Climate Finance and the Political Ecology of (Im)Mobility: Displacement Risks in the Low-Carbon Transition

Climate finance is indispensable to global decarbonisation, yet its distributive effects on human mobility remain under-analysed. Using a qualitative, multi-scalar design, this article links macro patterns of climate-finance flows, meso institutional frameworks, and micro evidence from two emblematic arenas—the Atacama lithium frontier in Chile and the Noor-Ouarzazate solar complex in Morocco. It demonstrates that displacement and immobility risks arise less from technical shortfalls than from financial logics that privilege capital-intensive, debt-based assets and procedural safeguards, which restructure access to water, land and labour and compress local capability sets. The central contribution is to specify the causal mechanisms connecting the financialisation of climate governance to climate-related (im)mobility, integrating political economy, political ecology, and the economics of migration. The article concludes by proposing a shift toward more grant-equivalent adaptation finance, binding benefit-sharing and livelihood-restoration schemes, and performance metrics that incorporate mobility outcomes and hydrosocial costs alongside conventional indicators.