Inside the Gift: The Moral Economy of Green Securitisation

Contemporary climate governance is saturated with ethical language: intergenerational justice, the rights of future generations, planetary survival. Yet when one examines the instruments through which this governance is being assembled—green bonds, sustainability-linked loans, collateral frameworks—one finds a different register of obligation. This article distinguishes ethics, the universalising horizon that legitimates green finance, from morality, the obligations encoded in the exchange-forms of loans, bonds, and repo collateral—covenants, eligibility criteria, step-ups, verification protocols. Drawing on Strathern's relational anthropology, it analyses these instruments as devices that perform successive cuts: operations that sever ecological relations from their context, exteriorise obligations into detachable rights, and eclipse the conditions of their production. Each cut—from loan to bond to asset-backed security to repo collateral—reassigns responsibility from situated relations to increasingly impersonal infrastructures of circulation. With Guyer, the article tracks the temporalities these instruments enact: how coupon calendars, taxonomy reviews, and collateral eligibility compress planetary futures into sequences of near-term obligations—overnight rolls, quarterly reviews, annual KPIs—privileging continuous liquidity over thick, extended commitments. Drawing on Karatani's theory of exchange-forms, the analysis reads this trajectory as a rearticulation of the capital–nation–state complex at planetary scale, asking whether green finance opens toward new forms of association or remains enclosed within the inherited trinity. The apocalyptic register of climate discourse—tipping points, runaway warming, the end of the world—is taken seriously through de Martino's distinction between apocalypse with and without eschaton. Green finance, the article argues, stages a controlled apocalypse without eschaton: existential threats are converted into review cycles, covenants, and term sheets, while the decisive moment of world-refoundation is continually deferred. If a climate constitution is being written, it is being written in the moral language of eligibility, seniority, and pledgeability—under the ethical sign of planetary survival.