Allocating climate adaptation finance revisited: examining three ethical arguments for allocating adaptation finance on the basis of democracy

Abstract The actual amount of adaptation finance available globally is insufficient to finance, implement and maintain the necessary adaptation actions. A common way of dealing with this scarcity is to apply prioritisation criteria to the distribution of adaptation finance. The criterion of good governance already applied in the context of the distribution of official development assistance, and the social and political nature of adaptation needs, motivate the idea of allocating adaptation finance between countries based on the level of democratisation of their government. This paper examines three normative arguments for the democracy criterion: the legitimacy argument, the entitlement argument and the additional side-benefit argument. Understanding democracy as public reason and participation, this examination of the three arguments touches on considerations of justice and a potential intrinsic value of democracy. However, a final judgement on the democracy criterion is not the aim of this paper. Rather, this analysis concludes that there are plausible arguments for considering the democracy criterion in the debate on the distribution of scarce adaptation finance. Future work by policy-makers and academics will need to show whether, and, if so, in what detailed specification, the democracy criterion could actually play a role in the decision-making processes on the distribution of adaptation finance.