Budgeting for the Future: Understanding the Allocation of Climate Finance in the Global South

The impact of climate change on people’s lives and livelihoods is increasingly hard to ignore, and is moreover characterized by trenchant inequities: wealthy countries generate the vast majority of global CO2 emissions, but poor nations overwhelmingly suffer the consequences.

In response, wealthy nations have pledged to mobilize US$100 billion annually in “climate finance” to help their more vulnerable counterparts.

The past decade has seen climate finance nearly double, but we know very little about what happens when these resources reach their intended beneficiaries in the Global South.

As such, we lack information about where and how climate finance can have the greatest impact, and what constitutes the greatest areas of unmet need.

ClimateFiGS develops a new theory to understand the allocation and spending of climate finance within Global South countries.

The project considers how leaders’ characteristics, including their gender and age, condition their responses, as well as the relative emphasis they place on mitigation (i.e., risk protection) vs. adaptation (i.e., risk management).

This approach recognizes the agency of Global South leaders, and expands the knowledge frontier on substantive representation, distributive politics, and environmental policymaking.

ClimateFiGS breaks empirical ground by creating new global data on the mobilization of climate finance, as well as by studying detailed patterns of budget allocation and expenditure in three purposefully selected African countries.

The project further adapts methods from social activism to map the power dynamics that drive climate finance decision making within countries, and traces the processes that lead certain sectors and districts to be prioritized.

ClimateFiGS is thus poised to generate knowledge to address one of the world’s most “wicked” problems: How can we avert the most devastating impacts of climate change for the world’s most vulnerable?