“Scale and access to the Green climate Fund: Big challenges for small island developing States”

Small island developing States (SIDS) are among the first and the most severely impacted by climate change and thus have been designated as a priority for adaptation finance. But despite their urgent need and prima facie case for climate justice, SIDS have been proportionally less successful than other vulnerable country groups in accessing climate funding via the Green Climate Fund (GCF). This research extends existing studies that seek to understand the SIDS-specific challenges to accessing international public climate finance by developing a new explanation based on data collected via a multi-methods research design which draws on interviews with SIDS negotiators and officials, surveys, and roundtables, as well as content analysis of GCF and UNFCCC documents. Drawing on ideas about the social construction of scale and the emerging literature on the financialization of international development funding, we argue that SIDS’ limited access to climate funding from the GCF is the consequence of assumptions in development models of the benefits of largeness, with largeness equated with value for money. The perceived advantages of large-scale programs compound the injustice of climate change for SIDS, whose communities have contributed little to the problem yet struggle to gain access to meaningful levels of assistance. Improving access to climate finance for SIDS will require changes to the systems of access and this cannot happen unless ideas about the costs and benefits of different scales are disrupted.