Urban resilience, a new urban development and governance agenda, is being rolled out from the top down by a network of public, private, non-profit sector actors forming a global urban resilience complex: producing norms that circulate globally, creating assessment tools rendering urban resilience technical and managerial, and commodifying urban resilience such that private sector involvement becomes integral to urban development planning and governance. The Rockefeller Foundation's 100 Resilience Cities Program is at the center of this complex, working with the World Bank, global consultants, NGOs, and private sector service providers to enroll cities, develop and circulate urban resilience assessment tools, and create a market catalyzed by the notion of a resilience dividend. Notwithstanding the claim of this program being open and inclusive, aspects of its initial operationalization in Jakarta suggest that urban resilience assessment tools preempt alternative understandings of urban resilience and marginalizing voices of the city's most vulnerable populations.

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The developed world has pledged to mobilize at least US $100 billion per year of 'new' and 'additional' funds by 2020 to help the developing world respond to climate change. Tracking this finance is particularly problematic for climate change adaptation, as there is no clear definition of what separates adaptation aid from standard development aid. Here we use a historical database of overseas development assistance projects to test the effect of different accounting assumptions on the delivery of adaptation finance to the developing countries of Oceania, using machine algorithms developed from a manual pilot study. The results show that explicit adaptation finance grew to 3%-4% of all development aid to Oceania by the 2008-2012 period, but that total adaptation finance could be as high as 37% of all aid, depending on potentially politically motivated assumptions about what counts as adaptation. There was also an uneven distribution of adaptation aid between countries facing similar challenges like Kiribati, the Marshall Islands, and the Federated States of Micronesia. The analysis indicates that data allowing individual projects to be weighted by their climate change relevance is needed. A robust and mandatory metadata system for all aid projects would allow multilateral aid agencies and independent third parties to perform their own analyses using different assumptions and definitions, and serve as a key check on international climate aid promises.

According to an increasingly prevalent set of discourses and practices within environmental and development finance, cities across the Global South are facing a costly infrastructural crisis stemming from rapid urbanization and climate change that threatens to further entrench poverty and precarity for millions of people. But the cost of achieving urban resilience across the world dwarfs available public finance, both from development banks and governments themselves. Meanwhile, vast amounts of money on capital markets are searching for profitable investment opportunities. The World Bank is attempting to channel return-seeking investment into urban infrastructure in response to these challenges. But in order to harness this private finance, cities must be reformatted in investment friendly ways. In this paper, we chart the emergence of this discourse and associated practices within the World Bank. We call this rescaled and climateinflicted program of leveraged investments coupled with technical assistance Green Structural Adjustment. Drawing on policy documents, reports, and interviews with key staff, we examine programs that comprise Green Structural Adjustment to show how it aims to restructure local governments to capture new financial flows. Green Structural Adjustment reduces adaptation to a question of infrastructure finance and government capacity building, reinscribing both causes and effects of uneven development while creating spatial fixes for overaccumulated Northern capital in the Global South.

This paper explores some of the perverse effects of climate change adaptation policies and financing in the Republic of Kiribati, a low-lying island nation in the Central Pacific. I examine how encounters between financiers and government officials might produce vulnerability to climate change. I draw throughout from field research conducted in Kiribati, an archetypical 'vulnerable-to-climate-change' place, and a preeminent site for experimentation in climate change adaptation. By discussing several instances where Government of Kiribati elites are required to enact vulnerability in order to secure climate change adaptation financing, I demonstrate that such encounters are performative. This research contributes to theories of performativity in showing that the matrix conditioning and compelling such performative enactments of vulnerability is socionatural, consisting of a collective of climate change impacts, adaptation-finance technocrats, and many others. Thus, I demonstrate that vulnerability is not a latent condition, but, rather, an emergent effect of an assemblage of facts, expert actors, and objects.