Repositioning climate finance

Introduction

It is a pleasure to engage with generous and insightful colleagues about our book – both in conversation and in written form here. Their commentaries are helpful and clever, and responding to their remarks and questions offers an opportunity to update our understanding of climate finance. And there is much of our analysis that needs to be updated to account for the compounding violent, ecological and political-economic crises that have only intensified since we wrote the book. Our commentators have begun to reckon with this challenge; we turn now to examine whether the positions on climate finance we lay out are up for the fight.

The goal of the book is to work across political economy and economic geography to offer a synthetic map of climate finance and the futures it programmes. We want to take the politics of climate finance beyond “gap talk” – ways of measuring and categorising existing finance against the projected costs of responding to climate risks. Instead, we think of climate finance as embedded in, and reshaping, the core institutions of capitalism. As such, climate finance is both an indicator and mediator of different climate futures. We diagram climate change and financial relations in mutually productive terms, each shaping and reshaping the other and worked out across different positions of climate finance. Through this approach, we examine how these different climate finance positions each configure states, markets and ecologies in ways that point towards different kinds of climate futures, while opening up a range of tactics and strategies for advancing more democratic and progressive pathways.

Climate finance in review

As Matthan describes, the book seeks to attend to “finance as a dynamic space of political contestation, in which unevenly situated actors envision, negotiate and build diverse climate futures.” Its politics can be explicit; but as Newell reminds us, climate finance politics are as much about what is obscured in the “blurring and blending” of financial instruments and their actors and outcomes. Matthan takes this further, generously connecting our search for the “contestation, contingency and contradiction” of each climate finance position to transformative possibilities for climate finance “otherwise.” For Newell, this climate finance otherwise will be contested on the terrain of the state, through its potential to make public investments in the public interest while resetting “the rules of the game” that have led us towards climate catastrophe. For Matthan, however, climate finance can be stretched: its limits and affordances can become sites for building “self-determination, dignity and redistribution.” In her formulation, while climate finance is no panacea for the uneven distributions of climate risk and response, it is the basis from which to push “for a more expansive imagination of the possible in relation to the actual.”

The politics of the actual, however, as the commentators identify, has been rapidly transfigured. As Johnson writes, the “dominant climate finance positions . . . are now in a period of transformation.” First, the rise of right-wing populism, authoritarianism and fascism has further pushed climate politics, she writes, “out of overtly recognized political forums and onto the terrains of finance.” For instance, political opposition to action on climate change has been channelled through an assault on sustainable investing. Right-wing politicians and billionaires have attempted to use state power to reorient financial markets towards “dirty,” “anti-woke” and “anti-ESG” investment practices, causing an evacuation of banks, insurers and asset managers from climate initiatives. Where deals are being struck to finance climate technologies, they are overwhelmingly in service of the water-guzzling, territory-sweeping energy demands of data centres and the AI boom rather than the decarbonisation of asset portfolios. How climate finance articulates with these non-climate orientations – both in publicity and portfolios – requires, Johnson suggests, more analytical precision and attention.

Second, Silver points us to a multipolar world system, dominated by economic nationalism, competitive geopolitics, and ever more violently armed military states. As he prompts, “Big Military States” are aggressively expanding, and increasingly pairing goals of decarbonisation and adaptation with goals of national and economic security. In Germany, for instance, the goal to increase military spending enabled the government to circumvent debt rules enforcing fiscal austerity, while at the same time creating fiscal space for climate infrastructure investment. In practice, the vast public and private flows of finance that underpin war machines are central drivers of climate change, as laid bare in the unfolding genocide and ecocide in Gaza. Silver asks us to envisage a “more expansive political economy of climate finance to integrate these geo-political/geo-economic processes.”

Third, and relatedly, the commentators point to a geographical shift in climate finance and the climate economy it organises. This shift has created new loci of climate finance away from the traditional financial centres of the Global North and towards China, and its relationships with, for example, Gulf, Asian and African states. Indeed, China is, by an order of magnitude, the biggest global player in solar power (and, simultaneously, coal power), installing more capacity in the first half of 2025 than the rest of the world combined (Ember Energy, 2025). More significant is the scale of its investments in green manufacturing capacity which exports solar panels and battery storage systems internationally, from Saudi Arabia to South Africa. The central position of China in international flows of climate finance challenges the conclusion of the book on the centrifugal force of the Global North and our conceptual tools for understanding forms of climate finance that are, as Newell says, “less subservient to the whims of finance capital.” We examine each of these prompts in turn now.

The winds of anti-woke

The book positions Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) investing as “climate risk”: a mode of incorporating non-financial metrics into investment and management decisions as a material financial risk. ESG metrics encourage investors to screen against criteria deemed potentially damaging, seeking to facilitate a reallocation of capital to better manage exposures to climate and other investment risks to capital (see Parfitt, 2024). Throughout its career, ESG has been contested from both left and right, including legitimate charges of “greenwashing” and criticisms of its supposed connection with liberal political goals or potential violation of antitrust legislation. Since Republicans surged to even greater political power in the United States in January 2025, attacks on sustainable investing have increased. Johnson, crucially, continues to understand this through the lens of shifting risks, writing “the more salient risks now seem to be posed by financial or legal action from ‘anti-woke’ and anti-ESG investor movements and politicians in an instantly viral mediasphere.” The ESG backlash therefore represents a deepening of the financial politics of climate change; rather than appealing to a return to a time of purportedly objective metrics of profit seeking, this movement sees finance as a means to take a political position in favour of a fossil-fuelled climate future.

Republicans need not have worried. As we charted in the book, ESG-labelled portfolios routinely maintain substantive exposures to carbon-intensive assets. The turn away from ESG in the US does not mean, as Johnson rightly points out, a “rush in to ‘dirtier’ investments any more than their original [commitments] signalled a complete repudiation of fossil fuel financing.” It is, instead, an indicator of the political economy of climate change – as investors such as Blackrock, whose CEO Larry Fink now shuns the ESG label, reposition themselves against both climate and MAGA risks. While this confirms that private capital can at best act as a mediator, rather than driver, of political pressure for climate action, the evidence of the material financial impact of this anti-woke backlash remains mixed. In the immediate aftermath of the election of the second Trump Administration, financial analytics company Morningstar (2025) reported a record net outflow of investment in “sustainable” funds. While US finance accelerated its strategy, underway since 2022, of limiting its exposure to “woke capitalism,” the first recorded quarter of European withdrawals was linked to investor resistance to ESG limits on defence industries as the region looks to “ReArm.” Nonetheless, a recent Bloomberg survey of investors found they expected ESG assets under management to continue to grow (Bloomberg Intelligence, 2025). Indeed, projections of growth in the industry are common, even when more granular assessments of these projections continue to demonstrate that ESG or climate labels lead to very limited reallocations of capital or material impacts on financial valuation (e.g. Fichtner et al., 2024).

Morningstar also reported other headwinds for sustainable investment and ESG. These included new anti-greenwashing regulations in the EU and the UK prompting the relabelling of “sustainable” investment funds that fail new benchmarks and investor concerns about the profitability of climate investment. As Christophers (2024) argues, in an energy transition dependent on the investment decisions of private capital, the central metric is the profitability of renewable energy versus fossil fuels. Indeed, Newell affirms that the central climate finance challenge is less about “the lack of finance running through the veins of the global economy and more its misallocation to fossil fuelled extractivist ventures.” More worrying than changes in sustainable investment practice, then, is that the global trend of decreasing fossil fuel lending since 2021 reversed in 2024 (Rainforest Action Network et al., 2025). Deepening politicisation of ESG and sustainable investing since our book was published – including the peculiarly American war on woke investing – underscores our claim about climate finance as a central site of contestation over the shape and trajectories of climate and fossil futures.

Climate finance statecraft in the Second Cold War

Climate finance moves with, not against, shifts in the political economy of capitalism. Central here is Silver’s emphasis on the increasing salience of geopolitical rivalry and military expansion in domestic and international economies. Bankers at the 2025 New York Climate Week, for example, argued that financial deals for green energy framed around “energy security” were having more success than as “climate investments” (Marsh, 2025). Climate movement politics are simultaneously moving into geopolitical terrain. Climate activists are, for instance, using an anti-war analogy to push for a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty that would redirect finance to a Global Transition Fund (Newell and Simms, 2020). More directly, the Climate and Community Institute, among others, have framed military spending as a form of (climate) finance that should be met with divestment to build “true international peace and security through robust climate action” (Bigger et al., 2025). These examples show that climate finance is becoming increasingly enmeshed in the geopolitical competition of the “Second Cold War” (Schindler et al., 2024).

This is not a case of geopolitics trumping climate change. “Geopolitics now drives climate action” (Allan, 2025); but equally, climate change and the climate transition drives geopolitics. The case of rare earths is illustrative. Both the Biden and Trump Administrations developed policy intended to financially support domestic rare earths projects; in 2025, the Pentagon escalated its existing strategy of providing concessional finance to the sector and took a USD400 million, 15% ownership stake in rare earths miner, processor and manufacturer MP minerals (Datta and Harrell, 2025). These investments were justified as defence requirements to counter China’s dominance in rare earths, and made use of the Defense Production Act. However, demand for rare earth magnets for military uses, such as F-35 warplanes, represents a tiny fraction of international demand, which is instead overwhelmingly driven by the needs of the energy transition (Fickling, 2025). While public finance for rare earths is clearly not being driven by narrow climate goals, states are nonetheless taking a stake in a future co-produced by a range of forces inseparable from climate change.

The fusion of climate change and security within state finance is integral to the wider trend towards the expansion in state capacities and control within capitalist economies, and attendant debates about new state capitalism and the end, or otherwise, of neoliberalism (Alami et al., 2024; Mackenzie and Sahay, 2025; Menand, 2023; cf Slobodian, 2025). Appeals to national security have long been used to carve out military spending from fiscal constraints and the Department of Defence has been central to US industrial policy for decades (Riofrancos, 2025). But in the present conjuncture, it was China’s coordinated green industrial strategy and its global market dominance in many climate-critical technologies and materials that triggered a proliferation of industrial policies in the United States, Europe, Japan, Korea, Canada and Australia (Evenett et al., 2024). Initiatives such as the Inflation Reduction Act in the United States, and the Future Made in Australia Act (where we are situated) with its overarching “National Security Framework,” represent the rise of increasingly hybrid configurations of climate finance statecraft across public-private and climate-non-climate divides. States have developed an array of instruments and funds to backstop and direct private investment in green industries and infrastructure that are deemed to advance overlapping national security, sovereign capability and regional development goals. New climate finance statecraft resists the binary framing of de-risking versus industrial policy, as de-risking states operate “through the implementation of spatialised industrial strategy” (Schindler et al., 2023: 224; emphasis added).

The repeal of aspects of the IRA has not entailed a retreat of the US state from the climate economy. Rather, the case of MP Minerals, discussed above, represents an extension and expansion of industrial policy beyond the “weak” de-risking tools of the IRA, such as tax credits and loan guarantees (Gabor and Braun, 2025); in addition to the public ownership stake on the supply side, the deal secured contracts to publicly guarantee both prices and quantities on the demand side. While Trump has dismantled many of the green public subsidy programmes of the IRA, the Administration is deepening the capacity of the state to guarantee profits for a private company in a climate-critical sector to advance its Second Cold War with China, without any pretence of wider labour, regional or community benefit. This is a far cry from the Green New Deal agenda for “comprehensive decarbonisation and the guarantee of fundamental economic rights through public provisioning of universal healthcare, housing, education and dignity for all workers” (Brusseler, 2025). Nonetheless, it shows that the state, in Newell’s words, remains a “central site for contestation over the ideas, actors and institutions that should govern the world we want to live in.” The growing entanglement of states and security-climate capital highlights the urgency of a progressive rethinking of the industrial policy agenda – to move beyond the methodological nationalism that limits internationalist movements for pro-labour and pro-environment objectives (Estevez and Riofrancos, 2025) and to address “asymmetric” capacities for enacting industrial policy in the Global South due to the relations of subordination in global capitalism and finance (Alami et al., 2025).

New climate finance map; familiar subordination?

The abandoning of US ambitions to compete with China in various green technologies in the current conjuncture does, however, point to a potential reconfiguring of the geographies of climate finance. Newell agrees with Johnson’s suggestion that “the balance of political-economic forces in the world of climate finance [has shifted] towards Asia,” while Silver asks us to consider infrastructure investments through the Belt and Road Initiative, or state-owned financial institutions such as the China Development Bank. Thus, he asks: how can we “stretch climate finance beyond the terrain of the Global North to account for other flows and circulations of climate (adjacent) finance from China (or indeed the Gulf, or multilateral banks such as the Asian and African Development Banks).”

We admit, the scale of China’s dominance in green technologies and manufacturing deserves further scrutiny. In the book, we discuss fiscal support for green energy in China as a state capitalist model of the Big Green State, which perhaps understates the world-making role (Eich, 2025) it is playing in the climate transition. Chinese power in renewables has transformed its own energy production: 64% of global renewable energy capacity growth was installed in China in 2024 based on strategic state investment from the early 2000s (Tribdino, 2025). Chinese green manufacturing capacity and production dominate in electric vehicles, lithium-ion batteries and solar panels and the critical supply chains for these. Beyond its borders, Chinese support for energy infrastructures proceeds through the Belt and Road Initiative and investment and construction through Chinese state-owned enterprises, although with limited follow through on pledges to “green” the BRI (Bian et al., 2024). China’s exports of its green technologies, especially solar panels, batteries and electric vehicles, are transforming energy systems throughout the Global South, where Chinese producers seeking to fix overcapacity issues are estimated to be reducing global emissions by 1% per year (Myllyvirta, 2025; see also Liu et al., 2024 on China’s public international climate finance).

In the meantime, the growth of investment partnerships with Chinese firms and the state signal the growing pursuit of “polyalignment” (Alami, 2025). As Indonesia, for instance, shepherds Chinese investment into nickel production for EV batteries alongside new trade agreements with the US, they – and other climate swing states, like Morocco, Brazil, Kenya, Vietnam, Turkey and India – are pursuing geopolitical ambivalence as a pathway towards connectivity and green development. Precisely how these geographies will unfold remains unclear. But it seems certain to be uneven, as these states each compete with themselves to be hubs, centres, sites and ports for supply chain security, and it is sure to produce dispossession and ecological ruination (Gabor and Sylla, 2023). While the networks and connections contested in this Second Cold War may have shifted, its patterning of social, economic and ecological impact remain familiar.

Consider further the consolidation, rather than unmaking, of uneven global climate finance geographies. In the wake of the book’s publication, we participated in several climate and international finance workshops with long-standing anti-debt advocates seeking structural climate finance reform. Indeed, the book sought to harness some of the momentum of global South advocates and activists in climate finance – for instance, around loss and damage financing, climate debt and climate reparations. These forces came to a head in July this year in the fourth UN Financing for Development conference. There, coalitions of vulnerable and indebted states sought reforms to the sovereign debt architecture which has left them subservient to creditors and unable to invest in essential public services or climate readiness (Fresnillo and Girshova, 2025). As the costs of climate risks and responses sky rocket, aid shrinks, and the “worst debt crises the world has ever seen is suffocating public budgets” (Fresnillo, 2025), Global South countries sought more power at negotiation tables, including by compelling creditors to participate in work-out mechanisms towards resolving debt crises. And yet, despite transformative talk of debt cancellation, a global debt architecture and borrowers’ clubs, the resulting Seville Commitment doubled down on the Wall Street Consensus of investable climate and development and solidified Northern financial creditor power. As Gabor (2025) writes: “the overall message from the North was clear: sovereignty stops where BlackRock’s yield curve begins” (np). For the Small Island Developing States, African Group and other Southern delegates who sought debt relief and climate finance, the new geography of climate finance seems very much like the old.

A climate finance field guide

One of the goals of Climate Finance was to flip conventional approaches to climate finance focused on mobilising measured volumes of finance for climate purposes. The book was instead premised on a reading of the political economy and economic geography of climate change – including through work by the contributors to this forum – that climate pressures, both physical and political, are transforming the rules and relations of contemporary capitalism. Our intended contention and contribution was to reveal how climate finance, broadly defined, represents a lens through which to understand climate-changing capitalism, and provide a map for navigating its future through our six positions. Developments such as the right-wing ESG backlash, the fusing of climate and military policy agendas and shifts in the geographical balance of climate investment towards China have accelerated the position of climate finance as the central terrain of climate politics and challenged the narrow versions of climate finance predicated on private sector voluntarism, de-risking states and Western financial centres. Climate struggles continue to reorient climate futures through climate finance, and recent developments make new directions possible. In this context, we hope that our positions provide a field guide to researchers, activists and students to engage with, to return to Matthan’s central point, the political and moral stakes of climate finance.