The Ministry of Future Production: How Green Finance Plans Our Future

Green finance has been heralded as “the” solution to the double crises of the environment and capitalism. By embedding environmental policies into the financialization of capitalism, green finance promises to tackle the problem of climate change while guaranteeing future returns. In this article, we challenge the narrative that portrays green finance as market-driven and advance the claim it is instead constituted by forecasting climate-cum-financial models and scenarios that substantially resemble forms of economic planning. Through different case studies that explore the making of sustainability-linked bonds within the International Capital Market Association (ICMA), the way central banks perform climate stress tests, and how asset managers compose their green portfolio, we show how the green finance apparatus heavily leverages big data and algorithmic calculations that are produced outside of the market. We point out the inherent ontological contradictions of these developments but also hint at their potential. Namely, while green finance figures as a financially led, undemocratic form of economic planning, it does employ powerful tools that cannot be left to the wills and whims of the financial elite. And, if finance gives up its neoliberal market addiction by embracing planning techniques, then we should give up our anguished inability to imagine alternative political dimensions and explore economic planning that can be—and, in fact, is—a reality.