Can climate finance advance climate justice? The case of Bogota’s low-carbon bus transition

This thesis applies a climate justice lens to the delivery of climate finance in Colombia’s capital city, through a study of two, much feted, mitigation projects that supported the low-carbon transition of Bogota’s bus-based public transport system: the first transport project to be registered under the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) – the TransMilenio Bus Rapid Transit CDM project (2006-2019); and a World Bank Clean Technology Fund (CTF) project (2014-2018) that sought to introduce hybrid and electric vehicles into Bogota’s bus fleet. Each case is analysed through a climate justice lens - examining justice as recognition, procedure and distribution – highlighting where they succeed, and where they fall short, in advancing climate justice in Bogota. The study deploys a mix of quantitative and qualitative data. A mapping of climate finance resources at the national level employs data from the global CDM pipeline and Colombia’s climate finance Monitoring Reporting and Verification (MRV) system. Case study research was conducted over eight months of fieldwork in Colombia; involving participant observation at field sites, review of hundreds of secondary documents, analysis of greenhouse gas and local emissions data and 72 interviews with climate policy makers, practitioners and project beneficiaries. The study contributes to Foucauldian inspired literature on global climate change governance, and scholarship on Urban Political Ecology and Environmental Justice, by grounding concepts of neoliberal climate governmentality at the city scale. The study explores how neoliberal principles, rationalities and technologies of governance of international climate finance modalities are mediated by the complex and contested reality of Colombia’s capital city. This research unravels the oversimplified success narratives that persist around these transport projects, exposing the political and social struggles and embedded structures of urban inequality with which they contend - and in some cases exacerbate – in the stalled low-carbon transition of Bogota’s bus fleet.