Städte des Globalen Südens im Fokus von Klima- und Entwicklungsfinanz: Reregulierung, Disziplinierung und Depolitisierung

This paper examines how shifts in climate and development finance and related global action agendas become manifest at the urban scale. In recent years, the increasing focus of financial markets on environmentally sustainable projects has gone hand in hand with their heightened engagement in global development strategies. These entangled shifts have widened the scope of financial market activity, in terms of economic sectors but also geographically, particularly as global climate and development policies are increasingly targeting cities in so called "emerging markets". Parts of economic geography (Bracking 2015a; Ouma/Johnson/Bigger 2018), development studies (Mader 2017; Mawdsley 2018), and environmental studies (Asiyanbi 2017; Bigger 2018) have critically discussed the related organizational, discursive, and regulatory shifts. Yet these literatures have only paid marginal attention to their urban dimension. Concomitantly, urban research has not sufficiently reflected the new relevance of Southern cities as actors, objects, and sites of intervention for climate and development agendas, which build on the deepening and expansion of global capital flows. Our aim in this paper is to trace relevant dynamics in climate and development finance and to analyse their effects on cities and urban development. Theoretically, this paper builds on political economy and political ecology perspectives to show how the increasing entanglement of climate and development finance on the terrain of the city advances processes of reregulation, disciplining, and depoliticisation. Our conclusion proposes an agenda for future research.