Presentation
Title of the thesis: Green finance and the turning of climate change into climate risk.
Under the supervision of Kristin Asdal (TIK-Centre for Technology, Innovation and Culture, University of Oslo, Norway) and Liliana Doganova (CSI, Mines Paris-PSL).
I’m interested in how knowledge and knowledge practices shape not just the way we think about the world, but the actual (and even material) world we live in. While arguably one of the most prominent examples of this can be found in the state bureaucracy, I’m especially interested in how knowledge shapes our society in more fragmented and cultural ways.
Currently, I’m part of the project Value threads, led by Professor Kristin Asdal, which aims to provide a better understanding of the valuation practices and technologies that underpin efforts to transform our economy into a “green”, low-emissions economy, and to combine financial return with other values. Within this frame, my project investigates actors under the umbrella of “green finance” and more particularly how these actors work on the climate issue through the notion of “climate risk”.
Finance has in the past few years come out as an environmental agent, called on by the latest COP climate conferences 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. As a central part of the European Green Deal, 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 with institutional investors and banks building large departments for investing green. Regulatory agents such as central banks have on their side included climate change into their mandates and work to manage the risk climate change is thought to pose to the stability of global financial systems – a “climate risk”.
What is this ‘new’ and ‘green’ finance sector? In what ways and by which tools does it operate? 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”, I take 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” sector 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.
Publications
Engen, S., & Asdal, K. (2024). The politics of climate risk: How the climate issue is turned into a risk issue through the little tools and operations of finance. Journal of Cultural Economy, 1–14.