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 new norms about governance of and access to external 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 racialized 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.

An emerging governmentality of climate change loss and damage

“…For example, Rivera (2020) explored disaster colonialism in Puerto Rico and the Caribbean and argues racialised violence and dispossession, even through disaster responses, reproduces coloniality and vulnerability throughout marginalised communities. Social movements, particularly peasant and Indigenous led, have consistently called attention to the colonial and neocolonial roots of vulnerability such as dispossession, depeasantisation, proletarianisation, and categorising subjects into hierarchies based on race or other attributes (Borras et al 2012;Löf 2013;Perry 2021;Sealey-Huggins 2018). These historical factors, among others, create the socio-ecological conditions that climate change, as a risk amplifier, interacts with, leading to losses and damages (Raju, Boyd and Otto 2022;Roberts and Pelling 2020;Wrathall et al 2015).…”

“…To conclude, we draw brief attention to further examples of visibility and obscuration in L&D governance (all examples discussed can be seen in Table 1). First, comprehensive risk management (CRM) is highly visible and pushed by wealthy nations, but this comes at the expense of developing countries’ desire for compensation (Mechler and Deubelli 2021) or reparations (Perry 2021). Second, whilst economic losses and damages remain visible, increasingly non-economic losses are being highlighted (Pearson, Jackson and McNamara 2021; Tschakert et al 2019).…”

“…Boda and colleagues’ contribution was a first step towards exposing implicit assumptions and rationalities. Building from these, and other critical contributions (Ciplet 2017; Perry 2021; Roberts and Pelling 2020), we draw from Foucault's (1991) concept of governmentality and ask: is there a governmentality of L&D? We will review existing L&D literature in addition to wider research that we believe can help identify an emerging governmentality of L&D.…”

An analysis of tax abuse, debt, and climate change risk in low-income and lower-middle-income countries

“…For instance, the Caribbean only receives 32% of climate financing for adaptation. 17 Yet, adaptation can improve health and increase survival, 18 such as strengthening healthcare systems and weather-resilient environment systems. 19 Additionally, increasing girls’ education has a significant impact on the reduction of emissions.…”

An Atlantic eco-poetics of relations: Intercultural communication and Caribbean decolonising approaches to face the climate crisis

“…For instance, any forms of "financial aid" from Europe and international organisations to the Caribbean, should be publicly acknowledged as part of overdue reparations to postcolonial territories. If the "development finance remains silent on the historical responsibility and continuing coloniality that reproduce uneven and extreme consequences in climate-impacted Caribbean communities", achieving equity in international relations will continue to be a pending task [8]. In the context of climate change, language and representations are important.…”