This commentary explores the potential consequence of latent racial formation in emergent climate finance data projects and draws from ethnographic research on climate finance governance conducted in Fiji. Climate finance data projects emerging in the Pacific aim to ease the flow of finance from the Global North to the South. These emergent data projects, such as renewable energy resource availability and investment mapping, are imbedded in the climate finance organizations that fund, develop, and use them. Thus, the commentary explores climate finance organizations through the lens of Ray’s (2019) theory of racial organizations, highlighting the ways in which important climate-related resources are mediated through racial and colonial schemas. The racial mediation of two key resources are spotlighted in this discussion: the finance itself and knowledge. Given that the Pacific region is at the coalface of climate change’s existential effects, the just allocation of resources is imperative. In interrogating the ways in which emergent data projects may deny these resources based on hidden racial schemas, the paper cautions against new and old forms of colonization that may be mobilized through even well-meaning techno-benevolent fixes ( Benjamin, 2019 ).
Pacific Island Countries are most vulnerable to the disastrous impacts of climate change; they also, however, manifest some of the most ambitious international climate commitments. Fiji, for one, has sought to respond to the escalating threat by setting highly ambitious climate mitigation targets, specifically in the energy sector. Finance is key to the realization of these goals: governors must attract and meaningfully invest vast sums to support these mitigation targets. This study, through qualitative, empirical, and inductive methods, found that a complex landscape of barriers stood between governors and the translation of finance into positive climate outcomes. The study categorized barriers into four different planes of deepening entrenchment: Level One barriers are the most tractable, whereas Level Four barriers are immovable. The study found that these barriers interrelate between levels, creating complex chains of entrenchment. A superficially tractable issue may be rendered less so by being rooted in a more entrenched issue. Empirically, this paper delineates the complex landscape of challenges, or ‘context’, that Fijian climate governors must understand in order to deliver effective governance solutions. Beyond this, this research offers a framework of broader application through which climate governors may conceptualize complex barriers.
Our article illuminates a particular way to think about the relational nature of public accountability and how that might guide further study of liberal democracies’ treatment of asylum seekers and refugees. Public accountability is in trouble in liberal democracies, conceptually and practically. Scholars in the field identify a lack of clarity surrounding the ‘ever-expanding’ idea of accountability—its meaning and want of deep conceptual roots; the separation of theorizing from lived practice. At the same time, we see in liberal democracies, particularly in cases regarding the treatment of non-citizens, disturbing attacks on traditional mechanisms of accountability. We focus on the crisis of public accountability manifest in Australia’s treatment of asylum seekers in offshore detention. We suggest that the lack of clarity around the concept of public accountability—and the lack of an ethical understanding of the public’s critical role in demanding it—informs what is occurring in countries like Australia.
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