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Abstract

This commentary explores the potential consequence of latent racial formation in emergent climate finance data projects and draws from ethnographic research on climate finance governance conducted in Fiji. Climate finance data projects emerging in the Pacific aim to ease the flow of finance from the Global North to the South. These emergent data projects, such as renewable energy resource availability and investment mapping, are imbedded in the climate finance organizations that fund, develop, and use them. Thus, the commentary explores climate finance organizations through the lens of Ray’s (2019) theory of racial organizations, highlighting the ways in which important climate-related resources are mediated through racial and colonial schemas. The racial mediation of two key resources are spotlighted in this discussion: the finance itself and knowledge. Given that the Pacific region is at the coalface of climate change’s existential effects, the just allocation of resources is imperative. In interrogating the ways in which emergent data projects may deny these resources based on hidden racial schemas, the paper cautions against new and old forms of colonization that may be mobilized through even well-meaning techno-benevolent fixes (Benjamin, 2019).

Keywords

Racial formation climate finance postcolonial data projects Pacific Fiji

This article is a part of special theme on Data, Power and Racial Formations. To see a full list of all articles in this special theme, please click here: https://journals.sagepub.com/page/bds/collections/dataandracialformations

Introduction

Early racial formations, as colonially constructed schemas, allowed key ‘imperial activities to be launched and organized’ (Winant, 2001: 23). Racial formation was central in both the logic and mobilization of colonial power through conquest and slavery (Winant, 2001). As observed by Ruha Benjamin (2016: 2227): ‘Explicit racial references, previously fixed on to the exterior of racist devices, are no longer practical. Instead, innovators find ways to embed racism deep in to the operating system.’ Data, increasingly preferred across the world as a means of bedding down and representing knowledge, is one such pathway that innovators contribute to racial formation whilst maintaining a veneer of postracial neutrality. Postracialism, as Benjamin argues, is the new ‘killer application, deadly and disenfranchizing, minimalist and minimizing, and always one step ahead’ (2016: 2227).

Data, racial formation, and colonial epistemological praxis draw their power, in part, from claims of neutrality; this compatibility offers potentially productive intersections of inquiry, particularly when considering central questions of data in this purportedly postracial moment. This commentary explores the instrumental role of data as a tool of colonization in the context of developmental projects in the Pacific, particularly the way in which data may be used to withhold resources. Data provides basis and legitimation for the launching and organizing of development projects; as such, these resultant logics may have deep implications for communities and (eco)systems subjects to development interventions. Given what is at stake, neutral representational posturing of data characteristic of postracial paradigms must be deconstructed. Examining data colonization offers a pathway for doing so: data colonization explores inter alia, new forms of colonization through data grounded in symbolic constructions, and material infrastructures that maintain the practice of colonization (Ricaurte, 2019).

Data can be a contemporary tool of colonization and a product of older forms of colonization, one that not only connotes structures of power and economic dominance, but also racial formation:

data and digital colonialism should take into account the process of colonization that reproduces injustice within and across countries and enacts violence on gendered and racialized bodies, … so that technology can continue to operate as a renewed form of oppression. (Ricaurte, 2019: 353)

The racial element, however, is not always visible in discussions of data colonization. Without this explicit visibility, data colonization as a concept runs the risk of reinforcing postracial logic.

The relationship between data and racial formation has been most explicitly discussed in the North American context. As such, there is a need to situate and generate forms of knowledge about data colonization as they manifest in other parts of the world, which have had diverse histories and presents of colonization and racial formation, and encounters with various forms of data projects.

This commentary thus locates conversations of data and racial formation in the Pacific region. It does so by reflecting on ethnographic research, including field observations and over 70 interviews, I conducted in Fiji on climate finance over the course of three years (2017–2020) (for description of methodology see Anantharajah, 2021). In particular, the commentary posits climate finance organizations as important sites of racial formation. As these climate finance organizations are deeply entangled with emergent data projects in the region, they are integral actors within the processes of discussing, designing, and negotiating data projects in the Pacific. These data projects are not sui generis; they are embedded in the institutions and organization that fund, develop, and use them:

To understand how this World Bank-led push towards renewable energy mapping and investment will affect who claims, uses, and controls rural lands and resources, and who stands to win or lose within these new visions for development, accumulation, and ‘sustainability,’ it is essential to examine closely the technical details, decisions, and operations of the … projects as part of the latest reconfiguration and expansion of the Bank-centered ‘knowledge empire’. (McCarthy and Thatcher, 2019: 243)

Emergent data projects, being born from institutions, are potential conduits of the schemas or ‘beliefs’ of these organizations. These mapping projects seek to package and categorize potential renewable energy projects in the region (and beyond) for commercial consumption. Webber, in her exploration of the commercialization of climate services in the Pacific, highlights the ‘conflict between packaging services for consumption and providing objective science’ (2017: 90). While commercialization is a key element of this knowledge empire, this commentary explores another aspect of these institutional beliefs, those that underwrite racial formation.

While it is arguably too early to fully analyze the effects of these nascent data projects, this commentary aims to provide context by interrogating racial formation in the institutions and organizations within which they are embedded. Indeed, the attention to racial formation, a key analytic, is almost entirely lacking from discussions on climate finance justice (Sayegh, 2019). Hidden beneath North-South logics, the entanglements of climate finance and racial formation in climate finance organizations are rendered invisible. As such, this discussion problematizes the so-called neutral allocation of climate finance resources, investment, and resources, highlighting the ways in which they are racially mediated through institutions and organizations. In doing so, I draw attention to how data projects and organizations are linked: In the case of Fiji, making visible the schematic-resource couplings manifesting in climate finance organizations offers an opportunity to problematize them in nascent renewable energy and investment data projects. This process reveals how racial organizations are central to the two domains of climate finance in ways that have colonizing effects: the allocation of finance and claims to knowledge.

Climate finance and racial organizations

In response to escalating ecological crisis caused by a warming climate, finance for climate change mitigation, and adaptation outcomes, climate finance, is increasingly pressing. Pacific Small Island Developing States (PSIDS) are at the coalface of this ecological crisis, already experiencing climate change’s existential effects (Palmer, 2017). Correspondingly, the climate finance needs of these nations are significant. In Fiji, for example, financing transitions in the energy sector alone between 2017 and 2030 will require an investment of USD 2.97 billion (Government of the Republic of Fiji et al., 2017). As such, attracting climate investment and finance has been a central focus in both PSIDS and climate finance organizations.

This commentary is targeted at this organizational level of analysis. Here, Victor Ray’s (2019) conceptualization of racial organizations offers an important unpacking and articulation of the race reification process, which sees racist ideologies begetting racist action, creating ‘tractable sources of racial inequality’ (Sewell, 2016: 405). Ray (2019) argues that the creation of durable racial structures occurs at the connection of racial ‘schemas’ to the control of resources; schematic-resource coupling creates racial structures, which are then justified and fortified by racial ideology. The issue of racially mediated resources is key to climate finance data projects in the Pacific as such projects purport to steer the allocation of resources. Here, the instrumental role of data emerges: data, in this case, information or assessments on market size, resource availability and compliance with regulatory ‘best practice’ inter alia, steers the allocation of climate resources (Anantharajah, 2021). Racial schemas, or individual prejudices and assumptions, de-linked from any resources would, Ray (2019) argues, do little harm. Conversely, the interrogation of the resources yielded or withheld through coupling with racial schemas is critical in illuminating potential harms.

In the case of climate finance, two key resources are evident sources of racial contestation. First, there is the climate finance itself: the capital, access to loans, and global climate funds. Second, there is that of human resources: in this case, knowledge, expertise, ‘capacity’, and skill. Once these racial structures are in place, explicitly racist ideologies are operationalized to reinforce the underlying schema, contributing to the unjust and unequal distribution of resources.

Existing conceptualizations of racial organizations facilitate an unpacking of climate finance organizations operating in the Pacific and aids in tracing how racial formation may be generating material social and environmental consequences. The material inequalities are inherent in the operation of racial organizations, as they legitimate the unequal distribution of resources (Ray, 2019: 38). This is evidenced in two key areas of racial formation in climate finance organizations: the schema-resource coupling surrounding the allocation of finance itself, and the benefits derived from validation of knowledge. In applying Ray’s (2019) framework to the international level of analysis, however, postcolonial perspectives are useful infusions, given the historic internationalization inherent in colonial racial formations. Colonialism was a racial project: it involved externalizing a racial Other, managing heterogeneity, dealing with difference through imposition and restriction, regulation, and repression (Goldberg, 2002). Despite the ‘post’ of postcolonial analysis, relationalities and structures that characterized the colonial period have persisted and adapted, living on in the present and also threatening futures (Baldwin, 2017).

Racially mediated climate resources: Finance

At the international (and international institutional) level of climate finance, the resource—that is, the finance itself—emerges as a locus of racial schema-resource coupling, demonstrated in Pacific experiences of accessing international multilateral funds, and attracting private investment. Pacific Island Nations have faced significant challenges accessing climate funds, an observation that is particularly pronounced with the region’s experience with the Green Climate Fund (GCF) (Samuwai and Hills, 2018). To access funds, national entities have to become accredited, they must prove ‘readiness’. The process of readiness is time-consuming, and often diverts significant resources in often already overstretched bureaucracies to the gaining of accreditation. Various development organizations are then financed to support Pacific partners with ‘readiness’. The process of readiness requires Southern countries to close the regulatory gap, or rather to follow Northern trajectories ‘implicitly taken as more rational than their Southern counterparts’ (de Souza et al., 2018). Such examples of ‘institutional orientalism’ have been studied in the context of large-scale renewable energy infrastructure collaborations between Northern and Southern partners (de Souza et al., 2018).

In applying Ray’s conceptual framework here, the elements of racial structures are evident. The racial schema at play is the implicit irrationality of the Southern governance and regulatory systems, and the celebration of a formal White ideal (Pailey, 2019). The resource being controlled, in this case deprived, is pledged finance that would be a lifeblood in Pacific communities facing an escalating ecological crisis. The ideology justifying the system of exclusion and deprivation is the notion that unaccredited, Southern nations are unable to account for and meaningfully use the resources withheld. This dynamic of ideology in reinforcing racial structures (Ray, 2019) is well documented by postcolonial scholars (e.g. Césaire, 1972: 32). Pacific scholar Epeli Hau‘ofa (1993: 38), for example, reflects on those:

whose purposes it is necessary to portray our huge world in tiny, needy bits. To acknowledge the larger reality would be to undermine the prevailing view and to frustrate certain agendas and goals of powerful interests. These perpetrators are therefore participants, as I was, in the belittlement of Oceania, and in the perpetuation of the neocolonial relationships.

As highlighted here, the schema-resource coupling theorized by Ray (2019) on an organizational level has also long enlivened colonial and neocolonial relationalities on an international and systems level.

Beyond international climate funds, climate finance aims to channel investment from private and financial sector investment, particularly from the Global North, to the Pacific region. Yet, private investment in even climate finance’s most attractive and profitable project destinations, renewable energy, has not been forthcoming (Samuwai et al., 2019). A key reason cited in the research for this dysfunction was the perception of sovereign risk on the part of institutional investors. Investing in the Pacific has been considered to be risky, and without sovereign guarantees, risk perceptions prove an immutable barrier (Interview, renewable energy company representative, August 2018). Previous studies have highlighted the ways in which ‘risk’ can function as a schema and ideology justifying resource deprivation: ‘institutional orientalism reproduces mutatis mutandis the colonial mechanisms of wealth transfer from Southern to Northern countries because it legitimizes subjective risk narratives that make Southern countries' access to international finance significantly more difficult and expensive’ (de Souza et al., 2018: 97).

In response to the slow flow of finance to the region, various nascent data projects seeking to quantify, categorize, and represent climate finance opportunity in the Global South for the purpose of easing and encouraging investment decisions in the Global North are being rolled out. A key climate finance data project pursued by institutions such as the World Bank, International Renewable Energy Agency, REN21 (inter alia) has been large-scale renewable energy resource and investment mapping, providing spatially represented assessments of investable resources (McCarthy and Thatcher, 2019).

Can these data projects ameliorate the condition of unequal climate resource allocation? Benjamin (2019) cautions against techno-benevolent fixes. On one hand, she argues that they are often developed to issues without sufficient awareness of the particular predicaments they create and maintain. This critique is applicable to the investment mapping projects; they are built on a notion of justice that erases key dimensions of inequality. In the case of climate finance in the Pacific, data projects are aimed at channeling and scaling up much-needed finance to the Global South, a relational dynamic at the core of the climate finance rationale. In fact, some definitions argue that climate finance is the flow of public and private finance from the Global North to the South (Pickering et al., 2015). This binary framing of resource allocation obscures the issue of racial formation and the unique, situated colonial legacies enlivened therein. The challenges experienced by the French Outré Mar provide a particularly stark example of this potential obfuscation (Ferdinand, 2018). These former colonial territories both contribute significantly less and face heightened vulnerability to climate change than mainland France. Yet, due to its status as overseas territories of France, it falls outside the scope of climate finance from sources such as the GCF. Here, the legacy of colonial relations operates to deprive the Outré Mar of much-needed climate resources (Ferdinand, 2018).

Indeed, risk and readiness, important climate finance standards which may well be translated to climate finance data projects, are contextually and historically tied to the racial schema, which, in turn, manifests materially through resource allocation. Thus, without explicit attention to racial formation, techno-benevolence may in fact entrench the postracial logic of climate finance, a point upon which Benjamin (2019: 157) elaborates:

The denial of racial–ethnic categories may very well lead to some of the most sinister and systemic forms of racism, with very little recourse. This is especially the case when people refuse to acknowledge and to challenge how such logics structure the development and deployment of technoscience and, by extension, access to resources and the rights associated with such initiatives.

While climate finance data projects may simplify the process of channeling finance to climate vulnerable areas, such simplification risks the entrenchment of racial formations as potentially enduring loci of inequality and injustice.

Racially mediated climate resources: Knowledge

A further key climate finance resource is knowledge: whose knowledges determine climate finance governance? And, what do they mean for future renewable energy and investment data projects? Exploring the racial mediation of knowledge foreshadows potential effects and of these data projects by interrogating benefits and critical exclusions. Put another way, it justifies an interrogation of whose knowledge is rendered visible in such projects, and, in the case of subsequent financial mobilization, who stands to benefit.

Many postcolonial and feminist scholars have highlighted how underlying, arguably racial, schemas can devalue the resource of diverse knowledges (e.g. de Sousa Santos, 2018; Harding, 2011; Visvanathan, 1987). For example, knowledge may be devalued to the extent of invisibility, falling to one side of an ‘abyssal line’: here, ‘there is no real knowledge; there are beliefs, opinions, intuitive or subjective understandings, which, at the most, may become objects or raw materials for scientific inquiry’ (de Sousa Santos, 2007: 47). They may also be displaced by hierarchies lauding ‘value-neutral scientific rationality’ (Harding, 2011: 2). These dynamics of visibility and invisibility materialize in renewable energy and investment data mapping projects rolled out in the Global South. One study, for example, showed that issues such as social acceptability were displaced from the final map, which instead focused on quantifications of resource availability (McCarthy and Thatcher, 2019). It serves as but one example of how data can indeed reflect epistemic hierarchies maintained by ‘infrastructures of knowledge production… situated mainly in Western countries’ (Ricaurte, 2019: 351).

A further way climate finance knowledge is racially mediated in the Pacific is through the coding of what becomes understood as capacity. Michael Omi and Howard Winant (1994) set out a history of using code words—that is, non-racial rhetoric used to disguise racial issues. This history calls for an unpacking of seemingly innocuous rationales for underlying racial schemas. Issues framed as concerning capacity in the Pacific have been mobilized in relation to resource allocation in the Pacific. Limited bureaucratic capacity to carry out reforms justifies the funding of networks of international organizations and consultants. On a community level, limited ‘technological capacity’ legitimizes placing ownership of renewable infrastructure outside of communities. The racial schema attached to these codes in some cases appears close to the surface. In a report, no longer publically available, international consultants and a key international climate finance organization describe Fiji’s young labor force, which would service a growing green economy in the following way: ‘Entrepreneurial skills are poor. Shortcomings in generic workplace skills include communications, English proficiency, professionalism, attitude, punctuality, and attire. One consequence is the employment of foreign workers in skill shortage areas’ (Personal communication).

Knowledge-based resources, such as employment opportunities, the conferral and acknowledgement of expertise, are subject to schema-resource coupling. One interviewee working in climate finance overtly commented on the racial formation of climate finance organizations in Fiji: ‘I mean you go there and look around. There are so many White people’ (interview, NGO officer, May 2019). Sara Ahmed (2007: 158) argues that an organization’s recruitment practices, evidenced by the bodies in the room, can speak to the character of an organization. Recruitment creates the ego ideal of the institution, what it imagines as the ideal that working at the institution means working toward or even what it imagines expresses its character. The inclusion of some occurs as the exclusion of others. Whiteness, like property, is conceptually grounded in the right to exclude: ‘White’ was defined and constructed in ways that increased its value by reinforcing its exclusivity. Indeed, just as whiteness as property embraced the right to exclude, whiteness as a theoretical construct has evolved for the very purpose of racial exclusion (Harris, 1993: 1737).

In the context of climate finance in the Pacific, it is important to be wary of racial formation which maintains whiteness as a credential. Ray (2019: 41) argues that ‘Whiteness is a credential providing access to organizational resources, legitimizing work hierarchies, and expanding White agency.’ Co-benefits of climate finance include local job creation. After unpacking the way knowledge, expertise, and employment can be racially mediated in climate finance organizations, a real risk of data projects is the unequal disbursement of such co-benefits. Here, as particular knowledges and expertise are translated and mobilized through emergent climate finance data projects the dynamic nature of whiteness as property may be observable. The spillover effects of data and its shaping of priorities and ‘readiness’ may mediate the allocation and deprivation of vital climate resources.

Conclusion

Climate finance organizations and emergent data projects are intertwined. In the case of Fiji, making visible the schematic-resource couplings manifesting from these organizations offers an opportunity to recognize and problematize them in nascent renewable energy and investment projects. This is critical, as racial organizations obfuscate unequal resource allocation through structures that are purportedly neutral and postracial. Furthermore, this kind of interrogation is vital, given that analyzing organizational racial formation highlights critical loci of injustice and inequity that are the products of durable structures (Ray, 2019). These structures of inequality may have dire implications on a region at the forefront of climate change, urgently requiring the just allocation of resources to mitigate and adapt to the worst effects of ecological crisis. This argument stems from the Pacific context, from Fiji, and its history and present of colonialities and racial formation. Given the importance of climate finance throughout the Global South, this particular issue is by no means confined to the region, augmenting the need to unpack the relationships between climate resources and racial schemas within organizations.

Without acknowledgement of the racial structures mediating climate finance, well-intended emergent data projects may embed postracial logics while streamlining racial and colonial effects. Correspondingly, when climate finance data projects are debated and designed, there remains opportunity to decouple racial schema from the allocation of vital climate recourses. As this analysis precedes the large-scale dissemination of renewable energy and investment data projects, it may serve as a caution, as the ‘the yet-to-come can … inaugurate new forms of categorization, domestication, and colonization’ (Baldwin, 2017: 295).

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I am very thankful for Henne and Orr for their insightful reviews and comments. I would also like to acknowledge the collegiality and generosity of the School of Government, Development and International Affairs at The University of the South Pacific, who supported me as a visiting scholar while I conducted this research.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Kirsty Anantharajah

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