New ‘bond-ages’, climate crisis and the case for climate reparations

Keywords: colonialism, race, Sustainable Development Goals, Caribbean, development finance
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Monday
Session Start / End Time: 2/28/2022 08:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/28/2022 09:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 14

Abstract

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) provide a normative framework for development finance that emphasizes stimulating investor interest and redefines areas of development intervention. However, their underpinnings reflecting continuities of longstanding structural divergence along racial lines regarding determinants of finance and uneven climate devastation are not well explored. Additionally, the current global configuration of “billions to trillions” of development finance remains silent on the historical responsibility and continuing coloniality that reproduce uneven and extreme consequences in climate-impacted Caribbean communities. This paper interrogates the role of the SDGs in reproducing racialized peripheries and extracting surplus value from these formerly colonized communities through the use of financial logics and innovative instruments. The adoption of the SDGs at the same time of the International Decade of People of African Descent (2015–2024) appears merely coincidental. A lack of concern about climate justice and reparations for historical harms and climate-related losses is evident. This absence highlights the manner in which financial interests are privileged and mobilized in pursuit of high-yielding returns to be made from climate disaster, debt and dispossession. These contradictions usher in a new era of “bond-age” and coloniality that justify reparations for loss and damage facing frontline marginalised communities centred on climate justice.