Who Really Governs Climate Adaptation? Finance Is Quietly Rewriting the Rules

Climate adaptation finance is usually discussed as a numbers game. Estimates suggest that developing countries need hundreds of billions of dollars each year to prepare for rising seas, intensifying storms, and worsening droughts, yet actual flows remain a small fraction of that figure. The standard prescription follows directly from this diagnosis: mobilise more money, deploy it faster, and scale it up. But a provocative new essay published in PLOS Climate argues that this fixation on funding gaps is not merely incomplete — it is analytically misleading. Laurence L. Delina of The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology contends that the real question is not how much adaptation finance exists, but who governs adaptation through finance. In his framing, money is never a neutral flow of capital; it is a system that structures authority, sets priorities, and determines which futures are considered legitimate and investable.

Delina introduces the concept of adaptation finance as a form of political infrastructure. The term is deliberately analogous to roads or power grids: just as physical infrastructure organises access and movement, financial infrastructure organises decision-making. It consists of the institutional arrangements, intermediaries, metrics, and decision rules that determine which vulnerabilities are prioritised and whose knowledge counts. Viewed this way, adaptation finance is not an external mechanism layered onto climate governance — it is a mode through which governance itself is enacted. The essay draws on concrete practices to make the case, including the Green Climate Fund’s readiness processes, creditworthiness-based urban resilience programmes, and the standardised risk metrics used in sovereign and project appraisal.

The technocratic character of mainstream adaptation finance sits at the heart of the argument. Policy debates typically revolve around bankability, cost-benefit ratios, risk pricing, and project pipelines. Vulnerability is represented through hazard maps, exposure metrics, and probabilistic models that underpin investment decisions. These tools can support structured allocation, but they also recode vulnerability into forms that are legible to financial systems. Complex, historically produced inequalities are translated into quantifiable risks, and diverse lived experiences are compressed into comparable metrics. In the process, adaptation risks being depoliticised: no longer treated as a condition rooted in social and institutional contexts, but as a set of variables to be managed within investment models.

The consequences of this recoding are far-reaching. When vulnerability is framed as a project input to be measured, priced, and mitigated, adaptation is reconfigured as a sequence of discrete interventions that can be packaged, financed, and monitored — often detached from broader questions of land tenure, labour precarity, informality, or political marginalisation. Multilateral development banks and climate funds now rely extensively on standardised climate risk-screening tools and economic appraisal frameworks. These approaches tend to privilege interventions with clearly demonstrable, quantifiable returns, such as infrastructure protection, while sidelining less measurable but socially critical forms of resilience, including strengthening informal safety nets or securing land rights. Political choices about which risks are prioritised, over what time horizons, and at whose expense are quietly displaced into the domain of financial calculation.

Delina organises the governance functions of adaptation finance into three interlocking mechanisms. First, finance sets priorities: it determines which risks are considered investable, which geographies are deemed fundable, and which adaptation pathways are recognised as credible. Risk-screening tools used by development banks, for example, often favour interventions that protect infrastructure and economic assets, while adaptation centred on livelihoods or social relations remains less visible within financial appraisal. Second, finance allocates authority, empowering banks, consultants, fund managers, and specialised city finance units while positioning local governments and community organisations as implementers rather than decision-makers. Third, finance structures accountability, dispersing responsibility across investors, implementing agencies, consultants, and oversight bodies through contracts, reporting requirements, and performance metrics — making it difficult to identify who answers when interventions fail.

Intermediaries emerge as the most consequential actors in this infrastructure. Positioned between sources of capital and sites of vulnerability, multilateral development banks, commercial banks, consultancies, project aggregators, insurers, rating agencies, and digital platforms translate climate risks into forms that can be financed, governed, and evaluated. Their function is not simply technical but constitutive of how adaptation itself is defined. To render adaptation legible to financial systems, intermediaries rely on standardisation, comparability, and risk reduction. Diverse, locally embedded vulnerabilities are reformulated into categories that can be aggregated, benchmarked, and priced. Projects are bundled into portfolios, outcomes are expressed through proxy indicators, and uncertainty is recast as measurable risk — reshaping adaptation priorities to align with financial logics and investment expectations.

Urban contexts make these dynamics especially visible. Cities are increasingly positioned as agile, creditworthy actors capable of attracting climate finance directly, yet access is often contingent on fiscal discipline, project readiness, and credit ratings. These criteria reward already-capacitated municipalities while sidelining poorer or informally governed cities. In coastal cities such as Mumbai and Dhaka, adaptation investments have focused on large-scale flood protection aligned with external financing requirements, while informal settlements facing chronic flooding often remain underserved because they resist project standardisation and revenue generation. In Nairobi and Lagos, donor-funded resilience programmes frequently rely on intermediary organisations to aggregate and manage projects, potentially diluting community control over priorities and implementation. Decision-making authority shifts from elected institutions and local communities towards financial intermediaries and external advisers.

The asymmetry is starkest in the Global South, where the disjuncture between sites of vulnerability and sites of financial authority is most pronounced. Climate impacts are concentrated across Asia, Africa, small island states, and parts of Latin America, yet the frameworks through which adaptation is financed — risk metrics, disclosure standards, creditworthiness assessments — are largely developed in financial centres of the Global North and applied across diverse contexts with uneven consequences. The growing use of sovereign climate risk assessments and credit ratings that incorporate climate exposure illustrates the point: these tools aim to make climate risks visible to investors, but they can also shape borrowing costs, influence policy choices, and incentivise governments to prioritise macroeconomic stability and investor confidence over locally grounded needs. In small island developing states such as Fiji and the Maldives, access to multilateral finance often hinges on highly standardised project proposals aligned with external fiduciary and reporting requirements, which can delay disbursement, raise transaction costs, and limit direct access for national and local actors.

Financial centres such as Hong Kong, Singapore, and London increasingly function as translation hubs, converting local climate risks into products that circulate within global capital markets. This translation can unlock new flows of finance, but it can also reinforce hierarchies of knowledge and value: forms of resilience that protect assets, supply chains, and financial stability are elevated, while those that sustain social cohesion, informal economies, or cultural practices remain marginal. The result can be a subtle but consequential decoupling of vulnerability from decision-making — communities most exposed to climate risk often have the least influence over how adaptation is financed and designed, their priorities filtered through external financial rationalities that only partially capture lived vulnerability or the claims of climate justice.

Delina is careful to note that this is not an argument against private or international finance in adaptation. Rather, it underscores that such engagement is never neutral: financial systems shape the terms on which adaptation is imagined, valued, and governed. His proposed framework treats adaptation finance as comprising three elements — financial architectures, intermediaries, and political economy — and shifts analytical attention away from aggregate funding gaps towards questions of institutional design and power. Who sets the rules governing adaptation finance? Which forms of risk are prioritised, and which marginalised? Who benefits from resilience investments, and who bears their costs? Increasing the scale of adaptation finance remains necessary, the essay concludes, but it is insufficient to ensure just or effective outcomes. Without closer attention to governance, expanding finance risks reinforcing technocratic control, marginalising local knowledge, and privileging resilience that protects capital over resilience that sustains lives and livelihoods. Recognising adaptation finance as a terrain of governance and contestation, Delina argues, opens space to imagine alternative financial architectures that are more accountable, more participatory, and more attentive to the historical and structural roots of vulnerability.

Subject of Research: The governance and political economy of climate adaptation finance

Article Title: Financing resilience, governing vulnerability: Adaptation finance as a form of political infrastructure

Article References: Delina, L. L. (2026). Financing resilience, governing vulnerability: Adaptation finance as a form of political infrastructure. PLOS Climate, 5(10), e0001090. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pclm.0001090

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pclm.0001090

Keywords: climate adaptation finance, political infrastructure, Green Climate Fund, climate governance, Global South, financial intermediaries, urban resilience, creditworthiness, climate justice, vulnerability, multilateral development banks, PLOS Climate