‘We don’t want to be colonialism 2.0’: emerging frontiers of climate finance for technology innovation

Artikel i vetenskaplig tidskrift, 2026

In this study of a venture capital intermediary investing in ‘climate technology’ startups for Africa, this intermediary’s spatial configuration of financing is framed by its employees and networks as a pivot away from configurations considered extractive and colonialist. Primarily European capital providers seek out recipients which are envisioned to be proximal to ‘local’ contexts in Africa. Downstream actors therefore position themselves as locally embedded to land capital. However this local scale is constructed as spatially elastic, such that startups can also deliver expected returns by scaling digital climate technologies across continents from hub locations. Within this spatial pivot and emerging frontier of climate finance, places within Africa are envisioned to innovate the components for a globalist future of digitalised modernity. A broader enactment of this configuration may foster transcontinental distributional benefits for African countries. This configuration nonetheless implies two possibilities: (1) that concentrating innovation in certain African ‘hub’ locations excludes actors who lack the flexibility, capital and other privileges to access these places; and (2) that possibilities of places innovating components for many futures, rather than one dominant future, are limited. In its current form, this frontier enables venture capital to expand to new geographies and sites of accumulation in the name of climate finance.