Literature on global environmental governance (GEG) is vast and crosses multiple disciplines, but relatively less of it directly focuses on climate finance suggesting that the subject is quite nascent and is in the early stages of rapid expansion. Despite being in its early stages from a literature perspective, climate finance has a critical role to play in enabling a transition to a low-carbon, climate-resilient economy. Climate finance refers to local, national, or transnational financing—drawn from public, private and alternative sources of financing the management of climate change. This paper explores the political economy of contemporary climate finance and its continental effects on Africa. Contributions are made to the broader policy and structural development concerns that regional and continental frameworks seek to address in the climate finance space. This paper is based on an extensive review of literature supported by components of qualitative primary data. Results show that the major climate finance instruments have been shown to include grants, climate debt swaps and green debt instruments such as green bonds. Grants are more accessible to African countries in comparison to green debt and the —grants— to go towards adaptation projects which by far receives a smaller share of global green finances. Decision-making in climate finance has been shown to be multifaceted and drawing players from the public, private and civil society space. The state coalitions hold the project planning power while the private sector coalitions hold the post project implementation power and civil society adjudicates both planning and implementation but from a much lower platform due to limited technical and financial muscle. The dominant narrative in climate finance is that Africa is a grant recipient focused on resilience building and other adaptation inclined climate change management activities. Debt has also been shown to be a major challenge in the climate finance debate from an African perspective. Green debt is thought to come at expensive prices to Africa and it Is expected that continuous climate disasters will continue to exacerbate the African debt crisis
