Rising Powers, NGOs and North–South Relations in Global Climate Governance: The Case of Climate Finance

Climate finance is defined as all financial transitions to cope with the mitigation and adaptation of climate change additional to official development aid. This is, arguably, at the core to breaking the deadlock in international climate change negotiations within the framework of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. This deadlock is characterized by multiple overlapping conflict lines, by increasingly diffuse actor groups and coalitions and the often stifling overarching ethical debate on climate justice and what is constructed as common but ‘differentiated responsibilities’. In this article, we look at climate finance as a site of power struggles and identify key actor groups and the types of conflicts that they engage in. Our findings are transferrable to the analysis of the international climate regime and, potentially, other fields of global governance in an area of complex multilateralism.