Making time through climate finance: temporal rationalities and practices of the Green Climate Fund in Vanuatu

The climate crisis is a crisis of ordering and governing time. This paper interrogates how multilateral climate finance relies upon, and reinforces, particular temporal regimes and imaginaries around the relationship between modernity, coloniality, and time. Specifically, it asks: which temporal rationalities are inscribed in, and which structured temporal practices are enacted through the climate finance regime in Vanuatu, and beyond? Based on an ethnographic document analysis of funding proposals and investment criteria of the Green Climate Fund, I argue that the GCF actively governs ni-Vanuatu communities through time. Through different notions of (colonial) temporality informed by Pasifika political ecology scholarship, this paper explores the impact of these funding schemes in negotiating climatic futures. Methodologically, it approaches the GCF’s document machine as a social agent that diagnoses presents, anticipates futures, and renders particular interventions viable over others. The paper shows that the Green Climate Fund is not merely a mechanism for transferring resources; it is a temporal governance regime that diagnoses presents as deficient, renders futures governable, and thereby structures which Pacific futures become legible and investable. By foregrounding temporality, this study contributes to ongoing debates on climate coloniality and the political economy of delay, while situating Vanuatu as a critical site to rethink how power operates across scales, spaces, and times.