Understandings of climate finance are in flux today in politically urgent ways, posing timely questions for critical urban scholarship and practice. The term climate finance came prominently into use as a point of contention in United Nations Conference of Parties (COP) debates over the last decade. It was employed in calls upon wealthy countries to dedicate funding to support climate change responses in the Global South—recognizing that many countries who have contributed least to the climate crisis now stand to suffer most from its impacts. Climate finance is also a growing priority for multilateral and bilateral development funders. However, governmental and multilateral channels of climate finance have persistently failed to meet pledged and called-for commitments, let alone address the more significant climate financing gap facing communities worldwide, or the even higher tally suggested by more transformative understandings of climate/ecological debt and reparations. Growing critical scholarship suggests that a major outcome of—and underlying factor in—this political impasse has been an increase in the power of private financial institutions to set the terms of new climate-related investment, and to define narratives of (and capacity for) financing responses in their favor. [...]@en

Financial agendas centering on the global fight against climate change have increasingly turned to cities and urban re/development projects as ideal candidates for supposedly ‘future proof’ investment. In the last decade, research has witnessed the development of policy programs, risk assessments, and project pipelines, amongst other efforts to materialize this agenda in the city. Drawing on critical urban geographies of what is loosely known as ‘climate finance’, this Special Feature, ‘Decentering Urban Climate Finance’, proposes to expand and provincialize these dominant agendas. The five contributions in this Special Feature employ the notion of decentering in four distinct ways: by putting a broader range of theoretical lenses to use and rereading the workings of climate finance through them; by highlighting the modes of omission through which dominant understandings of climate finance narrow its operations to a limited set of solutions, approaches, places, and imaginaries; by turning a view onto under-examined sites of finance and climate adaptation; and by imagining alternative transformative imaginaries of urban climate finance.@en