If more money is the answer, what was the question? Thinking critically about climate finance

Climate politics are increasingly conducted through the medium of climate finance. Climate finance in all its guises is seen to be an enabler of deals, targets and commitments vital to advancing efforts to tackle global heating as well as the means to compensate for loss and damage associated with climate change. Critical questions about who and what the finance is for and whether indeed lack of finance (as opposed to its misallocation) is the main barrier to more ambitious action are often overlooked. Through an engagement with Gareth Bryant and Sophie Webber’s book Climate Finance , this essay foregrounds questions of power, regulation and distribution since the reason the international community has failed to bend the emissions curve has less to do with the lack of finance running through the veins of the global economy and more its misallocation to fossil fuelled extractivist ventures in a highly unequal global economy.