Climate Finance for Renewable Energy Development in Fiji: Recognising Alternatives Amidst Troubling Solutions

Abstract

This thesis explores the lived experiences of climate finance in Fiji. Fiji, alongside its Pacific neighbours, is contending with the escalating impacts of climate change and climate finance has emerged as a global response to this crisis. Despite the ongoing promises of climate finance being a 'game changer' for climate affected geographies, its material and epistemic effects in recipient communities have remained unclear. As such the driving question of this thesis is what is climate finance, as a lived, experienced resource in Fiji? As this thesis will demonstrate, climate finance is not just comprised of the actual, hard-won financial disbursements, but also regulation, governance, technologies and even more foundationally, epistemologies.

Fiji is both an international hub of climate finance activity, and due to the climate vulnerability of its communities, is also a key recipient of climate finance. Despite this, Fiji, the Pacific, and the Global South more broadly, have been underrepresented in the climate finance literature, resulting in very little being known about how climate finance is actually materialising and the impact that this has on those at climate change's coalface. In response, the thesis grounds itself in ethnographic work carried out in Fiji between 2018-2022. The thesis, drawing on 79 interviews and participant observation, facilitates a better understanding of how climate is experienced on the ground. It recentres climate finance's so-called objects: its recipients, the communities that are inheriting the unequal effects of a global crisis, as well as the contested financial 'solutions.'

The interdisciplinary thesis by publication aims to reach various research audiences concerned with climate finance. Accordingly, the thesis is interdisciplinary; its papers draw from Science and Technology Studies (STS), Regulation and Governance, Energy Studies, and Data Studies Pacific Studies. In particular, it draws the important STS traditions of postcolonial and feminist analysis into these other fields, highlighting the important of embracing epistemic diversity as well as situated explorations of power and marginalisation.

The analytical process of the thesis is guided by postcolonial analysis of climate finance's technologies, regulation and governance. In doing so, the thesis deconstructs dominant knoweldges and approaches that make up climate finance as well as making visible their consequences. Through the lens of barriers between climate finance and Fiji, the thesis highlights how the inflexible modalities of climate finance struggle to flow through the landscapes presented by Fiji, the Pacific and much of the Global South. The thesis troubles various levels of solutions that climate finance purports to offer, from the promises of its discourse, its regulatory solutions, and in its emergent data projects. In unpacking these solutions, we see that rather than offering help, these solutions may usher-in unequal relations, cement various axis of marginalisation, further racial schema, and mask profound contestations around technologies, futures, and agency.

One goal of deconstructing climate finance is to facilitate space for reconstruction. In recognition of the ongoing need for resources in climate affected areas such as in Fiji, the thesis moves beyond critique of climate finance, to considering both material and epistemic alternatives. In its final Part the thesis, guided by Pacific epistemologies, explores latent governance alternatives which are already leading towards better climate-aligned outcomes in Fiji. Further, using postcolonial and feminist STS to trouble some of climates finance's disappointing technologies, the thesis recognises how Fijian communities are stretching, reworking, and fixing these 'solutions' in a daily practice of future making. Finally, centring these manifestations of agency in Fiji, the thesis argues that climate finance can and must be remade.