The new 'bond-age', climate crisis and the case for climate reparations: Unpicking old/new colonialities of finance for development within the SDGs

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) provide a normative framework for external financing that emphasizes stimulating investor interest to address so-called development challenges. However, their underpinnings reflecting continuities of longstanding structural divergence along racial lines when it comes to determinants of finance and uneven climate devastation are not well explored. Additionally, the current global configuration of billions to trillions of development finance remains silent on the historical responsibility and continuing coloniality that reproduce uneven and extreme consequences in climate-impacted Caribbean communities. This paper interrogates the role of the SDGs in reproducing racialized peripheries and extracting surplus value from these formerly colonized communities through the use of financial logics and innovative tools. The adoption of the SDGs at the same time of the International Decade of People of African Descent (2015-2024) appears merely coincidental. A lack of concern about climate justice and reparations for historical harms and climate-related losses is evident. This absence highlights the manner in which financial interests are privileged and mobilized in pursuit of high-yielding returns to be made from climate disaster, debt and dispossession. These contradictions usher in a new era of bond-age and coloniality that justify reparations for loss and damage facing frontline marginalised communities centred on climate justice.

Automated summary

This paper examines the role of SDGs in reproducing racial peripheries and extracting surplus value from formerly colonized communities. The adoption of SDGs coinciding with the International Decade of People of African Descent seems to be merely a coincidence, showing a lack of concern for climate justice and reparations for historical harms.