ABSTRACT
Climate finance is an essential component of climate action globally, but more so in the Majority World which is disproportionately affected by the increasing risks from climate change. Climate finance institutions, such as the Green Climate Fund, are therefore critical to efforts for addressing climate change and delivering climate justice. This chapter draws from zemiology, which is an emerging paradigm in critical criminology, that primarily concerns itself with the analysis and critique of legalized social harms in the context of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century neoliberal capitalism. The chapter highlights how these harms germinate from the operations of state–corporate collusion, where the pursuance of neoliberal outcomes is considered a legally acceptable trade-off for processes and outcomes that address the root causes of vulnerability of those disproportionately affected by climate change. This chapter further argues that these trade-offs emerge from ‘paradoxical harms’, which are driven by accountability deficits within the climate change governance regime, and which generate social harms for those in the Majority World. The outcome for the Majority World is climate change responses characterized by blame avoidance and reassignment and shifting of responsibilities for addressing climate change. For the Green Climate Fund, paradoxical harms are rooted in its design structure which contributes to a climate finance system that fails to challenge the structural causes of climate change and instead provides superficial solutions for addressing the climate crisis. Finance channelled through the Green Climate Fund therefore becomes a veil for sustaining apolitical climate solutions and provide ideological cover for exacerbation of climate change while disproportionately allocating impacts to communities in the Majority World.
