The New ‘Bond-age’, Climate Crisis and the Case for Climate Reparations: Unpicking Old/New Colonialities of Finance for Development within the SDGs

Abstract

In the current crisis period, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have provided a framework for establishing new norms about governance of and access to external development financing that emphasize stimulating investor interest and creating a suite of innovative instruments to address major development challenges. However, the inadequacies associated with extant financing streams are in sharp relief since they do not address damages and losses associated with the climate crisis. The current global configuration aimed at generating from “billions to trillions” of development finance are awfully mute on historical responsibility for the uneven and extreme consequences facing climate-impacted communities in the Global South. This paper interrogates the role of the SDGs, in particular SDG17, in both adducing financialisation as an evolutionary process, further extracting profit from racialized communities, and a source of instability in the global economy. It points to the manner in which the “trillions” deemed necessary are ostensibly mobilized in pursuit of financial returns to be made from climate disaster that generate further debt, dispossesses populations in the global south, and thereby ushering in a new era of “bond-age” and coloniality. Current development financing arrangements under the SDGs would increase the cost burdens and compromise the Global South’s capacities to democractically manage and meet their developmental needs due to accumulating losses and damage from major extreme climate-induced events. Loss and damage compensation for marginalised developing countries at the forefront of the climate crisis must therefore come from another source: climate reparations. Climate reparations offer an appropriate encompassing philosophical and policy apparatus for first understanding the magnitude of climate breakdown, and second for mounting a response to ongoing environmental harm in vulnerable countries that is centred on climate justice.

Racial capitalism and the sea: Development and change in Black maritime labour, and what it means for fisheries and a blue economy

“…The MPA approach, in Seychelles for example, offers a route to improve marine biodiversity protection in ways that local policy leaders deem economically viable (Schutter & Hicks, 2019). Yet, as Perry (2021) observes, the ‘global configuration’, advocating for market‐based finance mechanisms are ‘awfully mute on historical responsibility’, for global South debt and socioecological vulnerabilities, generally. From this perspective, debt incurred by former colonial territories has historically been a mechanism of (neo)colonialism that limits national sovereignty, and remains so today (Hudson, 2017; Perry, 2021).…”

“…Yet, as Perry (2021) observes, the ‘global configuration’, advocating for market‐based finance mechanisms are ‘awfully mute on historical responsibility’, for global South debt and socioecological vulnerabilities, generally. From this perspective, debt incurred by former colonial territories has historically been a mechanism of (neo)colonialism that limits national sovereignty, and remains so today (Hudson, 2017; Perry, 2021). Thus, in the development of financing for MPAs, a Racial Capitalist perspective would seek to explore whether the debt itself is just via considerations of supply chain exploitation, colonialism and the legacies of institutions such as plantation slavery.…”

Crisis Capitalism and Climate Finance: The Framing, Monetizing, and Orchestration of Resilience-Amidst-Crisis

“…The framing of crisis as unprecedented and urgent justifies policies that react to the present causes of the situation, thereby allowing the historical and structural causes of crisis to be obfuscated (Whyte, in press). At the same time, employing a resilience-amidst-crisis discourse romanticizes the survival capacity of disaster victims and fetishizes the resiliency of marginalized communities, thereby facilitating a disconnect that makes it easier to rationalize austere modes of governance and debt-bondage (Bigger & Webber, 2020;Perry, 2020;Serrano-García, 2020).…”

Financing a Global Green New Deal: Greening Capitalism or Taming Financialization for a New ‘Civilizing’ Multilateralism?

“…Climate change is seen as the context within which financialization is occurring and leading to structural imbalances. The nature of financialization or finance‐led hyper‐globalization mirrors the relationship between corporate‐backed investments in climate change action and corporate‐driven climate mitigation actions at the level of the UN (see also Gallagher and Kozul‐Wright, 2019; Perry, 2020c). Thus, climate change is seen not as a consequence of the pattern of capitalist development since the Industrial Revolution but rather as an external shock to the financial system.…”