The era of climate capitalism and climate colonialism? A critical analysis of global climate finance governance

Presented by Dr Hyeyoon Park.

Abstract

Transnational climate governance institutions increasingly initiate many climate finance policy instruments, such as climate-related financial risk disclosure, and build new public-private allies to mobilize money that could accelerate a global net-zero transition. These new types of climate finance governance steer transnational financial flows and determine for whom the money is allocated. Despite rapidly growing climate finance, developing countries and the most affected people remain lacking in funds and investments to cope with climate challenges. Moreover, some climate financial tools reproduce the disparity between the Global North and the Global South.

This normative aspect of green finance governance has been marginalised in policy and academic debates but needs to be centred on just transition. This presentation introduces emerging issues of global inequality and justice in global climate finance governance through the lens of climate capitalism and climate colonialism that (re)produces unequal exchanges between the Global North and the Global South in multidimensional aspects, including ecological and epistemological inequalities.

Hyeyoon Park is a Lecturer in International Politics at the Division of History, Heritage, and Politics at the University of Stirling. Her research focuses on the interplay between global norm development and international power politics and its impact on the agency of various state and non-state actors in transnational environmental governance, with empirical emphasis on critical mineral resource extraction and green/climate finance. Her work aims to analyze those governance realms from critical perspectives, in terms of global equity, planetary justice, and geopolitics. Prior to joining the University of Stirling, she worked as a postdoctoral research fellow at Lund University in Sweden and Wageningen University in the Netherlands and received her PhD in Political Science at Colorado State University in the USA.