ABSTRACT This article employs a political settlements approach to explore the formal and informal institutional dynamics that underpin contemporary rentier capitalism in urban Africa through the case of Antananarivo, Madagascar. It examines how Malagasy ruling elites created opportunities for land‐based rent seeking by establishing new institutional arrangements. Specifically, it traces the rise and decline during the 2010s of detailed urban planning, a planning instrument elaborated through public–private partnerships between the Malagasy state and large‐scale corporate landowners in Antananarivo. The article argues that public–private partnerships in detailed urban planning served as a strategy for ruling elites to give an appearance of legality to the informal practices that drive land‐use changes and real estate construction in the city. This strategy effectively facilitated land investments and created rent opportunities while allowing ruling elites to act with reference to the law, which was crucial to their political survival given the risks of an overt violation of formal rules under Madagascar's competitive and unstable authoritarianism. Yet detailed urban plans were sidelined when they no longer aligned with presidential priorities. By bridging debates on rentier capitalism and political settlements in urban geography, the article offers a lens for analysing the fine‐grained institutional dynamics through which rentier logics play out across contexts.

ABSTRACT There is a growing tendency to argue that the capitalist mode of production is fundamentally incompatible with climate stability and that ‘system change’ is needed to prevent apocalyptic ‘climate change’. This position overstates capitalism's dependence on fossil fuels. Rather than fossil fuels per se, capitalism requires abundant, secure and predictable energy sources. Furthermore, capitalism cannot postpone the stabilization of the earth's climate indefinitely, as doing so threatens core systemic imperatives: the generation and accumulation of profits and reproduction of capitalism across space and time. The growth in renewable energy generation could bring about a transition from ‘fossil capitalism’ to ‘renewables capitalism’. While this could potentially eliminate the ecological risks of climate change, it would most likely exacerbate existing socio‐economic inequalities and environmental injustices associated with increased extraction and consumption of natural resources. The role of counter‐hegemonic movements remains crucial for the creation of a democratic and equitable system of production and distribution.

ABSTRACT This contribution uses a discussion of the global climate finance architecture to put forward and illustrate a conceptualization of the financialization of and by international organizations. It highlights four channels through which the phenomenon operates: (1) the adoption of financial logics; (2) the advancement of financial innovation; (3) the embracing of financial accumulation; and (4) the direct financialization of member states’ policies and citizens’ lives. As consequence, four main types of financialization can be identified that are promoted within and by international organizations: within intergovernmental fora, these are the financialization of policy narratives, meaning the redefinition of policy challenges as questions of financial investment, and of standards; while international organizations, in their function as governing and administrative bodies, can drive financialization by turning public goods into the basis for financial assets, and through the direct representation of financial interests.

ABSTRACTTransnational ‘helping’ today relies upon partnerships with private companies as enshrined in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, creating Faustian bargains of neoliberalism. However, a knowledge gap remains over how state institutional structures produce these neoliberal solutions. This article explores the case of Italy, an under‐researched development actor, to analyse the interactions between its development institutions and their politics to better understand the role of for‐profit actors in transnational helping. As in other donor countries, there has been a weakening of public trust in the traditional aid sector of Italian non‐profits, combined with recent decreases in national funding for assistance abroad. The article is based on review of state, NGO and private sector documents, including laws and policies, as well as participant observation and review of academic literature in Italian and English. Using an historical institutional approach, the author demonstrates how Italian helping has been characterized by a strategic co‐mingling of public and private aid, development and humanitarian aid, and of helping abroad and within Italy. In a changing institutional context for Italian NGOs characterized by reduced public solidarity, negative discursive framing and the need to diversify fund‐raising channels, Italian businesses are being sought out for partnerships between for‐profit and non‐profit actors.

ABSTRACTThis article examines how and why water privatization has been in place for nearly three decades in Mozambique, expanding from cities to towns despite a lack of conclusive evidence of its merits. Drawing on primary data and secondary sources, the article argues that powerful actors driving water privatization in Mozambique ‘produced success’ out of what has been a messy and problematic process of implementing water privatization in cities in the 2000s. This strategy is cultural, in that actors constructed and mobilized a success narrative to legitimize the retention of water privatization in cities and to widen its spatial scope to towns. Yet, because water privatization in cities was not actually successful — quite the contrary — the retention and expansion of water privatization necessarily relied on a political economic process that buttressed this cultural production of success. That is, proponents expended power and resources in critical decision‐making moments to ensure water privatization and its underlying neoliberal water imaginary would be sustained, at the expense of alternative (post‐neoliberal) modes of water supply. As such, this article concludes that water privatization in Mozambique represents an exemplary case of neoliberal resilience.

ABSTRACTThe push for reparations for Africans and people of African descent extends back generations, yet has gained substantial momentum since 2020 — a global inflection point that exemplified the polycrises facing the planet, including the global COVID‐19 pandemic, worldwide uprisings against state and police violence in response to the murder of George Floyd in the United States, stark income inequality, and multiple natural disasters. Against this backdrop, reparations advocacy became more visible and gained traction. This article explores the enabling factors that have contributed to this heightened visibility and the dynamics that have created a more global reparations agenda. It also provides a roadmap with emergent areas of caution and guidance for reparations advocates as they advance the work.