seems like the ultimate trust. You've got systems, you've got people, you’ve got experience. Here's the money. Go do it. Tell us at the end.

Audits and reporting thus operate as performative technologies of trust-making that simultaneously enact surveillance and control. While these measures ought to create ‘trust’ in Vanuatu's abilities, they serve as a form of technocratic and epistemic gatekeeping (i4) that ultimately de-politicise the issue through rendering technical (Li, 2007a). This reinforces a cycle in which perceived risk justifies further control, and further control inhibits the very capacities that might warrant trust. This persistent deferral of trust has inhibited national accreditation efforts and enables a regime where ‘third-party organizations […] apply for funds on behalf of the Vanuatu government’ (i16), further dislocating decision-making from sovereign structures. In this system, risk becomes moralised and racialised, as one respondent (i12) vividly describes:

They just think every country is the same and they're all corrupt, right? They won't say it out loud, but that's what they think. Therefore, they need to handle the money.

As Ratuva argues, risk is not neutral but deeply political (2021). It structures who is trusted to govern funds and who is subjected to oversight. This is also connected to a common perception among interview partners that it is not about the frontline communities and climate action anymore (i6, i13), but rather about ‘placing oneself in a good position or under a radar of due diligence’ (i4).

As Shore and Wright argue, audit cultures produce ‘a peculiarly coercive and disabling model of accountability’ (1999: 557). In Vanuatu's climate finance regime, accountability functions less as a democratic mechanism than as a disciplinary tool – reordering political possibility through compliance, surveillance, (financial) literacy and conditional trust. Rather than resolving risk, it institutionalises mistrust and reproduces the very dependencies it claims to overcome. Importantly, these dynamics do not only restructure institutions; they also produce political subjectivities. These manifest as ni-Vanuatu stakeholders are enrolled into systems of audit regimes and are continuously assessed, disciplined and rendered intelligible. This dynamic resonates closely with Perry's (2021) ontological reading of climate finance, in which finance operates as a project of subject formation: seeking to produce ‘modern’ governable subjects, while maintaining a persistent ‘space of otherness’ (Wynter, 2003: 296) that structures their relationship with ‘modernity’. This dynamic was described succinctly by one respondent (i6):

It's like you're holding the government on a leash and tell them that this is the way to go. We don't want to be ruled by that.

Discussion: Be/coming ready, remaining disciplined?

The findings indicate that climate finance access in Vanuatu is not simply a matter of technicalities, but a disciplinary regime whose dynamics concentrate in specific access infrastructures including accreditation procedures, fiduciary standards, and monitoring frameworks. These cumulative and material consequences, including the extraction of human capital and institutional resources, the redirection of accountability away from ni-Vanuatu communities, and the deepening dependence on external financial structures, appear less as unintended side-effects but constitutive features of how the climate finance regime – and access to GCF funds particularly – operates in practice. Managerialism increasingly displaces political decision-making, shifting the terrain from addressing the climate crisis to managing it through compliance, reporting, and trust-making.

Although many respondents perceived external control as a form of foreign rule, the GCF's audit culture is simultaneously normalised as an essential step in gaining access to climate finance. It is at this point that the operation of discipline becomes visible. Drawing on Foucault, DuBois reminds us that the ‘key to discipline is normalization […] In disciplinary power, control exists not in the form of an act of law or a set of legal codes, but in the guise of natural rules or norms’ (1991: 8). In Vanuatu's climate finance regime, normalisation operates by translating political inequality into technical difference. Audits, rankings, and compliance procedures become routine features of administrative life, shaping how ni-Vanuatu institutions must act in order to become legible and to access resources. At the same time, the colonial genealogy of these practices is rendered invisible, maintaining what Perry describes as the ‘space of otherness’ (2021; cited from Wynter, 2003, 296). As Ratuva argues, such indicator-based systems construct a ‘natural order of things’ by privileging Eurocentric institutional norms and reinforcing ‘deficit discourses’ that present Global South institutions as perpetually behind (2021: 2104).

Accreditation and the rearticulation of discipline

‘Readiness’ to access GCF funds thus appears less as a technical pathway than as a political condition shaped by unequal power relations: ‘readiness’ implies a logic of linear progression through which frontline communities are governed, reflecting what Thaman describes as the ‘western-dominated, monocultural, assimilationist view of the world’ (2003: 12) that presents its normative standards as advanced. In this realm, the accreditation of the Ministry of Finance and Economic Management (MFEM) by the GCF in October 2025 may mark less an overcoming than a rearticulation of the disciplining mechanisms that shape the field of climate finance access in Vanuatu. Reading accreditation through the lens of governmentality and legibility, the attribution of institutional ‘readiness’ – that is, ‘a country's capacity to engage with the GCF’ (GCF Watch, 2016) – does not mark an end point but a transition to a new regime of permanent self-review, disciplining, and ‘imperial eloquence’ (Banivanua Mar, 2013: 21). This becomes visible in the accreditation conditions and compliance mechanisms as specified in the GCF's Accreditation Framework (GCF AF), its monitoring and accountability framework (MAF) for accredited entities (AE), as well as the respective Accreditation Master Agreement (AMA) between MFEM and the GCF. While these frameworks were updated in 2025, they continue to institutionalise an extensive due diligence process (GCF, 2026) that anchors self-disciplining mechanisms and accountability-outsourcing based on a risk-based approach (GCF, 2025b: 5), including recommendations on how Vanuatu through MFEM could reach more ‘maturity’ (GCF, 2025a: 16).

Through accreditation, AEs may submit project proposals and concept notes directly to the GCF without reliance on intermediaries; that is, as long as the proposed projects respond to the GCF's recommended accreditation type, notably environmental and social (E&S) risk categories and fiduciary functions as enforced in the respective AMA. In its recommendations, the GCF ranked MFEM as eligible to apply for small-scale projects, ⁹ execute basic and specialised fiduciary standards for project management, and implement projects with minimal to no risks (E&S category C) (GCF, 2025a: 13). Translated, MFEM is considered financially trustworthy and operationally strong enough to receive GCF funds and manage projects itself, but only within tightly defined risk parameters. This qualification is consequential: for example, the GCF's states that ‘some of the [proposed pipeline] projects are likely to exceed the E&S risk level recommended by the AP’, ¹⁰ effectively constraining the scope of projects that can be pursued. This raises the prospect that long-developed pipeline projects reflecting nationally assessed needs may remain unrealised – or subject to intermediary involvement in approval. Even after accreditation, access-sovereignty remains constrained.

More so, the monitoring and accountability framework entails incorporative tendencies – rather than liberating ones – under accreditation status. Under the updated MAF, accreditation is now indefinite but monitored continuously, involving self-assessments based on risk flags (GCF, 2025b: 5) set by the GCF. The framework also promotes ‘participatory monitoring’, encouraging the involvement of ‘local stakeholders, notably women, Indigenous Peoples, and civil society organizations’ (GCF, 2025b: 5) throughout the project cycle. Yet such participation may function less as empowerment than as incorporation of local actors into accountability regimes. In Li's terms, participation may thus become a ‘coercive element’ (2007b: 7) within governance regimes that enrol local actors into systems primarily designed for upward accountability, whose procedural complexity may rather ‘protect the interests of GCF’ (GCF, 2025b: 7) than that of frontline communities.

While it is too early to assess the ex-post effects of accreditation, these shifts suggest that accreditation refines – rather than dismantles – the disciplinary regime through incorporation and enhanced imperial eloquence: it formalises its place within a stratified system in which Vanuatu remains perpetually ‘almost ready’ to completely, without ‘oversight,’ govern funds and climate action. The conditions – project-based funding, due diligence mechanisms, upwards accountability and authority over funding allocation – largely remain intact. What changes instead are the modalities of discipline: intensified self-monitoring, strategic self-disciplining in project selection, and the nationalisation of failure in cases of non-compliance.

In this sense, accreditation absorbs responsibility by translating political questions of justice into matters of procedural compliance. While national agency is formally recognised through accreditation, it is done within GCF risk parameters and without fundamentally shifting accountability toward frontline communities. These reforms remain largely incompatible with demands for relational accountability that is ‘built over time, shaped by context, and sustained through shared commitment’ (Vavaitamana, 2025). As Anantharajah and Naisilisili (2023: 20) argue, accountability grounded in lived relationships and interconnectedness sits uneasily with the technocratic reporting regimes of climate finance, which privilege bureaucratic verification over practiced forms of responsibility. At the same time, reading these dynamics through Banivanua Mar's concept of imperial literacy highlights their ambivalence, as learning to navigate the administrative and epistemic grammars of climate finance may extend access to resources. Yet such access remains conditional on demonstrating legibility within externally defined standards of credibility and control. In this sense, imperial eloquence provides a pathway to participation within the regime, while leaving its underlying hierarchies largely intact.

The role of the state raises further analytical questions. As Ferguson and Gupta (2005) note, global institutions enact forms of authority that appear state-like despite operating beyond the nation-state, helping naturalise their right to evaluate, classify, and oversee others. The governmentality lens reveals how green funds operate not only as distributors of resources but as subtle state reformers. In their governing logic, green funds assume, normalise, and reproduce a bureaucratic state architecture rooted in colonial administrative traditions, e.g., through the creation of special reporting units. As Kabutaulaka reminds us, ‘[t]he state is often presented as unproblematic, or at least taken as “given” in ways that ignore the violent history of the development of the Western states’ (2015: 118).

In Vanuatu, the GCF reproduces this epistemic ordering by presuming a bureaucratic state as the universal locus of governance ‘without reference to the ways that Melanesians organised themselves in their own terms and how these strategies have kept their societies surviving for thousands of years’ (Kabutaulaka, 2015: 118). Against this backdrop, contemporary climate finance enters not as a neutral instrument but as an iteration of these long-standing patterns of rule – one that presumes, and simultaneously deepens, a particular state form that has colonial origins and uneven relevance to kastom-rooted modes of political life (Wesley-Smith, 2013). When the GCF enters this landscape, it reshapes them by requiring governments to adopt its procedural cultures, audit technologies and administrative grammars (see also Meki and Tarai, 2023: 3). These reforms are not coercive in the classical sense, but they are disciplinary: they reward alignment with graduation (i.e., accreditation), and penalise deviating forms of governance that do not map onto the bureaucratic templates with reduced budgets and more ‘practical way[s] of rationalising administration’ (Fry, 2019: 44). Rather than disrupting the governing mode of the pre-readiness climate finance regime, accreditation may normalise its disciplinary logics and embed them more firmly within the state itself.

Absorption and the limits of reform

As Shore and Write argue, ‘[t]he problem is how to use such awareness as the basis for political action given that, even when people oppose these systems of audit and inspection, they are nevertheless interpolated by them’ (1999: 561). As one respondent noted, waiting for fair and directly accessible climate finance risks ‘creating new dependencies’ (i11), echoing the dilemma of pursuing demands for historic responsibility while simultaneously reproducing reliance on donors. Ni-Vanuatu initiatives, such as the National Loss and Damage Policy and attempts to implement a national LDF exemplify efforts to articulate Pasifika approaches to climate action within the existing climate finance architecture (SPREP, 2025). However, while these endeavours are ‘nationally owned, community-oriented and globally informed’ (Kumar, 2025), they may be absorbed in ways that leave underlying logics of projectification, risk management, and upwards accountability largely intact, limiting their disruptive potential.

These tensions highlight the limits of reform agendas that seek to improve climate finance access without addressing the underlying rationalities through which such access is governed. While reform agendas – including accreditation – seek to address limitations within the climate finance regime, this analysis suggests that such reforms remain structurally constrained as long as climate finance governance continues to be organised around logics of projectification, compliance, administrative legibility, and what Anantharajah calls the ‘discretionary largesse of the North’ (2024: 6). More so, these reforms sit uneasily with Pasifika approaches that ‘honor the specificities of Islander experience, recognise the generic effects of (neo)colonialism on all Islanders, and are committed to political and cultural cooperation at the regional level, thereby erod[ing] the generic constructions’ (Teaiwa, 1994: 102–103) on which historically sedimented forms of developmental and contemporary climate interventions depend. In its current constellation, climate finance does not seem to enable such reconciliation.

While Vanuatu actively opposes external governance, it remains interpolated within the global climate regime. The tension between refusal and compliance is not a failure of agency, but a constitutive feature of the regime itself, including attempts to be/come legible and to access much needed resources. Within this constrained space, interviewees consistently articulated a demand that exceeds the parameters of project-based climate finance: direct budget support (i2, i4, i6, i8, i10, i14). Rather than a technocratic preference, this demand can be read as an attempt to shift the locus of accountability and decision-making away from disciplining compliance towards nationally defined priorities and relational accountability.

Conclusion

The climate crisis poses major financial challenges to fund adaptation and to recover from losses and damages. While multilateral climate finance has been positioned as a mechanism of justice, research increasingly shows that its governance constitutes a political struggle over responsibility, authority, and power. Based on a political ethnography of the climate finance nexus in Vanuatu, this paper has argued that green funds – particularly the GCF – operate as disciplinary regimes characterised by donor-centred accountability relations. Vanuatu's climate finance landscape is shaped by the projectification of climate action, producing institutional fragmentation, duplication of efforts and the proliferation of parallel systems. This often invisible labour of aid governance is sustained through external benchmarking and the cultivation of particular forms of legibility required to access funds. Audit cultures institutionalise these dynamics by translating political trust and responsibility into measurable indicators of competence and risk, often functioning as governing techniques aligned with racialised tropes and Western notions of modernity.

These dynamics build on long histories of governing from outside in Oceania. Rather than enabling climate action, green funds restructure local institutions around donor logics, limiting the capacity to allocate funding according to locally defined priorities. In this sense, accountability tends to shield donor interests rather than enabling systemic transformation. In this context, the recent accreditation to the GCF can be understood as an institutional refinement rather than liberation from these constraints: a transition to a new regime of permanent self-review, disciplining, and ‘imperial eloquence’ through which institutions must continually perform competence and credibility. From a critical climate justice perspective attentive to (neo)colonial legacies, a significant upscaling of grant-based climate finance that countries of the Global South can allocate without external interference is needed. Such shifts need also include non-monetary restitutions that tackle these structural misalignments at their roots. Without them, climate finance risks remaining not an instrument of transformation, but a mechanism of continued discipline and delayed justice. Further research tracing the material, temporal, and epistemic costs of these access regimes may help challenge the structures that currently govern climate finance in practice.