The international community, especially wealthy countries, pledged to provide 50 billion USD per year in adaptation finance to developing countries threatened by climate change. A crucial question is how to distribute the funding. In the adaptation literature, allocation criteria such as vulnerability and cost-effectiveness have been discussed to some extent. Our contribution will propose “democratic government” as a possible further criterion and discuss its (de)merits. We will offer (what may be called) intrinsic and instrumental reasons for such a criterion: first, people are entitled to have a say in matters that shape their life prospects and should thus participate in decisions on how to use adaptation finance; second, strong democratic institutions hamper corruption and the misuse of adaptation finance and enable citizens to incorporate local knowledge into the decision-making process, which is regarded as increasing the effectiveness of adaptive measures and, hence, adaptation finance. Our contribution will be structured as follows: we will start with a definition of “democratic government” and a specification of its content, lay out a pro tanto justification of the criterion, discuss how to operationalize it as well as associated problems and address important objections to and drawbacks of such a criterion.
