About the project
What the climate issue is to finance: Green finance and the turning of climate change into climate risk
Finance has in the past few years come out as an environmental agent, notably called on by the 2015 Paris agreement and large intergovernmental agents such as The European Investment Bank and The World Bank, who talk about an “investment gap”, which needs to be filled to fund the green transition. Another prominent example of the intermingling of financial and environmental concerns, is the European Green Deal, where the EU taxonomy aims to provide a guide for «green investing» by defining some things as green and others not. The financial sector has conversely answered the call and built large departments which work on sustainability issues through ESG measures and the creation of new and “green” financial products. It is here, in the intersection between the political ambition to make finance take the climate issue into account, and the financial actors new, green practices, that the notion of “climate risk” has emerged as central to how finance organizes its work on the climate issue. Through the notion of climate risk, the climate issue becomes an issue of concern to finance, understood as a risk that threatens to devalue financial assets at a large scale.
In this thesis, I investigate this “green finance movement” through theories developed in primarily fields such as valuation studies and social studies of finance, that in interrelated ways have opened “the economy” to empirical study. Through these pragmatic ways of understanding the economic, the aim if also to shed light on how things become economic, though conceptualizations, practices and devices. The economy is hence not taken to be one stable thing or something which represents the world as it is. Rather, attention is directed towards how economic practices are performative and bring about the objects they represent. The thesis looks specifically at the rendering economic of environmental concerns in the practices of finance, that is, how these issues become financialized.
More concretely, with the help of these theories, I want to ask: How has the notion of climate risk developed as an issue in finance and in climate politics and how does different actors work on it? Today, there is extensive struggle to define what the climate issue should be about, who should work on it, by which means. When more and more actors want to work on “the green” and “do good”, the project takes outset from the concern that critical attention is required to investigate how these negotiations change the political landscape and have important political and environmental consequences. Understanding this new green finance movement is part of a greater interest in understanding new economic initiatives that tries to combine economic value with other values, and a strategy of studying economic practices as culture.
Thesis supervisors
Professor Kristin Asdal (TIK - Centre for Technology, Innovation and Culture, University of Oslo)
Associate Professor Liliana Doganova (CSI - Centre de sociologie de l’innovation, École des mines, Paris)
Commentators
Associate Professor Maximilian Fochler (Department of Science and Technology Studies, University of Vienna)
Postdoctoral Fellow Bård Lahn (TIK - Centre for Technology, Innovation and Culture, University of Oslo)
About Stine Engen
Stine Engen is a PhD candidate at the TIK - Centre for Technology, Innovation and Culture at the University of Oslo. Before starting her PhD she worked for several years as a journalist and holds a Master of Arts (MA) in Philosophy from the University of Copenhagen.
The PhD is part of a research project funded by the Research Council of Norway called Value threads. The project is led by Kristin Asdal at TIK and carried out in collaboration with the CSI - Centre de sociologie de l’innovation at École des mines in Paris.
How to participate
The seminar is open to everyone, but please register by sending an email to Lara Kristiansen lbkristi@tik.uio.no by 1 December 2023.
The manuscript is available upon request. Please send the request to Lara Kristiansen lbkristi@tik.uio.no.
Welcome!