Becoming ready, remaining disciplined? Access to climate finance and the double bind of accountability in Vanuatu

Abstract

The climate crisis is a lived reality in the Pacific. In Vanuatu, slow-onset and extreme weather events threaten coastal infrastructures, food security, and socio-cultural practices. Addressing these impacts requires substantial financial resources to address adaptation and losses and damages. Multilateral climate finance has been positioned as a mechanism of climate justice, yet access to these funds remains highly constrained. Drawing on a governmentality-informed political ethnography grounded in Pasifika scholarship and fieldwork in Vanuatu's climate finance nexus, this paper shifts analytical focus from flows of finance to its infrastructures of access. It argues that green funds – particularly the Green Climate Fund – operate as disciplinary regimes that produce parallel governance structures and donor-centred accountability relations. The paper shows what it means to become ‘ready’, yet remain disciplined in a global system that continues to equate justice with compliance. Via projectification, audit cultures and risk frameworks, green funds restructure local institutions around donor logics, often undermining locally defined priorities. Engaging Tracey Banivanua Mar's notion of imperial literacy, the paper further illuminates the epistemic labour required to navigate legibility and compliance within climate finance governance. While remaining contested in Vanuatu, these practices normalise external control and translate historically entrenched inequalities into seemingly neutral technical standards. By treating climate finance as a constitutive site where accountability, discipline and legibility are produced, the paper adds empirical depth to critical climate geographies by extending debates into the highly technical – yet deeply political – empirical and epistemic terrain of climate finance access infrastructures.