Fractured Promises: Developing Countries and the Global Contestation of the $100 Billion Climate Finance Pledge

ABSTRACT In 2009, developed countries pledged to transfer $100 billion ($100BCG) yearly from 2020 to developing countries to support their adaptation and climate change mitigation. The failure to deliver on this promise has created enduring debate, especially within social media. This paper investigates how discourses about the $100BCG are framed on X (formerly Twitter) and vary depending on actors in developed versus developing countries. We analysed 1799 tweets related to $100BCG posted between 2021 and 2023 using NVivo's sentiment analysis and topic classification. Findings reveal that discourses around the $100BCG are primarily framed as diplomacy, sustainability and economics narratives. These narratives take mostly negative sentiment, particularly when presented as diplomacy and sustainability, expressing scepticism about fairness, accountability and trust in developed countries about climate finance. Although economic narratives sometimes express cautious optimism as they may be leveraged to boost development and investment, they remain secondary to the larger trends of discontent. These narratives are adopted in the diplomatic rhetoric of elites from developing countries who have echoed such critiques at the international level. This paper helps to illustrate how contestation can play out in a public way and have implications for debates around narratives, trust and fairness in global climate governance.