Financing Reparative Climate Infrastructures: Capital Switching, Repair and Decommodification

Despite geographical critiques of the financialisation of climate governance, the realities of deteriorating environmental conditions, entrenched market logics, and the concentration of capital in the hands of financiers demand new strategies to contend with climate finance. We envision routes to better futures by surveying “financialised” responses to climate catastrophe that might be harnessed towards more reparative and decommodified ends. We combine ideas of “repair” and “capital switching” to evaluate financial tools for “reparative climate infrastructures” in five cases centred on energy, land, and water in the United States, Australia, Indonesia, and Brazil. Through these cases, we identify three key themes—governance, scale, and the state—that illuminate the socioecological, material, and political dimensions of reparative capital switching. The cases are each hopeful and cautionary. Together they offer a window into the contested terrain of climate finance in the present and highlight the need for critical attention to its strategic possibilities.