Climate justice through climate finance? Australia’s approach to climate finance in the Pacific

Pacific Island actors have long called for climate justice in the international climate regime, particularly in the form of financial support. While climate finance can be conceptualised as a mechanism of climate justice, the extent to which climate finance does indeed contribute to climate justice is contested. We explore these contestations by looking at Australia’s development programme in the Pacific between 2010 and 2019, examining both policy documents and climate finance flows. This analysis is conducted through a climate justice lens that we conceptualise as consisting of three dimensions: adequacy, additionality, and predictability; balance between adaptation and mitigation and priority provision of adaptation finance to vulnerable recipients; and donor coordination. Our analysis shows that Australian public climate finance has not acted as a mechanism of climate justice according to our criteria in the period studied, even if does meet some criteria of climate justice. From a justice perspective, Australia has approached climate change inconsistently and at times incoherently across its development program in Pacific Island countries. These results provide important lessons for Australia’s approach going forward, under a new government and a new development policy framework.