Expert Battles in Financing the Green Transition

Finance has increasingly been positioned as a solution to the looming threat of the climate crisis.In recent decades, green finance has evolved from niches of socially responsible investments tocenter stage of financial and climate governance. At the same time, green finance has expandedinto a trillion-dollar industry. Yet, while both experts and organizations have exhibited increasedrecognition of climate change as a financial risk, we are still grappling with the failure of climatechange mitigation. This dissertation takes its point of departure in this puzzling tension and asksthe following question: How do experts and organizations enable or constrain green finance?Contributing to the interdisciplinary scholarship on green finance, this dissertation foregroundshow actors and objects interact and what the distributional consequences are in the creation,maintenance, and contestation of green finance. Speaking to the interdisciplinary literature ongreen finance governance, I draw on International Political Economy and Science and TechnologyStudies to approach green finance as an evolving financial infrastructure where actors competefor authority over what counts as green. This is theorized and investigated empirically across fourresearch papers, drawing on cases ranging from EU sustainable finance to accounting standards,the classification of stranded assets, and contestations around ESG. Taken together, the empiricalcases illustrate how experts and organizations cooperate and contend, either to obstruct or supportgreen finance.As such, this dissertation makes three main contributions to the field of green finance andinternational political economy. First, I develop an interdisciplinary theoretical approach linkingactors to objects and infrastructural power. Second, I offer novel empirical insights that advanceknowledge about the evolving nature of green finance. Third, this dissertation contributes toadvancing a mixed-methods approach, which integrates computational social science methodswith qualitative analysis to trace interactions – contestation and cooperation – across actors andobjects. Taken together, these contributions help illustrate how experts and organizations enableor hinder green finance by battling it out over the objects and definitions that contribute to themaintenance, creation, or contestation of green financial infrastructure.