Performing climate-aligned finance: the displacement of the climate crisis | Mattias Täger

Mattias Täger is an economic sociologist with the Centre for Economic Transition Expertise (CETEx).
Mattias will present the paper: Performing climate-aligned finance: the displacement of the climate crisis.

Abstract

Financial institutions are increasingly interested in whether investee companies’ plans and activities are in line with aspirations of mitigating climate change. To answer this question, finance has developed tools to measure such climate alignment by imagining corporate climate futures and comparing them to desired future climate scenarios. Based on ethnographic and interview data, this paper traces the development of such a tool – the Implied Temperature Rise (ITR) tool – which produces temperature scores describing whether a company or investment portfolio is aligned with, e.g., a 1.5°C or a 3.2°C future. Drawing on Butler’s concept of performance as citational practice, we argue that the development of an ITR tool can best be understood as a self-referential performance in which finance aims to credibly demonstrate to itself that it can measure and indeed reach a state of climate alignment. We thus contribute to a growing STS literature on futures and their contestations in two ways: First, we show that in the contestation of the future, alternative (climate) futures are not necessarily being actively silenced by dominant industry interests but rather passively displaced due to finance’s lack of appropriate identity repertoires to draw on when performing climate alignment measurement. Second, by understanding climate alignment measurement as citational performance, we stress the role of the audience to how appeal of certain futures is manufactured by referencing the audience’s identity. We thus find alignment measurement to be an act of financial self-reproduction rather than of strategic deception.

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