Making climate finance: toward everyday, historically informed, and reparative understandings

The centering of climate finance around a narrow set of institutions, sites, instruments, practices, and technologies is an achievement made possible by the domination of finance capital and policy elites. In this intervention, we shift the spotlight away from such elite projects and practices in favor of a wider understanding of urban climate finance—one that includes a more diverse set of sites, activities and participants. A wider and more inclusive conceptualization of urban climate finance requires accounting for the historical and ongoing role of finance in the production of climate vulnerability. Reconceptualized in this way, urban climate finance expands to include everyday financial life in cities around the world. Everyday climate finance is thus generated in places where the risks and uncertainties of climate change are currently unrecognized by policy elites as such, yet are being managed through improvised repertoires of financial practices. Additionally, (re)considering past financial practices as climate finance (e.g. historical residential redlining that produces climate vulnerability today), provides a rationale for demanding that past and present financial actors account for today’s climate injustices, and contribute to future reparative and abolitionist climate action.