Precarious agency, evolving conditionality, equity and the financialization of vulnerability in Zimbabwe’s nationally determined contributions

Under the polycentric architecture of the Paris Agreement, climate-vulnerable countries face a double bind in which they must craft sophisticated climate pledges (NDCs) to secure finance while maintaining domestic ownership over the implementation process. This paper interrogates how this tension manifests in and is shaped by official climate discourse. Employing a longitudinal critical discourse analysis, specifically the Discourse-Historical Approach, the paper analyses Zimbabwe’s three NDC iterations (2015, 2021, 2025) alongside key policy documents. It traces the strategic evolution of narratives around conditionality, equity, and vulnerability. The findings demonstrate a marked discursive pivot from principled, legalistic claims toward financialized, technocratic, and securitized justifications. While this reflects a masterful adaptation to the ‘grammar’ of global climate governance; the paper argues that it simultaneously constructs a state of precarious agency, a form of performative competence in external negotiation that is structurally contingent on external validation, thereby risking erosion of domestic ownership and externalizing accountability. The paper, therefore, theorizes precarious agency as a core paradox of post-Paris climate politics for the Global South, and it reveals the financialization of vulnerability as a key discursive mechanism through which climate justice claims are translated into transactional demands within an asymmetrical regime. It concludes that effective climate statecraft requires vulnerable states to complement external-facing financial narratives with domestic stories of climate action as sovereign development, as well as transforming conditional dependence into augmented self-reliance.