(Re)Pairing With Water: Climate Finance and the Prefigurative Positions of an Ocean Counter‐Politics

ABSTRACT This paper takes up recent calls to work ‘for and against climate capitalism’ to foreground the possibility of strategic engagements within capitalist structures that could destabilise its long‐standing exploitative dynamics. In doing so, it locates prefigurative positions of an ocean counter‐politics generated through novel blue financial instruments; positions that are, perhaps, able to orient us towards different political paradigms beyond prescribed modes of capitalist development. Based on extended ethnography in the Republic of Seychelles—an archipelagic country that has pioneered two ‘world‐first’ climate finance deals in the last decade—I track how the operationalisations of these instruments have allowed for the formation of political spaces and subjectivities with, for, or against the country's ocean territory. Ultimately, I suggest we must hold the tension between climate capitalism expanding into a last oceanic frontier and the alternate futures that are simultaneously animating the current climate finance conjuncture.