Justice serves as a foundational principle in this study, which critically examines the equitable distribution of climate finance to developing nations, ensuring they possess the necessary resources to address the impacts of climate change while fostering sustainable development within the context of the commons. Developing countries with high vulnerability, in particular, are disproportionately affected by climate change and face significant challenges in adapting to its effects. International climate finance is crucial for these countries to align their growth trajectories with the global goal of limiting warming to 1.5°C and to enhance their resilience to climate risks. This research examines how international climate finance can support climate-resilient development, focusing on its impact on key social indicators such as poverty alleviation, health outcomes, clean water and fuels, gender equality, and energy justice.
Using data from Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) in 48 recipient countries, the study analyzes how climate finance intersects with the framework of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), evaluating its role in improving livelihoods while promoting environmental justice within developing nations. It also assesses the variations in the effectiveness of climate finance pre- and post-Paris Agreement, providing insights into how this global framework has shaped the flow and impact of financial resources. By emphasizing environmental justice, the study highlights the need for fair and equitable access to climate finance, ensuring that vulnerable populations in developing countries can meet their development and climate objectives without being left behind. Ultimately, the research aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of how climate finance can drive a just, climate-resilient future for the world’s most vulnerable regions.
In Amsterdam, commons initiatives are generating significant social, ecological, and economic value by addressing essential needs that markets and the state often fail to meet effectively. These endeavours, from community gardens to shared childcare and public space management, prioritize community well-being over profit while at the same time avoiding bureaucratic complexities. As commons gain momentum, offering localized solutions to pressing needs, the City of Amsterdam explored ways to support this movement. As commons face a major funding gap, as traditional finance structures are misaligned with their principles of collaborative governance, ecological care, and long-term communal benefit.
This presentation introduces relationalized finance, a new funding model developed by the Schumacher Center for New Economics and proposed by AmsterDOEN, the City of Amsterdam's action program for commons. This model emphasizes transvestment. An important concept in supporting this alternative theory of value – “living systems as generative” – is transvestment. This term refers to the deliberate transfer of money from conventional capitalist circuits of wealth-creation into commons-based circuits of value having a different character. Unlike conventional financial arrangements, which prioritize investor returns, relationalized finance functions as a social partnership or covenant, rooted in an ongoing commitment to supporting the diverse, often unmarketable value that commons produce.
Through transvestment, relationalized finance addresses the unique needs of commons by facilitating long-term stewardship, community cohesion, and mutual aid. It fosters investments that enable commons to operate autonomously, with a focus on creating sustainable, human-centered networks of care and responsibility. This model is not charity or “do-gooding” but a strategic investment in resilience and ecological health, offering an alternative to the extractive nature of traditional markets and bypassing the rigidities of state-driven support.
Relationalized finance and transvestment together provide a framework for redirecting resources into initiatives that regenerate community life, creating a financial ecosystem that values the commons' holistic contributions over immediate profit. This presentation will explore how this innovative approach, as envisioned by the Schumacher Center and championed by AmsterDOEN, can empower Amsterdam’s commons movement, strengthen their role as agents of positive social change, and serve as a replicable model for cities seeking to foster resilien
Africa, despite contributing less than 3 percent of global energy-related CO2 emissions experiences disproportionately severe impacts from climate change, worsened by its rapid urbanization and socio-economic vulnerabilities. Whereas, formal governance mechanisms often face difficulties in addressing the hurdles effectively, informal governance structures, including community-led initiatives, grassroots networks and local leaders present complementary approach to addressing the challenges and enhancing climate resilience. This qualitative systematic review will explore how informal governance can be leveraged to strengthen urban resilience against climate change impacts. Using examples from various African cities, the study will highlight cases where informal governance has enabled community-led initiatives and adaptive capacity, demonstrating informal systems’ provision for inclusivity, flexibility and the use of local knowledge, which are central to tailored interventions and climate adaptation. However, integrating informal governance with formal structures requires creative policy frameworks and governance models that are inclusive. This evaluation will stress empowering local communities and valuing local and indigenous knowledge to improve formal-informal collaboration. African cities may improve climate resilience and urban growth by rethinking governing structures and becoming more inclusive
Why should there ever be a shortage of money for solving urgent social and ecological problems? Today, proven solutions to many crises are not being deployed due to a lack of funding. It would make sense if solutions were going undeployed due to a lack of materials, or labor, or technical know-how. But that is not the situation we face. Around the world, money scarcity leaves massive numbers of people unemployed even when the material and know-how exist to support them in providing much-needed social and ecological care work. In such situations, why can we not create more money, more numbers, to unlock the underutilized capacity to solve problems? After all money is just numbers, something we cannot run out of.
This paper argues for an even more powerful line of questioning, one conceivable only within a systems-level analysis of national money supplies and their governance. Current governance processes differ radically from the conception held by 85% of people, according to extensive survey research. Therefore, the paper begins by illuminating the current governance of national money supplies and the ways it violates every one of Ostrom’s eight design principles.
In the second section, the paper shows there are alternative wellbeing-promoting money supply governance processes that better align with Ostom’s principles. These alternatives are proven to work well at local and national scales. If implemented in a country like the United States, they would channel trillions of dollars in funding into solutions to social and ecological problems. Such a change is not wishful thinking. The United State employed many of these alternative money supply governance mechanisms to fund New Deal programs, WWII mobilization, and massive public investment postwar. Germany still uses many of those same mechanisms today, which is a key to its remarkable economic strength.
Currently, these governance choices are made without substantial stakeholder engagement. Empirical evidence shows that among stakeholders there is not universal agreement about which governance design is best. However, there is near universal agreement (86%) that the governance system in place today in most countries is undesirable.
In all, the paper invites and prepares commons researchers to join a growing community of thinkers in law, economics, political science, and banking that are calling into question the current governance of national money supplies and putting forward proposals for change.
There is little doubt that the present generation of scholars engaged with climate adjacent research doubt that academic research or the university in general can be sustained into the near future. Even if this realization is not felt affectively at a visceral level, we know, at least conceptually, that there is “no research on a dead planet.” The largely unprecedented ecology of climate change is continually undermined by the relentless demand for precedented concepts, methodologies, peer – or rather, power – reviews, disabling us to apprehend, to feel, what our own research tells us. In this presentation, with sentipensar as an intuitive-conceptual framework, we would share our ongoing work of an emotional cartography with researchers in/as our shared community of practice to feel(think) in common with the ecological commons.
The concept of credible commitments lies at the core of collective action studies and relates to the challenge of maintaining adherence to agreements over time and space. From a legal-institutional perspective, this issue raises the need for safeguards—or commitment devices—against non-compliance in international agreements, such as those addressing climate change and the formulation of Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) under the Paris Agreement.
NDCs represent each country’s self-determined efforts to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to climate change, in accordance with the procedural obligations outlined in Article 4(2) of the Paris Agreement, including principles of maximum possible ambition and progression in formulating climate goals. This paper aims to explore the administrative procedures involved in the formulation of European Union NDCs, the implementation decisions that shape their content, and the ex ante procedural safeguards (commitment devices) incorporated into these processes.
To achieve this objective, the paper is divided into three sections. The first section reviews the literature on sources of non-compliance with international environmental agreements, including opportunistic behavior, ambiguity or indeterminacy in language, institutional incapacity, and temporal challenges related to social, economic, and political factors. The second section analyzes the European Union’s procedures for formulating NDCs, focusing on the commitment devices designed to ensure ambition and progression in climate goals during the NDC update cycles. The third section evaluates whether the identified commitment devices address the sources of non-compliance discussed in the literature.
In conclusion, the paper highlights the contributions of the European Union’s climate governance framework, particularly how procedural safeguards create lock-in effects that promote ambitious and progressive climate goals over the long term.
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