Adaptation Finance: The Fading Promise of Emancipatory Futures

This paper builds on human geography and sociology scholarship concerned with the production and performance of futures and the effect of these in the present (Anderson, 2010) . Billions of dollars are spent on climate change adaptation in the Global South via politicized and technical processes, without significant understanding of its impact. We examine how adaptation finance shapes the present as a form of anticipatory governance (Aykut et al., 2019) but without accountability for these promises. This contribution looks across different adaption finance contexts and develops a theoretical approach to understand two related dynamics. First, we clarify the work that goes into distilling these future outcomes. Second, we explain the performative effects of these futures in the present. Evidence is drawn from interviews and observations over 24 months with multilateral climate funds, the United Nations (UN) processes and in-country experiences in programming funds. This empirical breadth facilitates exploration of various anticipatory knowledge practices deployed with different performative effects. This gives a fuller picture of the logics that sustain adaptation finance that can be missed with a narrow focus on one actor or case. In one Fund, projects are designed for approval, not implementation. Precise ex-ante results are required to unlock funds and then fall away as money is spent. In another Fund, anticipatory claims were designed by international bureaucrats and then taken into national contexts where the imaginaries lacked traction leading to a symbolic performance of prescribed futures. Providers of finance and UN negotiators face scrutiny about allocation, prompting them to become expert at aggregating and communicating results divorced from how people experience adaptation investments but which in turn are wielded to effect contemporary climate politics. We demonstrate a complicit ‘not-knowing’ of the futures that are promised, revealing the structural myopia that is failing to engage with longer-term post-apocalyptic futures.