Metaphors of underdevelopment

The latest UN Climate Change Conference held in Baku (‘COP 29’) resulted in an agreement to commit US$300 billion per year in ‘climate finance’ from developed to developing nations, by 2035. Developing countries organised under the rubric of the G-77 had asked for $1.3 trillion per year in climate finance, and this is included in the COP 29 agreement as an ‘aspirational’ target. That agreed $300 billion goal, however, is not expected to come from developed country governments but ‘a wide variety of sources, public and private, bilateral and multilateral’. In other words, governments in the Global North are tasked with ‘mobilising’ or ‘catalysing’ private sector investment, a process which often entails ‘de-risking’ private investment in climate adaptation or mitigation initiatives by providing various forms of guarantee: subsidising returns to private investors via the public purse. In addition, as G-77 members noted at Baku, including multilateral development bank spending and guarantees within the $300 billion total means that Global South nations are themselves paying for putative transfers from the North, via their subscriptions to multilaterals like the World Bank. Through Prime Minister Mia Mottley, her adviser Avinash Persaud, and their ‘Bridgetown Initiative’, Barbados has become central to articulating and broadening a ‘Global South’ narrative on climate finance since 2022. The Bridgetown Initiative has unfolded through three iterations in three years (termed Bridgetown ‘1.0’, ‘2.0’ and ‘3.0’). While much has changed across the three generations, Persaud has been consistent in articulating the dual injustice of countries in the Global South requiring far greater financial resources to deal with climate vulnerability, yet being forced to borrow the capital they seem to need at far higher interest rates than less vulnerable countries of the North