The assembly of climate finance in South Africa: politics, scale and justice

Barnes, Jonathan (2022) The assembly of climate finance in South Africa: politics, scale and justice. PhD thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science.

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Abstract

This thesis asks critical questions about the potential for climate finance to advance social justice. It draws on Deleuze and Guattari’s interpretation of the assemblage to engage in methodological and theoretical debates about the application of the concept within human geography. I emphasise the centrality of human desire, theorize the purposeful and strategic nature of assemblages and demonstrate theoretical opportunities with respect to scale. This furnishes novel theorizations of climate change policy processes, energy transitions and offers empirical perspectives on the programming of climate finance. South Africa has an ambitious Green Climate Fund programme organised around two contrasting organisations that are accredited to access finance. The wider social and material context of this provides a rich empirical case to explore and advance assemblage theory. Paper one nuances the depoliticization critique. It demonstrates how an urgency framing carries forward and intersects with an expert epistemology, shaping the knowledge and human desires that are generated, contested and expressed. These desires are ordered in a theorisation of assemblage deployed in the next two papers. Paper two establishes a relational conception of ‘country ownership’ by exploring the territorialisation of projects, rather than recourse to hierarchical conceptions of scale. Paper three theorizes legitimacy in assemblage, accounting for the strategic production of legitimacy, the role legitimacy plays and clarity about why this is sometimes elusive. Paper four emphasises desire in the national ‘just transition’ and invokes ‘net justice’ to caution against the prevailing policy-orientation that is inattentive to specific, situated injustices. This body of theory can be inaccessible, partly reflecting that it has been broadly applied with different agendas, stretching its coherence at times. This thesis explores the theoretical potential of the assemblage to advance studies of climate finance in critical human geography.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Additional Information:	© 2022 Jonathan Barnes
Library of Congress subject classification:	G Geography. Anthropology. Recreation > GE Environmental Sciences H Social Sciences > HC Economic History and Conditions H Social Sciences > HG Finance
Sets:	Departments > Geography and Environment
Supervisor:	Perkins, Richard and Mason, Michael
URI:	http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/4653

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