The growth of climate finance, a field of investment focused on funding climate change adaptation and mitigation projects, both legitimizes and transforms financial flows. Green bonds, a financial product within climate finance, redirect investments from institutional investors into low‐carbon infrastructure through the global bond market. These projects include clean energy, water infrastructure, public transportation, and sustainable forest management. The green bond market expands the scope of finance through the commoditization of the environment, as nature enters into financial markets as the added value of green bonds. In interpreting the environmental and economic value of forests, greener building methods, and public transportation, climate finance practitioners translate environmental, climate, and engineering expertise into the language of finance through the use of the term risk. However, these translations into risk require further risk management, promoting the production of green bond market devices such as standards and market indices. The ambiguity of risk supports these translations, creating a credible form of change within finance that legitimizes the development of the green bond market. This use of risk complicates its meaning and thus requires further examination beyond research already done in the social sciences on societal and individual dimensions of risk.

With the use of financial technologies to address social and environmental problems, the global finance industry now has a new proclaimed moral aim. While impact and sustainable and climate finance are promising new frontiers for the management of social and environmental public concerns, a closer scrutiny reveals a more complex picture than the industry’s surface narratives. Here, new forms of finance extraction legitimize the reproduction of old power hierarchies. We explore the historical trajectory of financial moralities, situating these within the history of capitalism. This special section explores the articulation of a growing sustainability–finance nexus across intersecting institutional, political, and cultural contexts. The contributions included document ethnographically how emergent preoccupations about concrete environmental and social outcomes generate new kinds of financial products, transactions, and financial subjectivities.

Climate finance has grown rapidly. What does this mean for people who construct careers in finance that leverage expertise to frame sustainability and climate change as investment decisions? What do their identities mean for the markets they create? This article examines how the careers of climate finance professionals impact them both as professionals and as people. I examine what climate action and impact mean in their decision-making. I find that practitioners interpret their careers around pivotal decisions that brought them into climate finance. This moralistic decision-making embedded in practitioner biographies highlights the effect of a particular ethical field in climate finance. In producing climate finance instruments through performative and data work, people transform into climate finance professionals.

No abstract

No abstract