Assembling Green Bonds: Data, Narrative, Time, Work, and People in Climate Finance

A Dissertation

Presented to

The Faculty of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Brandeis University

Department of Anthropology Elizabeth Emma Ferry, PhD, Chair

In Partial Fulfillment Of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Aneil Tripathy February 2021

This dissertation, directed and approved by Aneil Tripathy’s Committee, has been accepted and approved by the Faculty of Brandeis University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of:

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Eric Chasalow, Dean Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

Dissertation Committee:

Elizabeth Emma Ferry, Department of Anthropology Jonathan Shapiro Anjaria, Department of Anthropology Caitlin Zaloom, Department of Anthropology, New York University

Acknowledgements

First and foremost, I would like to thank my committee for guiding me through the dissertation writing process and supporting this defense. Elizabeth Ferry has been a thought provoking and contemplative guide through the entirety of my PhD, and I would not be where I am today without her. I look forward to continuing to work together from across the pond! Jonathan Anjaria has supported my attempts to simultaneously practice academic, engaged, and applied anthropology. Caitlin Zaloom’s work has been an inspiration for my own and I am very grateful that she agreed to join my committee. Many thanks as well to Colleen Morich and Katherine Waters for meticulous copyediting. This dissertation is the culmination of over 10 years of study at Brandeis University. When I started at Brandeis as a freshman in September 2008, I could not have guessed that 12 years later I would be leaving the university with a PhD in anthropology! Luckily, during my freshman year I found myself in two required writing and critical thinking courses that were both taught by anthropologists. One of these anthropologists, Rick Parmentier, became my first mentor in anthropology. In the Brandeis anthropology department, I have learned so much from conversations and mentorship from so many outstanding anthropologists: Dave Jacobson, Charles Golden, Javier Urcid, Ellen Schattschneider, Sarah Lamb, Patricia Alvarez and Janet McIntosh. My gratitude to Pascal Menoret for teaching me how to swim and the importance of râleurs. Many thanks as well to Laurel Carpenter for her administrative support and advice over so many years and to Laura Woolf. I would also like to thank all the graduate students that have guided me through my own graduate school journey over the last seven years. Adam Gamwell and Ryan Collins for our early This Anthro Life days and energized conversations. Mrinalini Tanhka, for getting me to think about economic anthropology and the possibilities of working and collaborating with researchers and practitioners outside of anthropology. Jara Connell, Hui Wen, and Amy Hanes for our writing sessions. Daniel Souleles, Canay Özden-Schilling, Mengqi Wang for our anthropology of finance reading group all the way back in 2016. A special thanks to Daniel for energizing and thoughtful

collaborative projects, they make me excited to be starting an academic career. I would like to thank Marc Brightman, Giulia Dal Maso, Alessandro Maresca, Claudia Campisano, Chelsie Yount- André and the entire Hau of Finance research team at the University of Bologna that I formally joined this October as an assegnista di ricerca. Our group calls and conversations supported my writing in its final phases. I am excited to continue my research on climate finance with a focus on blue bonds and the blue economy, in collaboration with such a great team of anthropologists. I am a firm believer in crossing disciplinary boundaries, and I have been very lucky at Brandeis to be able to develop fruitful range of mentors and colleagues across disciplines and fields of expertise. My gratitude to Ed Bayone, Phil Wight, Caroline Harrison, Katie House, Candace Partridge-Sykes, Elena Vanz, Sabine von Mering, Daniel Bergstresser, Eric Olson, Lionel Mok, Vivekanand Vimal, Anne Sweetser, Grégoire Lunven de Chanrond and countless others. This dissertation would also not have been possible had not so many climate finance practitioners taken their time to chat with me across a multitude of settings at work, over drinks at pubs, and while kayaking or rock climbing. I am tremendously grateful that David Wood told me about green bonds in a side conversation at a party. Sean Kidney has been both a guide through green bonds and a life mentor. I am very grateful that Sean agreed to give me full ability to use my experience working at Climate Bonds for my research so many years ago. My fieldwork in London and New York City would have been much more difficult had it not been for support and housing from very close friends. Michael Best and Jane Humphries let me frequently escape from London to their home in Oxford and our conversations and their thoughts rejuvenated my research. Whenever I am in New York City I am always at home in the Miller-Steinberg clan’s apartment, and Sari Miller showed me the world of impact investing through our conversations and her always insightful advice. I would not have been able to finish this dissertation without the support of Hilary Brooks King. Her love and ability to challenge me to sharpen my argument and points and support as I drafted my chapters during May days in 2020 got this dissertation done. My deepest gratitude to my immediate family: Susan Tripathy, who taught me how to be an anthropologist, Sheila Tripathy, who holds me to task for making unscientific blanket statements, and Keiyana Odom, for our shared home improvement projects that gave me breaks from computer screens. I am v

forever indebted to my father Sukant Kishore Tripathy, who drowned in the ocean twenty years ago dreaming of and working towards affordable solar power for more equitable and cleaner electricity.

I dedicate this dissertation to my friends, family, colleagues, and all of my teachers.

“…put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn’t in the middle of the room. Life isn’t a support-system for art. It’s the other way around” (King 2000: 101)

On Writing by Stephen King

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ABSTRACT

Assembling Green Bonds: Data, Narrative, Time, Work, and People in Climate Finance

A dissertation presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Brandeis University Waltham, Massachusetts

By Aneil Tripathy

Financial markets occupy a privileged place in the global economy and wield a large and growing influence on public policy and collective decision-making. The developing finance subfields of climate and sustainable finance situate financial markets as both the principal problem and solution to the climate crisis and environmental degradation. The financial industry continues to fund fossil fuels, resource extraction, and social inequalities that produce and exacerbate current environmental, social, and climate crises. In this dissertation, I explore the tension created as climate finance practitioners distinguish the green bond market and climate finance from mainstream finance, while simultaneously attempting to shift mainstream finance towards sustainable investment. I analyze the work and activity through which climate finance and the green bond market have come to exist. This work produces green bonds and the green bond market through its components of data, market narrative, time, work, and climate finance people. Anthropologists of finance and markets highlight and trace the embeddedness of market dynamics in politics, society and history. The anthropology of contemporary financial markets employs two dominant forms of analysis. Science and Technology Studies scholars meticulously document devices and tools used by participants in markets, while sociocultural anthropologists focus on lived experiences and cultural worlds. In my analysis of the green bond market, I

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combine both approaches and further the study of financial market mechanisms and market cultural ethos. I breakdown my study of the green bond market into distinct components while connecting these components together through the larger societal dynamics of climate finance and the green bond market. The composite of data, narrative, time, work, and people in the green bond market produces a new ethical field that is contested through explicit discussion on the purpose of financial markets. This ethical field shows financial markets to be a contested and diverse space. Given the outsized role of finance in society, identifying the fissures made possible by climate finance may grow in importance as the climate crisis intensifies.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements...... iv

ABSTRACT ...... viii

Table of Contents ...... x

Table of Figures ...... xi

Introduction ...... 1

Chapter 1: What is Green and in a Greenium? ...... 37

Chapter 2: Green Bond Market Narratives around Numbers ...... 69

Chapter 3: The Times of Climate Finance ...... 105

Chapter 4: Working with Green Bonds ...... 145

Chapter 5: People in Climate Finance ...... 196

Conclusion: Green Bonds and Beyond ...... 241

Works Cited ...... 252

Table of Figures

Figure 1: HSBC Manhattan Headquarters (September 2017) ...... 1

Figure 2: Sean Kidney State of the Market Presentation (September 2017) ...... 4

Figure 3: HSBC Manhattan Headquarters (September 2017) ...... 8

Figure 4: Climate Bonds Initiative’s Five Easy Steps for Green Bond Issuers ...... 49

Figure 5: City of London from MoreLondon (March 2019) ...... 53

Figure 6: CICERO’s Shades of Green ...... 54

Figure 7: John Hancock Manulife Sustainability Key Performance Indicators (April 2019) ...... 59

Figure 8: Cover of “Green Bond Pricing in the Primary Market: July – December 2018” ...... 65

Figure 9: Green bond market by year and issuer (Climate Bonds Initiative 2020)...... 69

Figure 10: State of the Market 2017 (Initiative 2017) ...... 95

Figure 11: Climate Bonds 2020 Twitter Banner ...... 95

Figure 12: Bloomberg New Energy Finance Green Bond Issuance ...... 96

Figure 13: Climate Spiral ...... 114

Figure 14: Twitter logo for Ceres A Clean Trillion campaign ...... 121

Figure 15: 2ii Investing Finance Time Horizons Image...... 122

Figure 16: Climate Bonds Initiative Green Bond Market Data ...... 124

Figure 17: Tenor of green bonds (Filkova, Frandon-Martinez, and Georgi 2019) ...... 125

Figure 18: Canary Wharf Swiss Clocks (June 17, 2017)...... 137

Figure 19: Raqs Media Collective Exhibit ...... 138

Figure 20: Raqs Media Collective Exhibit ...... 138

Figure 21: The Royal observatory 2017 Greenwich Mean Time Exhibit ...... 140

Figure 22: Greenwich Mean Time Exhibit ...... 141

Figure 23: Cartoon from The Economist ...... 145

Figure 24: Bullshit Jobs quote ...... 149

Figure 25: 40 Bermondsey and Floor Layout ...... 153

Figure 26: The Green Blob (Rose 2014) ...... 154

Figure 27: Kentia Forsteriana Deedman’s description ...... 157

Figure 28: Climate Bonds Data Portal ...... 163

Figure 29: Climate Bonds TWG and IWG Process ...... 168

Figure 30: Climate Bonds Certification Scheme...... 170

Figure 31: Assets Eligible for Certification ...... 171

Figure 32: Reports in Climate Bonds Office ...... 175

Figure 33: Covers of Reassembling the Social and Scaling up Green Bond Markets...... 177

Figure 34: A Climate Bonds Report in Progress ...... 178

Figure 35: State of the Market 2016 Iceberg Graphic ...... 180

Figure 36: A commentary on green bond networking work (Financial Times 2015) ...... 182

Figure 37: Cartoon from The Economist ...... 195

Figure 38: Indian Railways Green Bond Launch at the London Stock Exchange ...... 196

Figure 39: Responsible Investor Sustainable Finance Careers Survey ...... 202

Figure 40: “Statistically Insignificant” (Schoenmaekers 2020) ...... 245

Figure 41: Photograph of Canary Wharf by Andrew Whiley ...... 248

Figure 42: London from JP Morgan Canary Wharf Building, 2013 by Andrew Whiley...... 250 xii

Introduction

Figure 1: HSBC Manhattan Headquarters (September 2017)

The State of the Market: Numbers and People at Work through Time

In September 2017, I entered the bank HSBC’s New York City headquarters. HSBC’s offices occupy an art deco historical building next to New York City’s public library in Bryant Park.

Overshadowing the library from the opposite side of the park is the recently dubbed Salesforce building, where the digital software company of the same name occupies five floors. The library, a public institution that provides essential social infrastructure to communities, is thus surrounded by private capital and space (Klinenberg 2018). The mixed architecture of the HSBC office, which starts with stone before transitioning to glass, could represent continuity and

change in finance. The stone building with renovated glass windows stands next to a modern glass corporate skyscraper, which towers over the older building’s copper roof. The transition from stone to glass parallels the move to transparency rhetoric in the financial industry (Krause-

Jensen 2010). However, stone and glass may be equally foreboding to those who are not insiders in the financial industry (Scott 2013).

The HSBC building is next to the main branch of the New York Public Library in Bryant

Park, which is a private space managed by the nonprofit Bryant Park Corporation that was formed in the 1980’s (Corporation 2020). Walking through these spaces, no direct physical boundaries demarcate these public and private zones, but the management of space is ever present. The financial industry transforms, and is transformed, by the architecture of cities. With the growing dominance of finance in private and public decision making, this transformation tends to privatize city space (Scott 2013). The construction of London’s city hall, the seat of London’s public administration, within the private development of MoreLondon is a stark example of this. Caitlin

Zaloom, Stefan Leins and Ellen Hertz catalogue this transformation in their studies of the financial spaces of Chicago, London, Zurich, and Shanghai (Hertz 1998; Leins 2018: 30; Zaloom 2006). This blend of public and private ownership has grown in finance and is particularly active in climate and sustainable finance conversations. Similarly to this urban space, climate finance is a fusion of the public and private spheres that highlights how financial markets are becoming an explicit extension of governance.

I cross Bryant Park and enter HSBC’s offices through revolving doors. Walking into a cool stone lobby, I tell the concierge that my name is on the Climate Week event guest list and hand her a business card. I drop down a backpack and two bags filled with reports on the bond market 2

and climate change at the concierge desk. Then, I wait for my business card and state driver’s license to be checked with the guest list, so I can go up to the floor where the HSBC New York

Sustainable Financing Briefing event is to begin. New York City’s Climate Week, a yearly event in the calendars of climate financiers, climate activists, and policymakers alike, is scheduled every

September to coincide with the United Nations General Assembly.

Climate Week began as a large-scale march to the UN to highlight climate concerns. Since the first Climate Week in 2009, a range of climate-related science, policy, civil society, and finance events have proliferated (Group 2020). I entered HSBC’s NYC offices for one such event – to discuss sustainable finance and the launch of the Climate Bonds Initiative’s Bonds and Climate

Change: State of the Market report. I pulled off an oversized, baggy backpack is filled with copies of this report. The backpack belongs to the Australian CEO of the Climate Bonds Initiative (Climate

Bonds), the international climate finance NGO I had been working in and studying as an anthropologist for the past two years. The backpack is filled to the brim with State of the Market reports, and I have walked with it and two canvas bags also filled with laminated reports from global law firm Shearman & Sterling’s to global bank HSBC’s NYC offices in 90-degree September weather, which used to be unseasonable in September. That is a serious bond with climate!

Climate Bonds is a nongovernmental organization (NGO), nonprofit company based in

London that was launched in 2009 at the United Nation’s Conference of the Parties’ Climate

Change summit in Copenhagen. Since then, Climate Bonds has worked to mobilize conversations around green bonds, which are publicly traded debt that finances infrastructure deemed sustainable towards climate action. In practice, the Climate Bonds Initiative’s first years

“mobilizing” here involved the CEO frantically organizing from 2009 to 2012 and hiring three 3

analysts to use Microsoft Excel to track green bond issuance and gain research legitimacy for

Climate Bonds’ associates to talk about green bonds.

Financial professionals begin to fill HSBC’s lobby for the Climate Week event. I go up the elevator from the concierge’s desk to the floor where the report launch is to start. I enter an empty room filled with office chairs facing a red curtain stage. I find a seat in the back and start to send out emails publicizing the soon to be launched State of the Market report, while the IT crew setup their equipment and checked the sound system. It looks like a real performance: red curtains, a stage, multiple cameras and lights. However, the audience that enters the room to fill its empty chairs are finance professionals, startup entrepreneurs, and civil society climate finance practitioners. HSBC’s sustainable finance team kicks off the event. HSBC’s Michael Ridley, who has a PhD in economics focused on water management and left academia for a career in sustainable finance, presents his team’s pricing work on green bonds and projections for market growth.

Figure 2: Sean Kidney State of the Market Presentation (September 2017) 4

Sean Kidney takes the stage after Michael, with a copy of the State of the Market report in hand. “Look at this beautiful report!” he enthusiastically exclaims to a sleepy audience. Sean starts his presentation with an overview of the overwhelming story of climate change. His

PowerPoint consistently includes two pivotal slides: the first, from the film Lord of the Rings, is an image of Mordor, the fiery dystopian realm of the dark lord Sauron. Sean follows this slide with a futuristic utopian Paris, complete with green buildings and pristine canals. Sean uses these two slides to show bankers two possible futures for the world in relation to climate change trajectories (Moore 1990). Three months prior, Sean and I discussed the point of his presentations and our work in the Climate Hub, the London climate finance/climate change NGO incubator, and main site of my fieldwork in its Climate Bonds’ offices. Sean had told me that our work was to both “give bankers meaning and make them care about meaning.” To achieve this in his presentations, Sean has to convince bankers both of the urgent need to act on climate change as well as that it is in their interest to do so.

Sean draws on the predictions of climate scientist Jim Hansen, theorist James Lovelock, and researchers at the Tyndall Centre, along with other climate science centers to verify his projections of the future (Lovelock 1979; Graeber 2009). Climate finance centers on a scientific prognostic to inform decision-making in finance that seeps into the public sector (Ferry 2016).

This sector is driven by images and narratives of the future, both dystopian and utopian. As Stefan

Leins notes, “investment narratives are constructed through performance and aesthetics” (Leins

2018). Here, the aesthetics are both utopian and dystopian (Bennett et al. 2016). Sean’s back-to- back utopian future Paris and Mordor PPT slides stress the closeness of these futures in the minds of climate finance practitioners. Sean’s charismatic speeches at climate finance and green bond 5

market events contrast with mostly dry financial presentations. As one climate finance researcher told me of his presentation style: “He was one… who was really speaking more relatedly, like in human terms. Being more engaging, and more, bringing it back to concrete issues at the end of the day. And not just linking it to financial speak but being more holistic.” Sean’s speeches are a form of performative work, an attempt to translate climate urgency into the logic of finance (Beunza and Ferraro 2019).

As Sean continues on his soapbox speech, in the front row Vikram Widge, the Head of

Climate and Carbon Finance at the World Bank International Finance Corporation, jokes to a

Climate Bonds’ staff that Sean must have preacher blood in his background. Widge’s remark that

Sean’s oration to the financiers was akin to a Baptist preacher emphasizes the charismatic appeal of his green bond presentations — something that many others would remark to me throughout my fieldwork. The Climate Bonds’ employee tells me this after the event is over, stressing the length of time that Sean spoke. Sean’s proselytizing is indeed in full force as it is every year.

Climate Bonds staff at the report launch worry if he is not keeping the busy bankers a bit too long on the doomsday scenarios of climate change, bolstered by the slide of Mordor, the fiery apocalyptic wasteland which is the home of evil in The Lord of the Rings.

The State of the Market report is the result of months of compilation and organization by the Climate Bonds Market team. The 2017 report launch was managed by Mary Basson, running the team from Australia, in consultation with the HSBC Climate Change Centre team. The State of the Market was a significant report for the Climate Bonds Initiative. As Andrew Whiley, Head of Communications at Climate Bonds, had told me the previous month in London, the State of the Market report evolved through a series of reports and ideas. Murray told me that, “Sean 6

launched various ideas and other kinds of activities. He would do launches of it in different countries… it has sort of been like this once-a-year flagship, and then people refer to it, it is a big thing. Or at least a big thing for Climate Bonds.” The growth of the market had propelled the report to new significance. As Andrew noted, “The market has changed, green bonds are much bigger.” The State of the Market reports began in 2010, financed by HSBC when its sustainable finance team was still run by Nick Robins, a historian by training who had gone into investments with Henderson in the early 2000s. It was this flagship report that had cemented Climate Bonds’ reputation, as both an authority on green bonds and a market driver.

I had the chance to see State of the Market presentations in a number of venues: at the

Tate Modern gallery’s private event space, in State Street’s Boston offices, and at Norton Rose

Fulbright’s offices in London. In 2016 after the report’s launch at the London offices of Norton

Rose Fulbright, Michael Ridley called me to ask for the basis of Sean’s green bond market projections. I told him that the numbers were based on ongoing conversations with prospective green bond issuers. Ridley replied sarcastically, “Oh so that is just something Sean says, ok”.

Ridley’s sarcasm highlights the marketing in Sean’s use of numbers. Yes, the size of the market and other characteristics of the green bond market that Sean presented were grounded in quantitative analysis. However, another key part of his performative work was his predictions and analysis of the future of the green bond market. While future growth projections were based on speculation rather than the report’s earlier description of the green bond market’s current state, both of these elements use numbers, but the numbers move from positive description to normative prediction and hope. Sean’s ability to present a compelling narrative and to mobilize

green bond market actors to grow the market, is grounded in the kinds of numbers and data presented in the State of the Market.

Figure 3: HSBC Manhattan Headquarters (September 2017) Why Green Bonds?

The green bond market began in 2007. A green bond is tradable debt that funds or refinances infrastructure evaluated by experts as environmentally beneficial. In 2014, the green bond market grew twofold from 2013. It was then that I began my fieldwork on green bonds through gaining access to the Climate Bonds Initiative first as an intern and then as a paid contractor in several roles. I began fieldwork wanting to know the reasons for the quick growth of the green bond market and to learn how climate change exists for people working in climate finance and with green bonds. The green bond market’s momentum brought in foundation grants and partnerships for Climate Bonds. Financial institutions driven by financiers, and particularly bond underwriters (financiers that structure bond offerings), increasingly focused on green bonds as a new financial product class to highlight company and municipality sustainability initiatives as well as to drive more bond issuance. Working within the Climate Bonds Initiative, I

have been a participant observer in the growth and development of the global green bond market.

Green bonds constitute the largest market in climate and sustainable finance more broadly (Clapp and Pillay 2017). Climate finance is composed of financial instruments such as green bonds that fund projects marketed and audited as climate change solutions by financiers and environmental professionals. The 2015 Paris Agreement, the global agreement to curb greenhouse gas emissions and slow climate change, describes climate finance as capital that moves from developed countries to finance climate solutions in developing countries (UNFCCC

2015). In practice, climate finance refers to all capital going towards infrastructure that is assessed as providing climate change adaptation, mitigation, or resiliency benefits. Sustainable finance is a broader label that can include projects focused on localized environmental and social impacts of investments (Archer 2019). These fields of finance are increasingly touted by public policymakers and financiers as the solution to climate change (Figueres et al. 2017). The ability of the green bond market to deliver sustainability and climate change benefits rests on the sustainability and climate resiliency evaluation of infrastructure financed by green bonds offered by a range of accounting, engineering and sustainability firms that act as market auditors. Green bonds arise as a distinct asset class through having unique price characteristics in comparison to vanilla (generic) bonds (Birch and Muniesa 2020). However, the distinctiveness of this pricing does not arise in a black box, but rather through the data, narratives, time, work, and people that construct the market.

The 2017 State of the Market report launch highlights five components of the green bond market that are key to my analysis: data, narrative, time, work, and people. My research and this 9

dissertation focus on these components to highlight how the growth of the green bond market and climate/sustainable finance impact those working in this space and their work. My initial research questions included: why has this market grown so rapidly? Why are both financial and nonfinancial professionals and activists putting so much energy into the bond market as a response to climate change? One of my answers is that the translation of climate change into the times of finance involves the transformation of both people and numbers through processes of financial work. This transformation frames climate finance and the green bond market as an ethical field that is legitimized through calculative devices (Gottlieb 2019). This tells us that climate finance opens space for climate finance practitioners and financiers to explicitly be moral actors and arbiters.

People in climate finance often told me that climate finance is a hypothesis with an unknown ultimate result. The hypothesis is that the global financial industry can function on a financial value growth paradigm without crippling the earth’s biological carrying capacity and triggering the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s worst case climate scenarios

(Neiburg and Guyer 2017). Thus far, the most recent positive direct impacts that scientists at the

Global Carbon Budget have measured of financial activity on global emissions is the 1.3% short- term decrease in global emissions from the 2008 financial crisis and the 17% short-term decrease in emissions from the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic (Le Quéré et al. 2020).12

Both of these cases show a negative correlation between financial value and global emissions.

1 https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2009/jun/25/carbon-emissions 2 https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/nov/21/carbon-emissions-fall-report 10

Thus, we do not know if climate finance is possible and current evidence points against this hypothesis. Practitioners understand climate finance to be a hypothesis in an uncontrolled experiment that we will experience the material results of in the coming decades. While this hypothesis framing rests in the future, as anthropologists we can attempt to interpret what this framing means in the present.

Understanding Finance

Research in the anthropology of finance highlights the dynamics of the financial industry that exacerbate inequality through a hegemony of ideas and how financiers experience these dynamics in their work and lives (Ho 2009; Picketty 2014; Appel 2014; Lin and Neely 2020; Ortiz

2020; Souleles 2019). Many financiers understand their work in money to be separate from while also creating a basis of commensurate value for the “real economy” (Ortiz 2017; Guyer 2016).

The financial industry continues to finance fossil fuel, resource extraction, and other activities that have produced many of the world’s current crises (Mitchell 2011; Tsing 2015; Ferry and

Limbert 2008a; Klein 2007). The NGO Rainforest Action Network (RAN) concretely highlights this relationship both qualitatively and quantitatively (Network and Banktrack 2019).3 RAN analysts directly compare the sustainability statements of investment and commercial banks with the quantitative investment amounts that these same banks have in deforestation and the fossil fuel industry. Both academics and financiers are aware of these harmful impacts of the financial industry, and individuals in these fields of expertise often interpret their work and critique

3 https://www.ran.org/bankingonclimatechange2019/#data-panel 11

financial markets accordingly (Silver 2017). Geographers and anthropologists have already traced these critiques of the financial industry and the industry’s effects on society at large in financialization (Dempsey and Suarez 2016; Sullivan 2013; Keucheyan 2016; Pitluck, Mattioli, and

Souleles 2018). As a result, environmental and climate activists continually debate what actions constitute selling out vs. what produces “real” change in confronting negative financing in the financial industry.

For climate finance activists and practitioners working in the financial industry, the ethics of their work rests on how they evaluate their actions in the present as well as in the future. Thus, debate and critique of the potential and negative impacts of climate finance and the financial industry more broadly are not limited to scholars but form an important stream of thought within climate and sustainable finance itself (Keucheyan 2016; Gilbert and Sklair 2018). As one climate finance practitioner explained to me on WhatsApp during the COVID-19 pandemic:

Sustainable finance, as you know, is mostly self-serving BS from the asset management industry : - ) we shall see if this crisis manages to reorient US and global capitalism toward a more productive and sustainable path. But it looks like the oligopoly will only be strengthened. But I would be concerned about riots and other social unrest here in and in the US if things get much worse4

In this message, the practitioner emphasizes both his frustration for sustainable finance bullshit

(BS), while still prefacing this phrasing with ambivalences such as “mostly” and “we shall see.”

This practitioner continues to work in sustainable finance, moving in between financial sustainability data startups, NGOs, and sustainable finance media outlets. He continues to try to find a position where he will be in a position to be away from as much BS as possible.

4 WhatsApp message on April 2,2020 12

Like my interlocutors, I am also unable to predict the future, and my study here focuses on a sector where the full consequences of the activities that climate financiers work on is yet to become apparent. However, the growth of an arena within finance that explicitly addresses environmental, climate, and social concerns at a time when global financial markets are a dominant political force around the world, deserves close study to evaluate the significance of this change.

Financial Markets Beyond Prices

From its inception, the green bond market has been driven by a narrative for intervention beyond financial profit, an intervention that Sean and other climate finance practitioners argue could produce meaning for climate finance practitioners. The social and material impact of green bonds so far comes from new ideas and work in the financial industry that produces particular people and data. Early on in planning my fieldwork, I took an interlocutor’s advice. If I wanted to understand what was happening with green bonds, I shouldn’t go to an infrastructure project financed by green bonds (these projects would probably have been financed anyway). I needed to hang out with the bankers, activists, NGO workers, and central bankers, arguing for and critiquing the potential of green bonds to support climate and sustainable finance initiatives.

Through participant observation amongst climate finance practitioners over six years, I have identified five components that reveal the tension that is driving growth and debate in the green bond market and change in climate finance. These components are green bond market data, narrative, time, work, and climate finance people. These key components both constitute and construct the green bond market. These components assemble in the green bond market 13

and frame the market as a debatable ethical field underpinned by calculative devices. The green bond market, as the object of my ethnographic study is quantitative, a cumulation of the total issuance of green bonds. This object is in constant flux and monitored/influenced by market participants, analysts, and researchers alike (Çalışkan and Callon 2010; Callon 1999; Çalişkan

2010).

In this dissertation, I explore the tension in the development of climate finance and the green bond market as a sector apart from mainstream finance, which simultaneously tries to shift the entirety of the financial industry towards sustainable finance. This tension is the result of this space producing an ethical field that is legitimized through calculative methods (Arjaliès and

Durand 2019; Beunza 2019; Zaloom 2012). In each chapter – data, narrative, time, work, people

– my interlocutors use two or more different scales that open space for ethical and calculative work/projects in financial markets – the work of individuals and collective work to save the planet; the times of finance and of climate, horizon of climate catastrophe; attempts to commensurate (Merry 2016). However, the failure of commensuration is something my interlocutors acknowledge. This point is at the heart of their motivations and anxieties around their climate finance careers. Given these observations, I analyze how people productively work in the spaces in between.

Multiple temporalities are brought into finance through work done by climate finance practitioners. This work produces green bond analysts and data on infrastructure. This work also frames green bonds as an asset class – as claimed by BNP Paribas analysts due to the existence

of a “greenium,” or pricing difference between regular and green bonds.5 With my study of the green bond market, I follow Caitlin Zaloom’s call to present a fuller picture of how financial markets function. As Zaloom notes, “We need to take a closer look at markets if we want to transcend the idea that they are rational economic tools or, alternatively, that they are engines of chaos” (Zaloom 2006: 4). She goes on to state, “New objects for anthropological study emerge when novel practices and ideas about our ways of life, work, and politics arise. Financial markets are just such objects” (Zaloom 2006: 14). So, with the green bond market as a recent anthropological object of study, how should we make sense of how green bonds and a green bond market are made? I argue here that we should do this through breaking down this new object into components which have long been studied in our discipline: data, narrative, time, work, and people.

The components that I identify as constituting and driving the growth of the green bond market have been analyzed by social scientists before (Thompson 1966; Thompson 1967; Thrift

2000). I argue that, despite continuity with prevailing financial industry dynamics, these components within the green bond market and climate finance engender increased discussion and explicit reflection on the role of markets which is markedly different from previously dominant financial dogma (Souleles 2017b; Guyer 2009). This connects to topics in the anthropology of finance and makes clear market dynamics in the financial industry at large. A time-based morality is at work in the green bond market. This filters into the forms of labor at

5 https://www.bnpparibas-am.hk/en/intermediary-professional-investor/should-green-bonds-be-considered-an- asset-class-do-greeniums-help/ 15

play in the space and shapes the people who build careers in this market as climate financiers. In turn, these people work to produce green bond market data: the pricing difference of green bonds vs. vanilla bonds and the evaluation of green infrastructure that is both financed and refinanced through green bonds.

The response to climate change that we can expect from these developments is a function of the continuation and disjunction of the variables of data, market narratives, time, and people in climate finance markets. As I worked in the green bond market and became familiar with the databases, people, and spaces that constitute the market, the interactions between these elements became the mainstay of my fieldwork. I wanted to know what working in sustainable finance meant for the people in this sector. Did working on sustainable financial products mean that people had to be sustainable in other facets of their lives? In this way, I wanted to explore the green bond market as a total social fact that produces social change across political, economic and social spheres (Mauss 1967). The green bond market is a total social fact that impacts private and public institutions, people, objects, and forms of work (Wendling 2010; Mauss 1967).

What Green Bonds Tell Us About Responses to Climate Change

The question of how green bonds are created — and subsequently how green bond analysts, climate finance practitioners and a green bond market come to be — guided my fieldwork. Green bonds are fixed income instruments that fund projects that are broadly defined as environmentally beneficial. Climate finance, a field of investment projects focused on funding climate change adaptation and mitigation, both legitimizes and transforms financial flows. It is important to study markets where private claims foment market activity (supporting cheaper 16

capital, investor diversity), while the public sector through central bankers and policymakers posits climate finance as a potential solution to climate change. In this dissertation I focus on the people and market dynamics I observed over four years to highlight their worldview and the origin of the financial and environmental data numbers in the largest climate finance market.

I analyze this particular financial instrument and market to better understand dynamics of change within finance and how new financial instruments and market regulations impact society and the built environment. As an anthropologist, I understand financial markets as creations of interactions between people, terminals, interfaces, and physical places (MacKenzie

2008). Thus, interviewing and informally gathering information through conversing and working with climate finance practitioners in their workplaces and market environments are essential for me to understand the development of the green bond market at the human level. This is important because the people working in financial markets increasingly shape social decision- making.

I trace the development of green bond data and the history of the green bond market, highlighting the importance of the narratives that are stories that sustainable finance practitioners tell about green bonds. Then, I explore the other three components of the green bond market that, in my opinion, have the most impact on the market’s activity. These components shape the growth of the market and impact its ability to respond to climate change and environmental impacts. Exploring these themes, and how narratives function across and between them, challenges the primacy of contemporary framings of markets as rational, immediate, and asocial institutions. This more holistic analysis allows us to see markets as they are rather than as they are imagined to be in mainstream economics (Gibson-Graham 2014). 17

Through studying and interpreting financial markets with thick description, we can better highlight the tension in negotiations to transform economic activity and financial markets to work in coexistence with communities and the environment.

The green bond market and climate finance relate to conversations in Science and

Technology Studies and anthropology of finance. These conversations revolve around the construction and activity of financial markets in direct relationship with theorization on the boundary between nature/culture, human/nonhuman, and developing reflections on climate change. I argue that analyzing work, as one of the key components of the green bond market, is a bridge through which to do this. Here, I layout these theoretical discussions, and how they feed into the chapter structure and argument of my dissertation. My dissertation argues that the growth of the green bond market is dependent on the legitimization of the ethical field that explicitly responding to climate change and environmental degradation produces. This legitimization rests on the calculative devices that have been produced by climate finance practitioners in relation to green bonds.

Anthropology of Finance and Markets

Finance is an increasingly important field of study in the social sciences (Martin 2002). By focusing on the emerging sector of climate finance, this project furthers research on both social change as studied by Marshall Sahlins and Gavin Smith, and finance at large, as analyzed by Karen

Ho, Hirokazu Miyazaki, Donald Mackenzie, and David Harvey (Sahlins 1981a; Harvey 2006; Ho

2009; Smith 2014; Miyazaki 2013; MacKenzie 2008). My research is not only a focused analysis

of the development and mechanics of one particular market, but also a reflection on the edges of financial markets.

In the anthropology of markets there is a rich history of contextualizing market dynamics in political, cultural and social relations. Clifford Geertz unpacked the significance of haggling in

Moroccan culture and souks, and the role it played in structuring relations of trust in a context of incomplete information (Geertz 1978). Jane Guyer analyzes relations of debt and credit in markets and how this draws from preexisting social relationships (Guyer 2004). The classic study by Paul and Laura Bohannan of the Tiv, demonstrates the persistence of social hierarchies in mediating exchange (Bohannan 1955). Elizabeth Ferry highlights in her study of mineral exchange, how materials and their valuation are tied to a diversity of institutions, both inside and outside of market relations (Ferry 2013). These studies highlight the material, cultural, and hierarchical elements of markets that shape how markets function in different sociocultural settings over human history.

In the anthropology of contemporary markets, there have been two dominant forms of analysis. Science and Technology Studies scholars have documented financial and other forms of markets through an actor network theory and tracing approach (MacKenzie 2008). More culturally minded theorists have looked towards habitus and situational analysis to capture the worldviews that are dominant in different parts of a market. In my analysis of the green bond market, I have sought to combine both approaches, and to further efforts to put analysis of financial market mechanisms and ethos together (Maurer 2016: 880). I breakdown my study of the market into nodes, similar to Science and Technology Studies theorists, while keeping a cultural and modal analysis in my chapters in the mind of total social facts. Such analysis allows 19

for an engagement with the complexity that shapes so much of the experience of market actors and also contextualizes this experience in the larger societal dynamics and impacts of such market activity.

Due to issues of access, much market ethnography has traced markets, financial and otherwise, from the outside, making sense of the connections around market activity rather than the experience of market makers themselves (Bestor 2001). There are a growing number of ethnographers who have been able to gain access to financial market work, but access issues remain as highlighted by Daniel Souleles’ study of private equity (Ho 2009; Zaloom 2006; Souleles

2019; Chong 2018). To remedy this issue, Souleles traced value in private equity through interviews, attending conferences, and studying private equity stories and industry demographics (Souleles 2019; Souleles 2018). The technicality and morality of finance has been outlined by Daniel Beunza, from the trading floor of a smaller financial firm (Beunza 2019).

Çalişkan’s study of the global cotton market focuses on the technical connections between different components of the market: farmers, traders, and prices (Çalişkan 2010).

Karen Ho has argued that the habitus of financiers is what triggers inequality and market shifts (Ho 2009). In the development of the green bond market I argue that the habitus of climate financiers is particularly important in the legitimacy of the green bond market, and both feeds into it as well as shapes them. This fashioning is important in a larger perspective of how the green bond market has grown and currently functions. The green bond market gives a license that is always up for debate in terms of reputation for a number of different types of corporations, state governments, and large entities. This reputation and risk of work also exists at the level of individuals that move between NGOs, central banks, investment banks, and 20

academia. As Zaloom found the mediation of risk between traders and their lived experience key to the functioning of those markets and their transformation with a shift to digital trading, I find that the people and the work that they do in financial markets should be a key focus of inquiry.

This work experience and the cultural makeup should also be understood in relation to the dynamics of markets at the organizational level (Zaloom 2004).

Climate Anthropology in the Anthropocene

Within anthropology, discussion of climate change began through studies on how people

“in particular social and geographical locations understand and experience climate change”

(O'Reilly et al. 2020: 14). Beyond theoretical discussion, the work done thus far in anthropology relating to the empirical effects of climate change consists of both reflections on theory, as well as work in translation and communication of climate change between both populations and different expert communities (Callison 2015; Strauss and Orlove 2003). Anthropologists have moved to interrogate who participates in the production of climate change knowledge, and what the effects of this data production are (Barnes et al. 2013: 543).

As climate change has grown in the discipline, theoretical discussions, focusing on the term the Anthropocene have developed (Moore 2016). The idea of the Anthropocene, drawing from the empirical reality of climate change, argues that the world has entered into a new geologic age marked by human activity influencing processes on Earth at a geological level, transforming the planet’s atmosphere. This idea both challenges and continues the dualism of nature/culture still strong in Western thought, calling for a renewed effort to re-conceptualize the relationships homogenized by these two categories into domains of nature and humanity. In 21

anthropological theory, the emergence of the Anthropocene furthers conversations already active in the discipline to transform and move past this dualism, adding a particularly poignant political edge with the reality of climate change.

The idea of the Anthropocene both disrupts and continues much of the tension in the nature/culture dualism. The Anthropocene conceptualizes the interconnectedness of humans in a global environmental system, but also emphasizes human agency over nature, relating to calls of an end of nature (Tsing 2015; McKibben 2006; Urry 2011). This tension reflects previous and ongoing tension within the word nature. This abstraction obfuscates the particular forms of extractive projection with which capitalism interacts with the nonhuman environment with

(Haraway 2015; Karera 2019).

While much work has already been done in anthropology to disrupt binaries in the field, such as the ontological turn as well as anthropological engagements beyond the human as, climate change and the idea of the Anthropocene has energized this work (Descola 2013: 63;

Haraway 2008; Latour 2004; Tsing 2015; Kohn 2013). These debates have furthered a focus on the political implications of research on both humans and nonhumans. Anthropologists have wrestled with different ways of representing the nonhuman as well as the human, and the webs of possible agency in-between (Kohn 2013). Theorists attempt to open up discourse to acknowledge the multiplicities beyond concepts such as nature and the environment (Cronon

1996: 82; White 1996: 181; Escobar 2005: xxviii; Descola 2013).

A comprehensive review of climate anthropology has just begun to be outlined and presented as a vibrant sub discipline. In a 2020 Annual Review of Anthropology, anthropologists working on climate change in a range of contexts summarize the latest work in what they frame 22

as climate anthropology (O’Reilly et al 2020). Timothy Choy looks at the lives of environmental activists in Hong Kong, and their negotiation of contrasting narratives and contradictions in their work (Choy 2003). Gökçe Günel traces the careers and development of climate professionals tied to low carbon infrastructure development in Dubai (Günel 2019). Chika Watanabe analyzes the meaning and nature of the work of environmental NGO volunteers and employees in Becoming

One (Watanabe 2019). These more recent ethnographies of environment and climate change expertise and activism bring up similar themes of career navigation, work, and calling that I explore in this dissertation.

Climate Change and Work

Anthropological explorations of climate change often focus on connecting specific communities to larger global conversations on climate change through translating different forms of knowledge and expertise on climate change and environmental degradation (Callison

2015; Oliver-Smith, Crate, and Nuttal 2009; Tsing 2004). Crate and Nuttall argue that given the material impact of climate change, anthropologists have an obligation to help the communities they work with adapt to its effects (Crate and Nuttall 2009: 12, 13). In How Climate Change Comes to Matter, Candis Callison writes that her work “rests on an interdisciplinary perspective that seeks to trace the contours of public engagement with climate science in the American context”

(Callison 2014: 30). Her ethnographic research focuses on the multiple ways in which climate science is made legible by policy groups, climate finance organizations, and research institutes; furthering the discipline’s focus on the translation of climate change knowledge. This work of translation is key for anthropology to navigate transforming theoretical boundaries in climate 23

change research and plays to the discipline’s grounding in ethnography and participant- observation that can be used to bridge different forms of expertise. Jessica O’Reilly’s ethnographic study of climate science and exploration in Antarctica highlights the importance of this translation work and the creation of charismatic data in climate change discourse (O'Reilly

2017).

Marx’s focus on labor and work bridges both theoretical and applied anthropological work on climate change, as well as addresses the political nature of these discussions as anthropologists work to reevaluate our theory and practice in light of climate change. Work, as both theoretical as well as a category of lived experience, provides a pathway of communication between the changes occurring in the focus of theoretical and applied anthropology. White argues that any focused study on work must begin by blurring the boundaries between humanity and nature (White 1996: 174). This blurring work includes breaking down the categories of human and nature. Moving beyond these divisions, anthropologists can see through work a multiplicity of interactions with the world at large through work, which according to White

“entails an embodiment, an interaction with the world, that is far more intense than play” (White

1996: 174).

A focus on work brings to light how divisions of nature and culture develop and also connects to a Marxist framework for a grounded study of an otherwise amorphous capitalism.

Focusing in the green bond market goes beyond examining the rhetoric and evaluations of green bond projects to look concretely at what happens on a daily basis in this privileged prognostic market for climate change. Marilyn Strathern writes in reference to Marx that “‘by transforming the objects of his environment, man not only satisfies his needs and gives them value, but he also 24

separates objects and makes them his own. The transformation of objects into possessions is through labour’ (Ortiz 1979: 210)” (Strathern 1988: 177). The possessions created through labor include theoretical dualisms such as nature/culture, as workers on both sides of this divide transform through work. As Laura Bear notes, “In labor and citizenship—both so central to capitalist modes of production—there is a persistent conjoining of nature, culture, objects, society, and economy” (Bear 2015a). Work allows for these distinctions to be surpassed but also engaged in relation. Through contemporary and future ethnographies, “as ethnographers work toward blurring the distinctions between urban and environmental anthropologies, an urban/nature dichotomy that factored heavily in the discipline’s history is disappearing”

(Newman 2015: xxii).

Working in climate finance evokes a paradox. It is a sector that is both an extension of capitalist logic and a space in which participants have the hope of transforming capitalism through different relationships with the environment. This is a hope that also risks further cooptation and control of the environment through capitalist structures. This tension plays out in the work of climate finance practitioners. The concept of the Anthropocene has tensions similar to those in climate finance. The Anthropocene both acknowledges human agency and interaction with the multiplicity of the nonhuman in nature. With both ideas there are levels of reification but also space to engage and transform the binaries that continue in terms such as nature, the environment, and society (Sullivan 2013).

With a focus on work, theoretical discussion spurred by the idea of the Anthropocene on relationships between the human and the nonhuman, nature and culture, capitalism and humanity can be connected to the research anthropologists do on the ground in translating and 25

interpreting different forms of expertise and knowledge relating to the empirical reality of climate change. As translation work, much of current anthropology focusing on the empirical reality of climate change, is already involved in mixing and transforming these theoretical dualisms through communication between different communities. Through work, anthropologists can consider alternative relationships from both within and outside of concepts such as the Anthropocene, nature, humanity, and capitalism, through exploring how different types of work blur boundaries between all four.

Why Study Climate Finance as an Anthropologist

As the green bond market and climate finance continues to grow, disciplines from law to policy, sociology, economics, and political science have analyzed the phenomena of this space.

Economists focus on pricing, policymakers on mobilizing financial markets for their policy goals, political scientists on how states and governments interact with markets and treaties. In sociology, anthropology, and geography we focus on these larger phenomena, but in direct relation to people. However, our studying people has always brought anthropologists into conversation with the totality of our being, our engagements with our environment, our interpretation of it, along with many other elements of the beyond human that influence us

(Haraway 2008). The perspective on the green bond market that I outline in this dissertation provides a view of the lived experience of those working in the green bond market. This view highlights the impact and ambiguities of the green bond market and climate finance at large.

While one can understand green bonds through analyses of the organizations or of the pricing and supply and demand dynamics in the market, that type of study is not a user focused 26

inquiry. As Greg Urban notes, “The theoretical agenda for an anthropological perspective on culture may be differentiated from that of economics and political economy, in fact, by looking at inside-outside relations” (Urban 2019: 15). We study the framing of what is economic behavior and what is not, and how these spheres actively shape each other. Such a mindset has led sociologists to show the co-constitutive nature of economic theory in shaping economics (Callon

1998; MacKenzie 2008). My research framing looks at the lived environments, personal backgrounds, work processes, and other elements in climate finance and the green bond market that shape its continual morphing. In the following chapters, I present work as a central component that ties market data and narratives, timescales, and climate finance people together. This perspective emphasizes what experiences and actions produce climate finance markets.

Green Bond Market as a Total Social Fact

My fieldwork in the green bond market began with a simple premise, I wanted to know how a green bond gets made. How had this financial product that was nonexistent in 2007 develop into a $45 billion market in 2014 when I began my research. As Daniel Souleles does for private equity, I find that climate finance and the green bond market meet the criteria that

Wendling lays out for defining an object of study as a total social fact. Green bonds are total social facts. As Souleles notes drawing from Wendling, there are “two things that are essential to the idea of a total social fact: changes in social morphology that have economic, political, or aesthetic consequences, and collective gatherings to effect such change” (Souleles 2019: 214-215).

Souleles analyzes private equity and deal making through the lens of total social fact. 27

As highlighted by the State of the Market launch, the growth of the green bond market is supporting the transformation of people as green bond market experts as well as driving organizational change with the growth of sustainable finance teams in mainstream and alternative financial institutions. The totality of the green bond market as total social fact goes to its effect as both a change in social morphology produced by labor that draws on communication across multiple sectors of expertise and events that draw from this multiplicity.

The green bond market pulls in government, social constructions of sustainability, civil society, morality, corporations, and private actors to transform conversations and work in the global bond market. In the green bond market social morphology is at center of this newly forming market.

Methodology

In June 2014 I first began to outline my thoughts for research into the green bond market and its development. I messaged David Wood at the Initiative for Responsible Investment (IRI) with initial thoughts for research:

One thing that has struck me is the enormity of funding from green bonds going into transportation initiatives, as shown by the attached state of the green bonds market by HSBC and Climate Bonds. I think that by looking at the financial characteristics of green bonds in transportation I can ground my project materially in the realities of transportation projects both in India and China… Through my research I wanted to see whether the financing of transportation initiatives matters, do green bonds create greener transport? Or is it more of the same? This can then lead to a reflection on finance generally and its possibilities in social reproduction in both continuing the norm vs. creating change. In our meeting at Crema Café in Harvard Square, David told me that a study of the actual sites of projects financed by green bonds would probably be unfruitful in uncovering large differences 28

between the infrastructure projects and others financed by vanilla bonds. Instead, he suggested studying the financiers and NGOs locked in the design and discussion of this emerging market.

He suggested contacts at Bank of America Merrill Lynch (BAML), the World Bank, and JP Morgan and told me about the history of the birth of the green bond market in the mind of Christopher

Flensborg. However, the person David seemed to be the most excited about was Sean Kidney, running the Climate Bonds Initiative in London. I immediately set out to email Sean.

After not hearing anything over several months, I finally got word from Sean in Fall 2014.

I set out to make a trip to London to visit Climate Bonds as well as other climate finance NGOs such as the Climate Group and Carbon Tracker. I met with Mark Kenber, the then CEO of The

Climate Group, who told me that he was interested in my project because his wife is an anthropologist. She and friends of hers had tried to start a commune in Switzerland. While in

London, I called the phone for the Climate Bonds Initiative before Christmas, and Climate Bonds market analyst Georgia Waters answered and told me in a cheerful manner that there was always plenty of work to be done, and that Sean would be in the office the first week of January.

Over the first week of January, I took the London Underground into Shoreditch and met up with Sean. I walked into the office and saw Sean and all three fulltime Climate Bonds employees at the time: Georgia and Judith were on phone calls, Linnea was in the back room near a printer that wasn’t quite working, and Sean was focused in on his MacBook screen. After speaking for a bit, Sean and I went out for coffee and talked through my research. He accepted me on as an intern for the summer, and we talked about how I could contribute to the policy and incentives book he hoped to have Linnea write over the next year. In this initial meeting with

Sean, it quickly became apparent to me that climate finance was a fast-paced world, where I had 29

to be useful. Those in the space were focused and mission oriented, with a culture coming from both environmental activism and finance overwork (Ho 2009; Chong 2018: 4). I endeavored to grow a career for myself, with the relationships and contingencies that this would bring, in climate finance.

I chose field sites in London, Boston, and New York City. I wanted to ask questions about the symbolic and material change within the finance industry’s white-collar offices that is happening right now. This setting offers a unique perspective and is uniquely suited to answering my questions. To study these spaces of knowledge production, working in the process of knowledge production is key (Chong 2018). As Kimberly Chong notes in her study of a global management consultancy, “when studying experts who produce reflexive knowledge… the aim is to unpack the ethnographic sensibilities foundational to the expertise of informants, an aim that can only be carried out through the premise of collaboration or partnership” (Chong 2018:

23). While working as a researcher at the Climate Bonds Initiative I have been a participant- observer, both analyzing as well as being involved in the work of the organization to establish standards for green bonds. Over 2017 to 2018, I worked in the organization as a full employee, with one day off a week for anthropological reflections. During the workday as well as during late nights at the office or local pubs, I conducted interviews with interlocutors with whom I had extended contact to delve deeper into concepts and ideas that came to view in the field.

While Souleles and Rudnyckyj, both study finance through inquisitive inquiry, tracing what is around financial institutions and activity, I was fully embedded in my fieldwork akin to Ho and Zaloom (Souleles 2019; Rudnyckyj 2018; Ho 2009; Zaloom 2006; Bestor 2001). This experience is in a sector that is purportedly changing the status quo in finance rather than 30

continuing it. This is draining fieldwork, requiring full immersion in stressful work condition with long hours filled with multitasking and screenwork (Ho 2009; Boyer 2013; Chong 2018).

As I worked at the Climate Bonds Initiative, I felt that I was at the center of the green bond market. It was the reports and ideas that came from our organization that were fed into corporate law magazines and investment bank research center reports. The market’s key concepts seemed to emanate from Climate Bonds, with much fewer resources and people than these other organizations (Moretti and Pestre 2015). From my roles within Climate Bonds, I participated directly in the production of policy and market reports, organizing market education and other green bond events, and trained novice climate finance practitioners as well. My own knowledge production in the market influenced the climate finance work that I both did and studied.

Conducting Fieldwork

From January 2015 onwards, I attended 39 green bond and climate finance events, was in 23 high level meetings, and worked five days a week for six months and four days a week for

11 months. I interviewed and developed interlocutor relationships with 78 climate finance practitioners. I continued to move in and out of the field over my six years as a PhD student.

Through the spring of 2015, I carried out research for Climate Bonds, reading America, INC? and

The Entrepreneurial State by Mariana Mazzucato, as well as climate finance practitioner and historian Nick Robins’ book on The Corporation that Changed the World (Mazzucato 2013; Robins

2012; Weiss 2014). I continued to intern with Climate Bonds in London over the summer of 2015.

In June 2015, I moved to 15 Ullin Street in East London. It was an incredibly cheap rundown flat 31

in an old council house that went for 110 pounds a week. I lived at the apartment for 1 month and a half, commuting by tube to the London Bridge office at 40 Bermondsey. The team had just moved to the Climate Hub from Bath Place on March 30, 2015. The company’s office had 8 desks and a roundtable for meetings. There were 9 people in the office in and out over the summer.

Climate Bonds moved office spaces from the front to the back midway through the summer on the 1st floor.

Over the summer of 2016, I returned to London and dived back into the Climate Hub. I lived in yet another area named after a park, moving into a flat with London School of Economics and Political Science graduate students. In June 2016 I returned to London, to live at Tufnell Park in a flat that I had found through a London School of Economics and Political Science student flat hunting Facebook group. Sean came to Boston in September 2016. I joined him for an overview presentation on green bonds at State Street. The next day, we went to Breckinridge Capital

Advisors to have a small four-person chat about green bonds. The office space was filled with plants, and the building also housed Boston’s Goldman Sachs’ office.

From this initial fieldwork, I formulated questions for in-depth interviews with climate finance practitioners and outlined the questions on how my interlocutors experienced and felt about their work. I began a yearlong period of fieldwork from April 2017, initially living in West

London near Queen’s Park with a member of the London Cohousing Cooperative, who was a local community organizer and half of the Granville Community kitchen organization. I started a yearlong period of fieldwork, moving into the home of a homeschooling and community kitchen activist with American roots, connected to family friends I had recently reconnected with at a

Standing Rock concert/rally. I felt that I had arrived at the right place to think about climate 32

finance when I lived at her flat. The garden had an experimental shed/meeting house that had been constructed by the cooperative with locally sourced materials such as alpaca neck wool for wall insulation.

In the middle of my yearlong contract as an executive associate at Climate Bonds, I spent the month of September 2017 in New York City. This was around NYC’s Climate Week and other climate events there. I was involved in climate finance forums at Shearman & Sterling, HSBC, and

Moody’s along with follow-up meetings with green bond practitioners at US-based financial institutions and NGOs. I ended this month with a climate finance conference at the Yale School of Management and an internal green bonds presentation at Deutsche Asset Management’s offices in Boston, before returning to London. On my return to London in October 2017, I moved to Greenwich, commuting on the DLR and Jubilee lines as well as by the Thames ferry. There I lived with a family that had posted an advertisement for a tenant on spareroom.co.uk. In

November 2017 I left Greenwich and moved into Limehouse, living at a flat around the corner from the station. Throughout my final year of fieldwork, there was a great deal of uncertainty as to how the year itself would proceed. This influenced the relationships I put time into building and my conversations with interlocutors.

Returning to the Boston area in April 2018, I began to write my dissertation while continuing to interview and be in contact with interlocutors. From October 2018 to May 2019, I worked in Somerville’s Brooklyn Boulders, a rock-climbing gym/co-working space with a climate finance practitioner and close interlocutor, who I had first encountered in the Climate Hub.

Through this connection and my earlier interlocutors, I continued to conduct research and fieldwork in intervals between Boston, New York City, and London into 2020. I also organized 33

academic researchers in policy, law, and economics as an academic research coordinator at

Climate Bonds. I conducted my last in person interview in New York City in February 2020, just as the COVID-19 pandemic began to spread across the United States.

Chapter Layout

In the following chapters I breakdown climate finance and green bonds into five key components that I argue convene together in the green bond market. My breakdown of the green bond market into the components of data, narrative, time, work, and people builds and expands on a number of ethnographies of finance (Zaloom 2006; Ho 2009; Leins 2018; Hertz

1998; Miyazaki 2013). However, the uniqueness of this financial market is its interpretation and assessment of climate change and environmental degradation. This connection is also through which I connect anthropology of finance with climate anthropology (O'Reilly et al. 2020; Günel

2019).

In What is Green and in a Greenium, I argue that the production of green bond market data occurs through political and social relationships between organizations and people. This produces green bonds as an asset class with a pricing differentiation, as well as green infrastructure. I outline what a green bond has been framed as being, and the resultant pricing and green infrastructure concepts associated with this data.

In Green Bond Market Narratives around Numbers, I argue that market narratives construct and influence green bond market infrastructure, and create the future, which continues to transform present market narratives. Whether or not green bonds will be effective at tackling climate change is dependent on the narratives that are active in the market. These 34

narratives are continually re-evaluated over time. In The Time of Climate Finance, I argue that while timescales have been subsumed by industrial and financial logic in the past, in climate finance the tension that continually drives the markets is the incalculability and effect of the geological time of climate change.

In Working with Green Bonds, I argue that it is through distinct forms of work in the green bond market that the time of climate change is made legible in financial markets. Understanding how climate finance practitioners perform their work shows how climate finance produces climate change in financial markets. Focusing on work, reveals tensions that practitioners experience between connecting their daily tasks to the changes they hope work will have in the world. Examining these tasks and the tension practitioners have in interpreting them, gets us to understand how people navigate what constitutes important and valuable work in the midst of financial markets.

In People in Climate Finance, I argue that as they work and progress in their careers, my interlocutors become climate finance practitioners. Driven by a do-good narrative, their assessment of the meaning of their white-collar work continually threatens/constructs their perception of the good life. In the development of the green bond market and climate finance more broadly, there has been a generational shift with the increased professionalization of the space. There is also a categorization element here, with identities being both fixed while practitioners try to extend their expertise to be diversity consultants, impact analysts and to other areas of governance beyond sustainability.

In this dissertation research I breakdown the green bond market as an ethical project into the components of data, narrative, time, work, and people. Climate change and finance intersect 35

through these components and the tension of grappling with the scale of a hyperobject such as climate change (Morton 2013). I conclude through putting these elements together as they assemble together in the green bond market and the growth of climate finance that I have experienced through fieldwork. Governments around the world continue to fund and support initiatives in financial markets to provide solutions to climate change and environmental degradation. Here, I unpack the black box of one of these financial markets, so that we may better understand the components of green bonds and other markets and the worldviews and actions that the people and organizations in these markets produce (Riles 2018). This is vital for an interrogation of our global response to climate change, considering the importance given to the financial industry in the most binding global policy agreement on climate change (UNFCCC 2015).

Chapter 1: What is Green and in a Greenium?

The growth of the green bond market at the intersection of financial markets and environmental and climate change assessments produces an ethical field that market actors legitimize and evaluate with calculative methods that rest on the production and assessment of sustainability data. These methods rest on the evaluation of infrastructure projects financed by green bonds and the overall material environmental/climate impact and financial characteristics of the market at large (Giamporcaro and Gond 2016). These calculative methods involve work that involves and produces green bond market data. In this chapter, I highlight the calculative methods and politics that produce green bond market data, and the difference as well as the legitimacy that this data produces in the green bond market as an ethical field.

According to Melissa Gregg, the etymology of the word “data” defines data as existing a priori to and outside of argument. Gregg writes that “‘datum’ was understood as something given in an argument, something taken for granted. The obviousness of data, its taken-for-granted- ness, emanated from the Latin origin of the word, which in the singular means ‘gift,’ or something that is ‘given’” (Gregg 2015: 42). However, in the green bond market, data has never been a given. From the first green bond market data collection by the Climate Bonds Initiative, market participants have contested what data constitutes a green bond and what green bonds constitute the data of the green bond market.

Green bond data and analysis focuses on three aspects of green bonds that are distinct from vanilla bonds: bond issuing process, pricing differences between green and generic (vanilla) bonds (named a greenium) and green infrastructure. These debated aspects of the green bond

market center on ongoing calculative work that produces green bond market data on the part of climate finance practitioners. I argue that the production of green bond market data occurs through political and social relationships between organizations and people. This defines green bonds in relation to the green labelling of infrastructure financed by green bonds as well as an asset class through the differentiation of green bond pricing in comparison to generic bonds

(Birch and Muniesa 2020).

Data is central to the analysis of the green bond market through calculative devices, and data is also a consistent need argued for by market participants (Cabantous and Gond 2011). As the Canadian Smart Prosperity Institute notes, they make a case for climate information and analytics because Canada’s private sector “needs reliable and consistent data and information to play its critical role in addressing climate risks and harnessing clean and resilient growth opportunities” (Institute 2020). This data ranges from carbon emissions equivalency calculations, resource use by infrastructure projects, and operational energy intensity.

I begin this chapter by outlining the political debates and organizational frames that surround the concept of green infrastructure. I then outline what a green bond has been framed as being and the resultant pricing assessments with this framework. All of these processes of data production serve to make green bonds unique and incommensurate to vanilla bonds, while still being traded in the global bond market. As Sean Kidney argued at the HSBC State of the Market report launch in September 2017, “The more that we can commoditize and standardize what we do the more deals will flow.” He went on to argue that “There is no doubt that bonds are a commodity market.” His remarks focused on the need to make green bonds generic, while

continuing to meet data requirements to ensure that the bonds finance projects that are environmentally sustainable and climate resilient.

Over the period of my fieldwork, the green bond market’s growth role increasingly gave the market a key role in public policy both at national and supranational levels. Top policymakers in the European Union, China, and USA states such as California are using green bonds to direct climate change interventions. My question is why? It is a response to a scalar risk that has been and continues to be analyzed by multiple scientific disciplines through approximate models that have influenced global public policy and debate on climate change action/inaction. However, what we do know is that change has already happened due to the growth of climate finance and the green bond market. What can knowing how a green bond is made in this market tell us about the changes that have already occurred as a result of this financial product?

In producing green bonds, climate finance practitioners engage in work to create difference in financial markets, as opposed to the processes of commensuration that are central in the financial industry in the production of financial commodities. As Hirokazu Miyazaki finds in his study of the search and arbitraging of difference in financial markets, making difference into sameness is a focused form of labor in financial markets (Miyazaki 2013). In contrast, my interlocutors engage in producing difference in financial markets, in making green bonds distinct from vanilla bonds.

However, this difference also rests in the production of equivalence through producing a global green across the world. Fabiana Li notes in her study of mining and corporate social responsibility in Peru that equivalences that are produced in markets are often dependent on nonmarket forces (Li 2015: 24; Gamwell 2018: 50). Green is both defined and contested by 39

climate finance work. Pricing is based on commensurability as well as difference. A price is financial value difference, but also comparability (Simmel and Bottomore 2004). Standards are based on assessment and auditing that brings in scales that require auditing for calculative basis to legitimize what is sustainable. Social and political pragmatism goes into all of these green bond components. Pricing discourse is fueled by academic research demands, underwriter deal making, and issuer marketing. Green infrastructure discourse is fueled by government politics, think tanks, scientific prognostics, and the desires of market participants.

Debating Green and “Drawing a Line in the Sand”

In July 2015, markets analyst Georgia Waters told me that in her work as a market analyst,

“We need to draw a line in the sand with regards to what is green… if we are reporting to indices, bonds could be partially green, but they must be totally transparent.” This sorting work to determine what is green and what is brown, is the ground on which sustainability and climate finance expertise stands (Bowker and Star 2000). I argue that the emergence of the greenium, similarly to other numbers generated by the green bond market (its size, future trajectories, and market structure) allows for a concrete debate to occur that feeds the discussion and market talk surrounding the green bond market. These technical discussions lend legitimacy to the market and support the expertise of a range of professions (Özden‐Schilling 2016). This data is a charismatic framing of climate change and the environment in financial markets that creates difference that must be then legitimized ultimately through green infrastructure assessments

(O'Reilly 2017). Climate and sustainable finance practitioners produce data in offices that are

“centers of calculation” in Bruno Latour’s terms (Latour 1987). 40

As the green bond market grew, standards for determining what constitutes green infrastructure, and thus suitable investment for green bonds that avoids greenwashing, has been a continual area of debate. This debate supported the growth of the Climate Bond Standard and the Green Bond Principles, as well as the International Standard Organization’s green bond standards, national and regional guidelines, and the European Union’s Sustainable Finance

Taxonomy (European Commission 2020). These standards are a product both of market expertise as well as of public sector bureaucracy. The vagueness of the notion of green infrastructure is due in part to political negotiation between European Union member states, and the use of the environment as a unifying call to unite EU economic zones (Zabusky 2011).

Green bonds are promoted by calculating institutions such as investment banks and pension funds as a part of a financial solution to climate change through moving investment towards sustainable infrastructure such as public transportation and alternative energy. Climate change represents a new challenge that impacts economic activity, and this challenge creates new types of knowledge in markets. As Michel Callon states, in markets “no theory or concept can provide a final solution, simply because economic activities constantly spawn new problems… which require new reflection and new solutions to restore calculability” (Callon 1998:

29). The different forms of expertise that Climate Bonds attempts to organize into Climate Bonds

Standard and Certification Scheme, a program that evaluates the sustainability impact of green bonds, represent a new type of calculability to correct the undervaluing of the Earth’s environment. Such valuation encounters varying cultural conceptions of both the environment and nature as well as key terms in finance such as risk (Douglas and Wildavsky 1983). The

quantification of knowledge and use of data to solve social and environmental ills has continued to rise globally (Merry 2016).

What green means in sustainable and climate finance is the result of quantified evaluations, white papers, reports, and presentations at conferences (McNeill and St Clair 2011).

This data makes climate change and environmental degradation exist in financial markets. The construction of this data is a contested and socialized process that carries out over time. This legibility is driven by the creation of new financial instruments and categories such as green bonds that happens through the intersection of market activity and the debate between the narratives presented in Chapter 2.

Data and Narratives for Green Infrastructure

Both the knowledge production around data on the built environment as well as narratives in the green bond market frame discussions around green, climate resilient infrastructure. How are science-based assets brought into financial markets? The literature my interlocutors and I utilize to produce green bond market reports and evaluate bond issuance are the product of multiple systems of knowledge production around the world that converge on the term green infrastructure. Policy papers and reports around the world frequently spend copious amounts of time delineating what definition of green infrastructure they follow (Benedict and

McMahon 2012; Lennon 2013: 19; Benedict and McMahon 2002; Dunn 2010; Mell 2008;

Sandstro¨ m 2002; Tzoulas et al. 2007; Wright 2011). As Ian Mell argues, “the actual definitions of green infrastructure vary significantly depending on the focus of the document and the work of the researchers who compiled it” (Mell 2008: 79). Annelise Riles notes the importance of 42

documentation and the dissemination of both digital and material knowledge in her study of policy reports (Riles 2006). Similarly, in climate finance, ambiguous terms such as green infrastructure are practically defined and acted on through the production of reports.

My climate finance interlocutors define green infrastructure in relation to climate projections produced by scientific public policy intermediaries such as the Intergovernmental

Panel on Climate Change. Through this comparison, those working in climate finance and green bonds define their expertise through understanding materiality in the lens of climate change

(Callison 2015). Climate finance as a field is integrally focused on materiality, and the financing of infrastructure deemed to be sustainable by climate finance practitioners, who base their expertise and careers on identifying sustainable materiality. For practitioners, climate finance is about making the financial material directly material through infrastructure analysis (Gray 2010).

Comparative Green Infrastructure

In the United States, green infrastructure is most associated with storm water management, passive building design, and other strategies to engage with environmental processes in order to gain gray infrastructure benefits. However, in Europe, green infrastructure has been advanced by the European Union in order to strengthen pan-European economic and environmental policy (Lennon 2013: 22). The beginning of the EU’s commitment to green infrastructure is seen by many climate finance practitioners as being the EU Natura 2000 network

(Sussams, Sheate, and Eales 2015: 189; Lennon 2013: 26; Sylwester 2009).

Financing from the European Commission and other bodies of the EU is a vital revenue source for a diverse range of NGOs in London and throughout Europe. Luke Sussams, a 43

researcher at Carbon Tracker, a climate finance NGO whose offices were adjacent to Climate

Bonds during my fieldwork, argues in his coauthored paper on green infrastructure that “for independent, single objective organisations, a multidisciplinary concept like GI marks an even more competitive landscape for resources than normal” (Sussams, Sheate, and Eales 2015: 189-

90). Funding anxieties propel analysts to format their research in the keywords of funding organizations, regardless if they themselves fully understand the terms. From an interview with a UK NGO employee, Sussams et al. found that “‘the main reason I use it (the term GI) is for funding – I can’t bite the hand that feeds me!’ (D3, 2012)” (Sussams, Sheate, and Eales 2015). The lack of a formal governing structure on what constitutes green infrastructure means that determination for funding relates to how these organizations define and market the term to the possible agendas of funding organizations.

Evaluating Green Infrastructure for Green Bonds

The growth of the green bond market is tied to the description of infrastructure and material processes in the daily digital and white-collar work of climate finance professionals. As

William Cronon notes in Nature’s Metropolis, the development of financial markets and futures markets took as their starting point farming processes and the variability of crops due to weather conditions (Cronon 2009). Caitlin Zaloom documents in Out of the Pits how the memorabilia of a statue to Ceres and other commodities are emblazoned on the stone buildings that mark the

Chicago Mercantile Exchange, even as it becomes fully automatized and digital (Zaloom 2006).

The description of infrastructure projects in contrast to the white collar excel sheet data production that they produce is highlighted in climate finance. Climate finance is integrally 44

connected to shifting the material and atmospheric impact of the financial industry, yet much of the work done in the field is digital. This involves organizing lists of bonds with information checked from Thomson Reuters Eikon and Bloomberg terminals, cutting and pasting together images of sprouts growing out of coins for events at Moody’s offices in NYC and other venues in financial centers around the world. This voluntary, market regulation is focused on making green infrastructure acceptable for public and private investment. Through standard groups “the production of information… translates a complex set of materials into a new object of economic calculation” (Barry 2013: 14). Ultimately, these standards have to confront the physical infrastructure these knowledge systems imagine and generate. However, at this stage of the green bond market the socio-environmental impact of these projects is yet to be determined.

Climate Bonds Standard

At the Climate Bonds Standard launch in 2012, Climate Bonds Cofounder Nick Silver introduced its need by stating that “there are many investors who would like to invest in sustainable products. These are small compared to the investment universe, but large in absolute terms, but they do require assurance as to the environmental integrity of their investments, which a certification provides” (Silver 2012). Silver outlines his thoughts on the redesign of financial markets to better serve society and the world in his 2017 book (Silver 2017). In its work as a standard setting organization, the Climate Bonds Initiative plays the role of a boundary organization. Boundary organizations are institutions that “straddle the shifting divide between politics and science” (Guston 2001). Ben Cashore, a Professor of Environmental Governance and

Political Science at Yale University, played a role in outlining the structure and framework of the 45

Climate Bonds Standard (Cashore 2002). Near the end of 2019 and into 2020, transition finance became a major focus for climate finance organizations. This new focus reframes infrastructure projects in relation to their value for a transition to a low carbon economy.

What Green Bonds Count?

Fannie Mae’s reclassifying of billions of dollars’ worth of bonds as green in 2017, and the acceptance of the bonds by market participants and gatekeepers, shines light on the mechanisms active in the green bond market that determine whether or not a bond is green. The Climate

Bonds Initiative became a de facto green bonds watchdog early on in the market through the company’s website blog. Meanwhile, rating agencies also developing their own forms of ranking green bonds, but for a commercial purpose rather than to provide common market infrastructure. Moody’s and the S&P 500 both setup their own green bond rating scores.6 While the Climate Bonds Initiative attempts to monitor the entirety of the green bond market as a nonprofit entity, providing green bond assessments publicly, Moody’s and S&P 500 work on a consulting/contractual basis with green bond issuers. The rating agencies provide green bond assessments as a private sector service, as the agencies do for credit ratings as well, however without the political weight that would convince all green bond issuers to pay for an assessment.

6 https://www.moodys.com/sites/products/ProductAttachments/MIS_Green_Bonds_Assessment.pdf?WT.z_referri ngsource=TB~ESGhub~GREENBONDS 46

As Brian Chappata in a Bloomberg Opinion article states, “the Climate Bonds Initiative is the closest thing to a gatekeeper for the industry” (Chappatta 2018).7 Here, the Climate Bonds

Initiative’s existence as a nonprofit entity gave them a more neutral role than the government regulators and private entities, banks and corporations, in order to act as a watchdog and market supporter. Climate Bonds encourages private and public organizations to continue to grow the green bond market and works to chastise these institutions when they issue bonds that are below an acceptable level of public oversight and review.

The Climate Bonds Initiative’s green bond market Excel sheet, counting all bonds deemed green by its Markets team, links to the organization’s online blog reports on market updates, and also includes reflections and analyses of the latest green bond issuance, both praising and critiquing the different corporations, governments, and projects in the market. Climate Bonds’ blog functions as a mechanism for performativity in the green bond market, both describing green bond issuance while simultaneously defining what green bonds are for market participants.

Along with the Climate Bonds Initiative green bond list, in the market there are several lists from

Bloomberg, Dealogic, Environmental Finance, and the Green Bond Select Index. These lists allow the organization to evaluate the green credentials of a particular issuance, which green bond index providers Solactive, Barclays, and MSCI then use to assess which green bonds should be in an index.

In evaluating green bonds for list inclusion, only green bonds that have 95% of proceeds dedicated to projects aligned with the Climate Bonds Taxonomy in the Climate Bond Standard

7 https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-07-18/green-bond-market-needs-to-get-tough-to-blossom 47

are allowed in the Climate Bonds Initiative green bond database.8 The Climate Bonds Taxonomy is an evaluation of the climate impact of array of green infrastructure classes, from water infrastructure and green building, to public transit and waste management. To meet the criteria of the Taxonomy, issuers must publicly share the rating systems and metrics that they use on projects financed by green bonds to demonstrate that the projects are contributing to creating a low-carbon society.

What is a Green Bond? 5 Easy Steps for Green Bond Issuers

One of the flyers at Climate Bonds over 2016 and 2017 that was a staple handout in meetings with high level government officials, corporate executives, and investment bankers as well as at conferences and events was a document titled “5 Easy Steps for Green Bond Issuers.”

Much of the work at Climate Bonds was not only quantitative analysis of the market, but also outlining and taking market and potential market actors what they felt the process should be for issuing a green bond, and what the key characteristics of the financial instrument should be. The

5 Easy Steps for Green Bond Issuers highlights how Climate Bonds understood and promoted green bonds. The document is a how-to guide to issue and sell a bond to investors. Green bond issuers are the focus of the document, with the five points moving from the issuer’s perspective.

8 https://www.climatebonds.net/2018/09/market-blog-11-usd33bn-gbs-august-new-issuers-canada-china-japan- singapore-south-korea 48

Figure 4: Climate Bonds Initiative’s Five Easy Steps for Green Bond Issuers The four-page how-to guide vibrantly outlines its five steps to issue a green bond on the first page with four green and one orange box (orange to keep the reader at attention). These boxes take an issuer, whether the issuer be a government or private corporation, through the steps that Climate Bonds’ employees argue are best practice for green bond issuance. To describe what data processes make green bonds distinct for climate finance practitioners, here I break down the significance behind the five steps on this brochure’s first page step by step. These steps show how sustainability and climate change are evaluated and able to exist through a particular audit culture in the green bond market (Strathern 2000).

1. Identify qualifying green projects & assets

The key feature of a Green Bond is that proceeds are for green projects or assets. The “greenness” of a company or government doesn’t matter - it’s about physical assets or projects. Guidance about what qualifies can be found at http://www.climatebonds. net/taxonomy. For example, renewable energy, sustainable water, low carbon transport. The first sentence of step #1 is a focal point for green bonds: “The key feature of a Green

Bond is that proceeds are for green projects or assets.” This sentence focuses beyond financial materiality as defined for corporations (which is a legal definition in financial markets). This moves towards trying to assess the physical/built infrastructure that is connected to financial instruments. Much of this assessment is done by financiers without much expertise in the types of infrastructure involved in designated green projects (Anand 2015). Both companies and governments can be active issuers in the green bond market, composing the market of both private and public debt.

The debate about brown to green or “pecunium non olet” (money that does not stink) was ongoing during my fieldwork and continues amongst green bond market participants. The main issue here is whether “brown” companies or entities with primary high emissions generating activities should be able to issue legitimate green bonds. This framing represents the

Climate Bonds’ theory of change for green bonds in finance. Their work was about leveraging the preexisting global bond market towards physical infrastructure with more positive environmental benefits than oil and gas energy infrastructure and high carbon transportation focused on individual cars.

Narratives around what a green bond should be are debated in particular bond issues in the market. The Repsol green bond case was a turning point, when the Spanish oil and gas energy company issued a green bond to fund energy retrofits on oil refineries. Repsol’s green bond

issuance was rejected by Environmental Social Governance (ESG) investors, but the bond was still bought. Repsol representatives continue to be active in the green bond market, and have become key figures in transition bond conversations, such as at the Climate Bonds Conference in

September 2020.

As the green bond market continued to develop, the question of who would be the gatekeepers, or whether there should be gatekeepers, to determine what should and shouldn’t be financed by green bonds increased in online print (Financial Times, Global Money, Euromoney) and conference discussions. These discussions framed what the green bond market could be, similarly to LEED certified university buildings and the growth of certification schemes for sustainability (Brown 2010). This process of auditing is messy, involving negotiations between stakeholders across organizations. Choosing a standard sets the robustness as well as the network that environmental data filters through to reach financial analysts in the green bond market.

Green bonds can impact a number of scales for corporate issuers. In February 2019, Jim

Gowan, Verizon’s chief sustainability officer, answered Yahoo Finance’s question of what is a green bond by saying, “a green bond is another mechanism for us to fund our unbelievably exciting sustainability journey that we have been on at Verizon since 2009… We started very small with recycling” (Finance). When I presented on green bonds for an internal meeting with four corporate lawyers at the NYC offices of Norton Rose Fulbright in September 2017, one of the lawyers remarked that “buying a green bond is like buying an organic mattress.” The connection here between material objects, sustainable activity and green bonds as a sustainable financial product is frequent as people attempt to comprehend what a green bond is. 51

In green bond issues, market actors play out an ongoing assessment of what constitutes a green bond. The Green Bond Principles outlined infrastructure categories, but the evaluation and thresholds of these infrastructure classes, the energy efficiency of buildings and other aspects of the infrastructure were not elaborated.

2. Arrange independent review Credible independent review and verification protects your reputation. Verifiers can also help identify green assets. Cost? Low. Issuers can: - Use Climate Bonds approved verifiers to get certification under the Climate Bonds Standard. Details at www.climatebonds.net. - Get a reputable science organisation to review the green credentials of the bond.

Step #2 of the flyer focuses on the effectiveness and rigor of independent review of a green bond’s sustainability credentials. This topic has been a continual debate in the green bond market. This is in effect a result of market organizing: there is no dominant framework that is mandated by law to evaluate the sustainability of green bond projects, similarly to complex derivatives contracts, as analyzed by Annelise Riles in Collateral (Riles 2011). As opposed to a legal framework to evaluate green bonds, engineering, consulting, and environmental firms offer to provide green bond issuers Second Party Opinions (SPOs) or verifications to third party standards such as the Climate Bonds Initiative Standard. These evaluations are based on data provided by issuers to the firms.

Markets are massive generators of data, and there are large data aggregators in finance.

Thomson Reuters and Bloomberg are two companies built on hawking market information in financial markets and other media (Boyer 2013). S&P Global, Moody’s, EY, and PWC rate bonds and an array of other financial products based on a plethora data assessments. Data seems to be everywhere in financial markets, but the constitution of markets by private institutions inhibits 52

universal standardization or centralized knowledge. This point was made clear to me one evening in MoreLondon. Jakub Malinowski, then a manager in a university think tank climate finance research center, reflected to me while we chatted with Padraig Oliver, Climate Bonds’ first employee, now working for the Climate Policy Initiative (CPI), on the terrace of Norton Rose

Fulbright, the largest law firm in total number of lawyers worldwide. Jakub told us, as we looked over to the City of London and its main cluster of finance institutions and law firms, that when he first started working in finance, he imagined there was one building amidst all the glass skyscrapers where the world’s data existed.

Figure 5: City of London from MoreLondon (March 2019) As Jakub continued to work in the industry, he realized that this was not the case. That information and decision-making was continually incomplete and fragmented amongst a number of private and public institutions. While this decentralized feature of private markets has been praised by neoliberal theorists such as Friedrich Hayek as a feature that allows for more time efficient allocation of resources, with responding to climate change the disaggregation of data and its lack of standardization may contribute to Mark Carney’s Tragedy of the Horizon concept, that I explore in Chapter 3 (Hayek 1945; Dal Maso 2019).

In the green bond market, the lack of standardization for green bond assessments resulted in a number of institutions positioning themselves as green bond expert assessors.

CICERO, one of the top Second Party Opinion providers in the green bond market, grew out of the University of Oslo, leveraging the academic credentials of the university to establish itself as an objective scientific assessor in the green bond market before spinning out as a private company.

Figure 6: CICERO’s Shades of Green While Second Party Opinions came to be seen as a gold standard amongst green bond market participants to highlight the sustainability credentials of a green bond, the scientific value and rigor of these opinions were questioned even Second Party Opinion providers themselves. A former researcher at CICERO, Johan Tilman told me that a CICERO Second Party Opinion, really is an opinion as described. He remarked that “CICERO’s method is, it is very much how it is described, It is very much an opinion. It doesn’t have the kind of rigor that I imagined that it would have.” Unimpressed with working on Second Party Opinions for green bonds, Johan drifted to focusing on adaptation finance. He feels that the projects that he works on now carry real

weight in terms of positive environmental and climate impact. Johan saw the lack of rigor in

Second Party Opinions as a result of conflict in the processes of translation work done at CICERO.

He told me, “I understand where it comes from. I think it has always caused a bit of internal conflict in people, because we are supposed to be on the research side, rather than delivering services for issuers.” According to Johan, at CICERO researchers and services “sit in the same office… essentially they are the same people.”

SEB and the IFC lauded the scientific rigor and objectivity of CICERO in the early development bank green bond issues that started the market in the late 2000s. However, Johan doubted the full objectivity of CICERO at the current moment, due to the institution’s embedding in the green bond market. Johan told me “that ability to be neutral in a way, and I think that it is difficult, it is difficult if you have a vested interest in a market to be that pure neutral voice.”

However, Johan did believe that the research side of CICERO not associated with the green bond market and Second Party Opinions still has objective scientific rigor. He told me that “the research side remains on the climate science, pure research side.” In Johan’s mind, what the green bond market lacks at this stage is objective and rigorous research. According to Johan, “the research work on green bonds has not been there,” while hinting in our conversation that this was where the significance of my own role in the green bond market should be, as a researcher. He told me that “you’re on the research side.” Johan also told me that while working at CICERO, the climate finance team was subject to many of the same anxieties I had experienced at Climate Bonds. This connects to finance being such a time-based process, which is reinforced by the temporal necessities of the Anthropocene. Johan told me, “I think that everyone in climate finance has some form of anxiety on what they are working on.” 55

3. Set up tracking and reporting The value of the assets or projects must stay equal to, or greater than, the amount of the bond. The issuer needs to track this and be able to show how they are doing it — transparency is essential. Treasuries always think this is harder than it is; sustainability officers usually say it’s easy. The trick is getting the two to talk to each other.

In step #3, we have the accounting component of green bonds that legitimizes the financial amount of the bond with environmental credentials. The value, which is different from market value. Talking across the silos within corporations and banks is highlighted (Tett 2015).

The purpose of accounting comes to the forefront here. As Mary Poovey outlines in the History of the Modern Fact, accounting is a source of social legitimacy for corporations and governments

(Poovey 1998). In the last sentence of step #3 there is also a hint at the organizational communication connected to a green bond issue. The ability of green bonds to improve communication across financial and sustainability departments in companies or government entities became an increasingly highlighted benefit of green bond issuance by underwriters,

Climate Bonds Initiative employees and other green bond market growth proponents.

4. Issue your Green Bond The usual steps apply here, as for any other conventional bond: - If needed, seek required issuance approval from regulators. That’s needed in China, for example. - Structure the bond with an investment bank or advisor; get a credit rating if needed. - Market and price the Green Bond. Reap the green bond rewards of: investor diversification, investor loyalty through deeper engagement, longer tenors and market leadership. Build your platform for long-term price benefit.

Step #4 highlights that the financial structure of a green bond is on par with generic bonds.

The growth of green bonds within the preexisting bond market supports the market. As opposed to carbon markets, which had to be constructed by public policymakers from scratch, green bonds have developed within the structure of the larger global bond market (Lovell and

MacKenzie 2011). Thus, the green bond market has many of the same dominant market actors and dynamics as the total bond market.

The language in this step reflects the time it was published, and the benefits that the

Climate Bonds initiative was extolling. Investor diversification was one of the first trackable differences between vanilla and green bonds as a point of difference. The first municipal green bond issuer in the United States was the state of Massachusetts. Massachusetts’ treasury department issued a $100 million green bond in June 2013. I heard this argument made clearly at the first green bond event I attended in April 2015 at the Boston Federal Reserve Bank. On a floor in the middle of the concrete brutalist skyscraper, with a view of a tree garden on the balcony outside the generic conference room, the state treasurers of Massachusetts and Rhode

Island gave presentations on their perspectives on and experiences with green bonds. The

Massachusetts state’s treasurer argued that diversification was one of the most significant benefits of doing a green bond issue over a vanilla bond (Keohane 2016: 45). The treasurer of

Rhode Island followed up, saying that he was excited for a Rhode Island green bond issue to get the same issuer diversification benefit. At my first green bond event, I observed the potential benefit of investor diversification driving municipal green bond issuance in the United States.

5. Monitor use of proceeds and report annually Confirm at least each year, through a public report, that the funds are still properly allocated to green projects. This can be done by a company auditor or in a letter signed by an authorised officer of the company. Most put out a simple newsletter letting investors know about green outcomes.

Step #5 centers on the continual auditing of green bonds. Issuers are expected to update the market and investors about the operation of and development of infrastructure tied to the green bonds issued. This step highlights the importance of information for the integrity of the 57

green bond market. Whether or not investors and other market participants feel that green bonds are financing infrastructure projects that adequately impact climate change and mitigate environmental degradation rests on the robustness of the infrastructure sustainability assessments as well as the continual reporting on green bond financed projects by the issuers.

Investor appetite refers to perceived demand for financial product by issuers and underwriters as financial middlemen.

The green bond market activity of Manulife, a multinational insurance and financial conglomerate, highlights the multifaceted external and internal effects to a company from a bond issue. Manulife, which was an early investor in green bonds, issued its first green bond in

2018. Their Director of Sustainability Accounting and other sustainability staff messaged Climate

Bonds analysts over the summer of 2017 to see what assets could qualify for a green bond issue.

The Manulife analysts were most interested in issuing a green bond. From this message, I organized a call with Climate Bonds’ Certification Manager to discuss how Manulife could get its green bond certified as a Climate Bond. After dozens of emails and calls, the Manulife green bond came to market.

I encountered the effects of Manulife’s green bond issue years later in Massachusetts in

2019. That spring, I took part in a Reporting 3.0 sustainability training program at the offices of

John Hancock, a subsidiary of Manulife. The Director of Sustainability at John Hancock, Kyle Cahill, pulled up an Excel spreadsheet detailing the company’s sustainability improvements (see Figure

6). Issuing green bonds was on the list of actions, alongside with internal efforts to cutdown on office paper use and reduce electricity usage. The highlighting of Manulife’s green bond by the members of the insurance conglomerate’s John Hancock sustainability team in their own auditing 58

of their sustainability initiatives demonstrates the use of green bonds not only for external monitoring but also for internal corporate assessment.

Figure 7: John Hancock Manulife Sustainability Key Performance Indicators (April 2019)

Green Bonds Create a Green Bond Market

Thus far I have attempted to breakdown the contestations around what a green bond is, and how market actors such as the Climate Bonds Initiative and others sought to define the financial product. The cumulation of green bond issues produces the green bond market. The

Climate Bonds’ Market Intelligence Team’s Excel spreadsheet is a direct digital production of the market. Each row of the spreadsheet tallies the quantitative data of a green bond, and the cumulative characteristics of the green bond market are calculated by market analysts using the spreadsheet to add up the current value of the global market. In the next half of this chapter, I analyze the significance of debates around what constitutes a green bond and the forms of data gathering and analysis that influence and feed these debates.

Numbers in Finance

Donald Mackenzie, Fabian Muniesa, Heather Lovell, Caitlin Zaloom and many other scholars have analyzed production and primacy of quantitative information and data in financial markets in a number of works (Zaloom 2003, 2009; Lovell and MacKenzie 2011; Muniesa, Millo, and Callon 2007). Mary Poovey in The History of the Modern Fact looks at the rise of numbers in accounting and business practices in relation to the earlier primacy of words and narrative

(Poovey 1998). The processes of calculation at play in the green bond market begin with the formal counting of the totality of the green bond market itself. The Climate Bonds Initiative green bond market list began in an Excel spreadsheet (and continues to be in an Excel spreadsheet despite calls to upgrade the data storing format!). Climate Bonds’ first employees would spend their time tallying green bond issuance and adding up the total currency amount.

To put together Climate Bonds’ list of green bonds, researchers look up bonds on public databases to look up each new green bond issuance to get its value and other bond characteristics and also verify this information via Thomson Reuters Eikon and Bloomberg terminal. The totality of the green bond market, is calculated in a particular format, based on financial data. Bonds receive CUSIP numbers. CUSIP stands for Committee on Uniform Securities

Identification Procedures. Lacking stock tickers for bonds, CUSIPS are the main way brokers and investors look up bonds to invest in or research.9 “Common Language. Uncommon Value.” was the motto in January 2020 for CUSIP Global Services, which is managed by S&P Global, an active

9 https://www.cusip.com/cusip/index.htm 60

participant in the green bond market and one of the world’s largest rating agencies. The bonds also have International Securities Identification Numbering (ISIN) identifiers. ISIN is a standard for stocks, bonds, options, and futures that the International Organization for Standards (ISO) became the manager of in 1990 ('History of ISIN Number Codes').

Pricing Research and the Emergence of the Greenium10

In database work in the green bond market, the debate over whether a pricing difference between green and vanilla bonds existed, came to dominate both bond analysis and conference debate amongst market participants. This debate came to reflect the value of green bonds and also shape the market itself. Green bonds can be constituted as an asset class if the bonds have distinct pricing characteristics in comparison to other bond groups. An asset class is a broad group of financial securities that react similarly to market conditions.11 Thus, the existence of a pricing difference between green bonds and vanilla bonds is a key debate for academics and practitioners attempting to define what green bonds are.

Prices play a variety of roles in a market (Velthuis 2007). Within the social studies of finance, pricing has been analyzed with several perspectives. The centrality of prices in mainstream economics, enters it into conversation in economic anthropology. The Climate Bonds

10 Section contains material already published in the Journal of Environmental Investing (Harrison, Partridge, and Tripathy 2020)

11 https://marketbusinessnews.com/financial-glossary/asset-class/ 61

Initiative’s pricing work is managed by Caroline Harrison, who has had a pivotal role in defining and naming the study of green bond pricing.

The Origin of Greenium

In the green bond market’s early days, anecdotal statements from green bond issuers that their bonds were being oversubscribed, resulting in a pricing difference in relation to equivalent vanilla bonds, lead some market participants to argue that green bonds provide a cheaper cost of capital. However, until the market matured to a size large enough to amass enough comparable bonds for analysis, this anecdotal evidence was unverifiable. The pricing difference search between vanilla and green bonds began with a white paper published by Barclays analysts

(Preclaw and Bakshi 2015). Two years later, the concept of the greenium arose from internal discussion at the Climate Bonds Initiative.

The Climate Bonds Initiative’s Caroline Harrison, coined the term in collaboration with colleagues. According to Caroline:

I met with Sean [CEO of the Climate Bonds Initiative] in April 2016, he asked me whether I could find any evidence of green bonds pricing differently from vanilla bonds. He had heard market participants talking about green bonds pricing with lower yields than vanilla equivalents, and he thought it could be an interesting hook to encourage more issuers to print green bonds.

Ordinarily, a bond issuer pays a yield slightly above the 'market' to issue a new bond. This is known as a new issue premium, and the price of the bond is therefore slightly cheaper for the buyer. This is a normal feature of the new issue market. However, around 2016 market talk was that green bonds were being priced with a new issue discount (Harrison, Partridge, and Tripathy

2020). 62

In their early research, Caroline and the Climate Bonds Initiative team wanted to know whether this discount was consistently present in green bonds or not, or whether the green label could influence pricing. This novel focus on pricing in the green bond market needed a name, and the name emerged through deliberation at the Climate Bonds Initiative. In Caroline’s words: I had some conversations with Andrew Whiley, Head of Communications at Climate Bonds, about labeling this difference (real or perceived). This was around the time that the UK voted to leave Europe, and that process had been termed Brexit, which we liked and which had been incorporated into the vernacular… Andrew loved the greenium term and immediately began to use it in communications. We were thrilled when we noticed the term had been used by an independent third party.

While griscount, an earlier name that Caroline brainstormed, would have been a clearer naming for the pricing difference, since it is a new issue discount that she was researching, greenium was catchier and more positive. Focusing on the greenium, Caroline spent the first couple of months informally looking at spreads of green bonds in the secondary market. She looked at EUR, GBP, and USD denominated bonds and compared them with vanilla bonds of the same issuer. Instinctively, the Climate Bonds team had not expected to find any differences, given that the bondholder would be facing the same entity irrespective of whether the bond was labeled green (Harrison, Partridge, and Tripathy 2020). The logical explanation for this was the impact of a green label, along with the yield also gained from moving further down the credit curve.

Contextualizing Pricing Research in Market Talk

From an early 2015 pricing study by Barclays analysts and the Climate Bonds Initiative’s early naming of and continued analyzing of the existence of a greenium, pricing debates have expanded amongst economists and finance scholars, occurring in conference panels and through

published white and peer reviewed papers. Michel Callon argues that “economics, in the broad sense of the term, performs, shapes and formats the economy, rather than observing how it functions” (1998: 14). A growing number of greenium analyses and debates amongst academics and green bond analysts coincides with continual market commentary on the existence of a greenium for individual green bonds that come to market. Amongst green bond market participants, perspectives on a greenium rest on market positions. As the market has developed, commentary on the investment side has changed with some investors arguing that they are investing at par and others saying that they are giving preference to green bonds.

A panel titled “Pricing deep dive: greenium, halos and trajectories” at the Climate Bonds

Initiative Annual Conference 2019 that focused on pricing discussions in the market demonstrates the difference between academic pricing discussions and market participant debate. This panel was made up of members of bond syndicate and origination at UniCredit, SEB,

Credit Suisse, JP Morgan, and other market entities. Pricing dynamics in the green bond market were discussed at length, but in a very different and much more pragmatic manner than in the pricing research we have presented here. The panel recognized the proliferation of the greenium conversation in both academic and market circles, with one participant noting that “the term greenium had been adopted to mean many different things.” According to the participant, greenium has been used to describe bonds being priced underneath the issuer yield curb, while issuers have adopted the term to mean they shaved a couple basis points off what they thought they would get from the market for an issuance.

While the bond syndicate and origination heads were aware of and noted and assessed academic pricing research, their description of the thought that went into actual green bond 64

deals differed greatly from the focused pricing description of academics. As one syndicate head noted, “[t]here is still a lot of art rather than science in syndicate pricing on desks.” In constructing green bond transactions, syndicates bring in market feeling and conversation into their analysis, as opposed to the overall market analysis of academic research. In this vein, when asked whether or not there is a greenium in the green bond market, a panelist stated, “intuitively there should be a greenium.” When pressed to elaborate on what this intuition is based on, the panelist argued that “the thing is economics is not like physics, ultimately it is about people.” In the green bond market, the process by which prices are put forth into the market is as much from current pricing analysis as it is from human relationships and discussion (Guyer 2009; Muniesa 2007). There is also an emotional and intuitive element to how syndicate desks respond to green bond issues. In parallel, Caitlin Zaloom notes in her study of the yield curve that predictive models in finance produce affect and emotion amongst financiers (Zaloom 2009).

Figure 8: Cover of “Green Bond Pricing in the Primary Market: July – December 2018” This pricing that aggregates in a potential yield curve is both “an epistemic and affective object” (Zaloom 2009). The yield curve has a particular place in the bond market, given its use to

chart bond pricing and future market fluctuations. This curve came to dominate the Climate

Bonds Initiative’s pricing reports (see Figure 8). Mark Turner, Climate Bonds’ graphic designer, told me that out of all the reports on which he worked, the pricing reports were the most difficult for him to comprehend. Economists and academics working on the greenium highlight its epistemic use, while the syndicate desk members on the Climate Bonds panel highlight its affective role in the green bond market itself (Çalışkan 2005). Prices are a synthesis of negotiations between people and institutions at distinct moments (Ferry 2016). The academic focus on pricing conversations is a result of the lens of economic analysis, while green bond prices themselves are generated by the motivations of the issuer, underwriters, verifiers, and investors involved in each issuance.

Along with direct discussion on pricing, the panel also discussed the numerous side effects and complimentary impacts of green bonds that complicate a singular search for a pricing difference. The green halo effect, the tendency of a green bond issue to positively impact both the bond and equity pricing of a green bond issuer, also complicates the quantification of a greenium (Basar and Krebbers 2019). As one bond syndicate head argued, “a green bond is of course a loudspeaker, it is the best way for me to communicate directly to the market on my sustainability.” This communication impacts multiple relationships between an issuer and its market relationships to investors and underwriters, which in turn influences multiple prices. The existence of a green halo effect complicates the search for a greenium in that the halo extends to vanilla bond issuance as well (Basar and Krebbers 2019).

Reflecting on the weight of arguments and statements on green bond pricing from issuers, underwriters, and investors; Caroline remarks that “this is the thing I cannot measure…. 66

When issuers say this and there is no benchmark for comparison, I am skeptical. I trust the syndicate response because they are the ones doing this work… I buy what the syndicates say, but I cannot prove it either.” With regards to green bond pricing dynamics, discussions from panels such as that at the Climate Bonds Initiative Annual Conference provide reflection that is closest to direct pricing decision making in the green bond market. The consensus of the panel that “intuitively there should be a greenium,” illuminates how the concept of a greenium already exists for green bond dealmakers. Echoing this, from the forthcoming results of investor surveys carried out by the Climate Bonds Initiative, investors seem to overweigh green bonds in bond holdings regardless of a pricing difference (Almeida, Harrison, and Sette 2020).

These comments from this conference panel are important not only in relation to academic greenium debates, but also in relation to official statements from green bond market entities. While much more aggressive green bond buying seems to be the norm from off the record or Chatham House rules events, official statements are much more conservative. As

Marilyn Ceci, Head of Green Bonds at JP Morgan, states in her official statement for this paper:

“Green Bonds price on market. Generally, they price in line with traditional bonds, but occasionally demand outstrips supply and they can price a few basis points tighter.” This statement needs to be taken for its value in signifying the type of institution JP Morgan is.

In the bank’s green bond work, JP Morgan has been very active in bringing new green bond issuers to market, but for its role as an underwriter, conservative stances provide the investment bank with a reputation for objectivity. This objectivity lends legitimacy to the bank’s underwriting activities where although the bank’s monetary incentives are to get issuers to issue

as many green bonds as possible for underwriter fees. However, JP Morgan’s ability to gain clientele rests on the objectivity of its financial expertise and power in financial markets.

Numbers for Markets and Governance

In this chapter I have put the data that constitutes what a green bond and what the green bond market is into the context of the market talk and debates that interpret and further produce green bond market data. The debates and forms of data production around green bond counting, pricing, green and infrastructure assessment create both numbers and forms of audit governance as well as further market narratives that feed continued data work on green bonds (Özden-

Schilling 2015). I argue that the production of green bond market data occurs through political and social relationships between organizations and people. This produces green bonds as an asset class with a pricing differentiation, as well as green infrastructure. I outline what a green bond has been framed as being, and the resultant pricing and green infrastructure assessments associated with this data. Green, in the green bond market, is political and tied to framings of development and scale (Krauss 2015; Smith 2010).

The debates that surround the green bond market often end on the argument that better data is the answer. While green bond market structure and focus continues to evolve, the fallibility of the market system is either data or political will. In the last week of July 2020, the latest State of the Market report was released by Climate Bonds. Head of Communications

Andrew Whiley alerted the team, writing in his email: “Markets latest report: Green Bonds Global

State of the Market 2019 Part 1. It's chock full of data, data, data.”

Chapter 2: Green Bond Market Narratives around Numbers

300 ABS Financial corporate 250 Non-financial corporate Development bank 200 Local government 150 Government-backed entity Sovereign 100 Loan

50 USD BillionUSD 0 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020

Figure 9: Green bond market by year and issuer (Climate Bonds Initiative 2020) Anxious energy and debate surrounded the nascent and growing green bond market over my period of fieldwork. When I began research in the winter of 2014, $36.6 billion in green bonds had been issued by 73 institutions that year, bringing the market to a total of $53.2 billion outstanding green bonds (Olsen-Rong 2015). By the end of the first financial quarter of 2018 when I finished a one-year period of fieldwork in London, there was a total of $364 billion outstanding green bonds (Rado 2018). As I wrote my dissertation, the total issuance of green bonds continued to rise to $773 billion at the beginning of 2020 and passed $1 trillion in total issuance by December 2020 (Climate Bonds Initiative 2020).

In this chapter, I contextualize and chart the green bond market’s growth. I argue that the development of green bond market data and material infrastructure, such as physical infrastructure sustainability screening and green bond assessment responded to performative discourse and narratives around sustainability/climate change in market (Leins 2018; Holmes

2013; Leins 2020; Appadurai 2016). I present the narratives that came to surround the green bond market. My focus on narratives around financial markets follows anthropology of finance ethnographies that stress the role of narrative in driving and supporting financial activity (Zaloom

2006; Leins 2018; Ho 2009; Hertz 1998; Chong and Tuckett 2015).

The narratives attached to financial markets that frame present and future market perceptions are themselves a key component of financial markets (Leins 2018). I argue that the social meanings of markets are what drive market activity, rather than expert abstraction that is beyond the social (Alexander 2011). Narratives and calculative numbers not only analyze what is happening in a market but also influence what will happen (MacKenzie 2008).

Since the inception of the green bond market, standards for green infrastructure projects financed by green bonds have been a concern of investors, issuers, civil society, and the public sector (Riles 2018). Indeed, the European Investment Bank and the World Bank both tried to set a standard of public disclosure in issuing their green bonds. Çalışkan and Callon note that “the public- and private-sector research centers that prepare new products and processes, the international monetary or financial institutions, the regulatory or standardization agencies”

(Çalışkan and Callon 2010: 8) are some of the main entities involved in establishing markets.

These market actors comprise mainstream financial institutions, governments, and NGOs

(MacLeod 2004). Market standards have been developed at the government level, by NGOs, 70

international organizations, and private banks. Debt markets in particular are a salient intermediary between the governments and private institutions (Barreyre and Delalande 2020).

The green bond market’s cross-sectional functioning between public and private entities highlights a contemporary blending that goes beyond academic discipline research divisions between states, markets, public and private spheres. As Felix Stein argues in A Research Agenda for Economic Anthropology, “for more than a decade, anthropologists approaching states and markets as fundamentally different have tended to describe their relationship with reference to neoliberalism” (Stein 2019: 25). The development of the green bond market by supranational entities challenges this division of the public and private in distinguishing states and markets.

Climate finance enmeshes countries and markets with governments, corporations, and global law firms in the same market space (Lovell 2015).

As the green bond market grew, organizations produced and acquired data and developed analysis to interpret and understand green bonds as a financial asset class. This production of data analysis on the green bond market accords with the impact of financial market data found by Knorr Cetina, Preda, and Calişkan in their research on the role of prices and commodity information in constructing and forming financial markets (Çalişkan 2010; Preda

2009; Knorr Cetina and Preda 2006). The numbers that frame the growth of the green bond market are the product of database work and calculative technologies used by green bond analysts and climate finance practitioners, much in a similar way to the electricity analysts and cotton traders studied by Çalişkan and Özden‐Schilling use numbers (Özden‐Schilling 2016;

Çalişkan 2010; Pardo-Guerra 2019). In the green bond, electricity, and cotton markets, market

participants base their decision making both on constructed data about green bonds, electricity, and cotton as well as data on meta market conditions.

Green bond market data is produced by processes outlined as quantitative and objective research. However, numbers gain traction and significance in the green bond market through the narratives with which they are associated. The importance of narrative is explicitly recognized by actors in sustainable finance. As anthropologist, medical doctor, and former head of the World

Bank Jim Kim states: “We need to be very smart in developing narrative around climate change.”

The green bond market is a place where market and climate change narratives intertwine.

Market Narratives and Performativity

In his study of a Swiss bank, Stefan Leins documents how financial analysts use market data to construct narratives that produce financial value (Leins 2018). While this is at play in the green bond market, financial narrative framing is compounded by a number of other quasi financial, civil society, and public policy organizations such as Climate Bonds, the 2ii Initiative, and the World Wildlife Fund. These relationships are important and underlie my argument that even as green bonds become technical financial products, legitimate within a supposedly “rational” and “objective” financial market, they are profoundly shaped by nonmarket social relations that create and legitimate them.

I have identified three primary thematic narratives that animate and drove the last ten years of green bond market growth. In this chapter, I explore the history of green bonds through three themes:

1. There is a need for new financial products to mitigate climate and environmental risk

(Tripathy 2017).

2. These new products allow bankers to keep using markets to tackle these risks; which has

the added benefit that bankers can self-reflect and be moral actors in their work and

identity construction.

3. These new products need to be legitimated in ways that are understandable to bankers

and financial market participants.

Along with the three themes that have pushed the initial growth of the green bond market, I identify five narratives that structure how market participants evaluate the green bond market.

These are normative narratives, that focus on what green bonds and the green bond market should be. The five normative narratives that I have identified are:

1. $1 Trillion by 2020

2. Aligning the Sustainable Development Goals with Green bonds

3. A Hot Air Balloon?

4. Is there a Greenium?

5. A Market Born out of Low Interest Rates

These three primary themes and five normative narratives serve two important functions:

First. they fit closely enough to current models to allow people to think that they can change markets from within and that therefore climate change does not have to radically overturn the financial industry in which they are really invested in. Second, these narratives establish an interpretive community in both markets and governments that is committed to growing the green bond market. Climate finance NGOs, foundations, central banks, and public policy think 73

tanks are members of this interpretive community and participate in the green bond market for public policy and other purposes. These organizations, while not directly involved in green bond market activity, form the boundaries of and conversations around the green bond market. As

Callon et al. note, “forms of organization of economic markets and their modes of functioning are becoming an explicit issue for multiple actors and especially for economic agents themselves”

(Callon, Méadel, and Rabeharisoa 2002: 194). Similarly Nik-Khah and Mirowksi acknowledge the importance of the public sector in markets through detailing attempts by public entities to build/design markets for public use (Nik-Khah and Mirowski 2019).

Callon and Çalışkan attempt to label the performativity of market narratives on market dynamics as marketization (Çalışkan and Callon 2010). Narratives shape discourse that impacts the performativity that frames the green bond market. Donald Mackenzie stresses the importance of performativity in the impact of financial modelling on the financial markets that they purport to describe (MacKenzie 2008). Çalışkan and Callon expand on the implications of this in their economization arguments (Çalışkan and Callon 2010).

Over my fieldwork in the green bond market, I observed the construction of market infrastructure in response to debates and arguments amongst climate finance practitioners over what constitutes effective gatekeeping for the market to achieve the narratives put on it by heterogenous market actors. These debates create contention, but also bring market actors together at conferences and events which galvanize future green bond issuance (Mosse 2011).

These narratives define the future of the green bond market and evaluate the market in its present (Cronon 2009: 120).

The First Green Bonds

The green bond market’s dramatic growth between 2014 and 2019 was markedly different from the first seven years of the market’s history, when green bonds were a niche financial product issued by international development banks. Green bonds began in July 2007, when the European Investment Bank, one of the European Union’s development banks, issued its first Climate Awareness Bonds (JPMorgan Chase 2014). The European Investment Bank’s bonds were followed shortly afterwards in 2008 by the World Bank’s first green bond issuance.

The World Bank’s bonds were the first to be labelled explicitly as green bonds in response to Swedish pension funds asking for green financial products to invest in conversation with the sustainable finance team at Skandinaviska Enskilda Banken (SEB) bank, a regional Nordic bank which was the bond underwriter.1213 This desire for sustainable debt by Swedish pension funds, connects to narrative #1, in which institutional investors attempt to respond to concerns about environmental degradation through financial action. Other development banks such as the

International Finance Corporation (IFC) entered the market following the lead of the World Bank in 2011.

During these early days of the market, many of the development bank bonds were marketed only to specific retail markets where bankers saw demand for environmental products, such as the Japanese retail Uridashi market (which roughly translates as bulk or wholesale) and

12 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gonSbpWvkQ

13 An underwriter is a bank that works to sell an issuer’s bonds to investors. 75

Swedish pension funds.14 This was the case into 2010, when the European Investment Bank issued a cumulative amount of EUR1 billion in Climate Awareness Bonds.15 As the green bond market began to grow dramatically, the EIB and the World Bank both took credit for issuing the first green bond, with media outlets crafting origins stories for the market with both organizations as the inventors.1617 While the origin of green bonds is mildly contested between these two development banks, there also exists an origin story tied to one individual who was an early advocate of the market: Christopher Flensborg.

Green Bonds Origin Myth

The first time I was told about green bonds by an impact finance practitioner, I was told the story of the SEB banker, Christopher Flensborg. The practitioner described Flensborg as the first to come up with the concept of a green bond. Flensborg had been a banker his whole life, and midway in his career he was diagnosed with a brain tumor and underwent a surgical procedure to remove it. While in recovery, Flensborg pondered the meaning of his life, and became adamant that once fully healed he would leave banking and go to try to save the world, in order to give his life true meaning. However, once he fully recovered, he realized that it really was banking that he was good at, and thus he sought to use his banking skills to do good in the world, rather than leave his profession entirely. So it came to be that Flensborg championed the

14 https://www.climatebonds.net/2014/05/new-world-bank-retail-green-bond

15 https://www.climatebonds.net/2014/05/eib-issues-€300-million-“climate-awareness-bonds”

16 https://www.worldbank.org/en/results/2017/12/01/green-bonds

17 https://www.globalcapital.com/article/b144nc1gwdpfzj/10-years-of-green-bond-issuance-at-eib 76

cause of green bonds at SEB when the bank worked on the World Bank’s first green bond issuance.

While there is debate among market participants whether Flensborg really was the inventor of green bonds, many say the concept was already in the air, which aligns with EIB’s issuance of Climate Awareness Bonds. Yet Flensborg’s story highlights some key features of the green bond market. Highlighting narrative #2, green bonds are often described by market actors as a dramatic outcome of personal reflection and redemption for career bankers but also as an innovation in line with standard financial practice. This narrative of bankers being inspired by callings outside of banking itself, particularly one instigated by a major life event, is prevalent in the portrayal of other green bond practitioners, particularly amongst investment bankers.

The Climate Bonds Initiative

As the development banks started the green bond market, in 2009 a much smaller market player emerged out of growing calls and concerns around narrative #3: the need to legitimize the market’s environmental and climate credentials in a manner comprehensible to financial market participants. The Climate Bonds Initiative was launched out of the Network for Sustainable

Financial Markets during the United Nations’ Conference of the Parties in Copenhagen.18 This was an impromptu network that developed out of a group of academics, finance practitioners and others interested in sustainability and the growth of climate finance markets. According to one member of the network, Climate Bonds was “the idea that worked!” His enthusiasm for

18 https://www.climatebonds.net/2014/05/climate-bonds-launch-fast-track-solution-low-carbon-economy 77

Climate Bonds arose principally due to the dramatic growth of the green bond market and the

NGO’s ability to influence market actors. Initially the Initiative focused on tracking and counting the number of issued green bonds, while also spreading the idea of green bonds to potential issuers and government regulators. As the market grew globally, the Climate Bonds Initiative has also worked to develop green bond markets in China, Brazil, India, Nigeria, and Kenya.

The emergence of the Climate Bonds Initiative as a key organization in the green bond market highlights processes of organizational change at play in climate finance. The green bond market arose initially from the actions of large established institutions such as the World Bank and the European Investment Bank, but its growth has been propelled forward by smaller startup style NGOs that due to their full organizational focus on a novel space, can feed market analysis and predictions to larger institutions. Alongside the Climate Bonds Initiative,

Environmental Finance; a for-profit financial journalism and media enterprise, began to cover the emergence of the green bond market. However, instead of producing market data and commentary as a public good, Environmental Finance offers its services for yearly subscriptions from users.

Green Bonds Allow Mainstream Finance to Work on Climate Change

In the markets’ early days, Christopher Flensborg and his green bond outfit at SEB were instrumental in getting more green bonds issued, pushing different branches of the World Bank

–such as the International Finance Corporation – to issue green bonds with SEB as the underwriters. In the words of a longtime green bonds advocate, “these were the days of the imperial ambitions of Christopher Flensborg at SEB.” SEB still proclaims green bonds to be the 78

bank’s invention, as the bank’s website states, “The Green Bond concept was developed in

2007/2008 by SEB and the World Bank as a response to increased investor demand for engagement in climate-related opportunities” (SEB Bank 2012).19

To evaluate the sustainability of the infrastructure projects that the green bonds they underwrote were financing, Flensborg and his team at SEB partnered with CICERO, a sustainability research institute at the University of Oslo. Reflecting on the need for environmental science in the green bond market, one practitioner told me that “Decisions about what is green need to be based on the science - as per the World Bank's first green bond where climate scientists at CICERO in University of Oslo were asked to assess the green credentials of the World Bank’s projects.” Off of the World Bank’s first green bond issuance, other branches of the World Bank such as the IFC, also issued green bonds referencing the guidance of CICERO.

While highlighting the scientific analysis of infrastructure by organizations such as CICERO became a mainstay in the green bond market, the beginnings of this practice were not as robust as what would later be demanded by market participants. According to Michael Eckhart, former head of Sustainable Finance at Citi and the initial author of the Green Bond Principles, this guidance was really a phone call with CICERO tangentially approving the World Bank’s or IFC’s green bond projects.

CICERO stands for the Center for International Climate and Energy Research-Oslo. During

Climate Week 2018 in NYC, I asked a longtime CICERO researcher what CICERO stood for. He told me that it was really a forced acronym to connect to the Roman orator Cicero. For the research

19 https://sebgroup.com/large-corporates-and-institutions/our-services/markets/fixed-income/green-bonds 79

center, Cicero invokes the orator’s legacy of spreading truth to the wider public and to give voice for scientific reason in financial markets and green building. Interestingly, CICERO is sometimes spelled as the name Cicero, such as in this quote from Stephen Liberatore, Managing Director at pension provider TIAA-Cref: "What’s considered green is different for everyone. Our investors need to be comfortable…reaching out to Cicero is a great first step.”20 The acronym in these cases becomes the signified. CICERO’s climate finance team continued to be a relatively small group, even as their role grew dramatically in the green bond market. Ultimately, with a deluge of green bond second opinions, CICERO spun out as CICERO Shades of Green, a private company focused on providing Second Party Opinions to green bond issuers.

By August 2020, CICERO would provide sustainability Second Party Opinions and verifications to 42% of the green bond market by cumulative volume. This translates to 82% of all green bonds with Second Party Opinions.21 This percentage highlights the dominant role

CICERO has gained as a gatekeeper for the validity of evaluations of the green bond market’s sustainability and climate impacts. The trajectory of CICERO from a center within an academic institution to a private company in order to manage its dominant role as an assessor of sustainability for green financed projects, highlights the institutional impact of the early exponential growth of the green bond market on market participants.

20 http://www.cicero.uio.no/en/posts/single/klimafinans

21 Climate Bonds Initiative Communication August 2020 80

In partnership, SEB and CICERO attempted to grow the green bond market. The idea of green bonds spread throughout the banking sector, particularly amongst underwriters22. 2013 was a breakthrough year for green bonds, with municipalities issuing them both in Europe and the United States from the city of Gothenburg in Sweden to the state of Massachusetts in the

United States. Private entities such as Credit Agricole, Toyota, and Unilever began to issue green bonds as well, learning about the concept from both the development banks and investment banks.

However, SEB’s role started to be sidelined as larger banks with more of a global reach entered into the market, driven by climate finance practitioners working at underwriters who did not want to be beholden to a regional Nordic bank. Suzanne Buchta at Bank of America Merrill

Lynch, Michael Eckhart at Citigroup, and Marilyn Ceci at JP Morgan were particularly instrumental in bringing together those working in sustainable debt at investment banks around the world. 23

The bankers were also in discussion from the beginning with climate finance NGO leaders such as Sean Kidney. Citi’s Michael Eckhart for instance met Sean Kidney at a conference in 2012, and the two quickly became “blood brothers,” in the words of Eckhart. At Bank of America Merrill

Lynch, Suzanne Buchta, characterized as an environmentalist in her everyday life as an “avid hiker and nature lover,” pushed green bonds to the center of Bank of America Merrill Lynch’s environmental investment shift, part of an overall attempt to deal with systemic risks in the bank

22 “Underwriters purchase debt securities, such as government bonds, corporate bonds, municipal bonds, or preferred stock, from the issuing body (usually a company or government agency) to resell them for a profit. This profit is known as the "underwriting spread.", https://www.investopedia.com/terms/u/underwriter.asp

23https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20140113005286/en/CORRECTING-REPLACING-Green-Bond- Principles-Created-Issuers 81

in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis.24 The Green Bond Principles represent the core private sector governance response active in shaping the green bond market.

Green Bond Principles and the Legitimization of Green Bonds

Building on this momentum, in January 2014, the Green Bond Principles (GBP) were established by a consortium of investment banks, including Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Citi, and BNP Paribas.25 The principles began when Michael Eckhardt and Suzanne Buchta began talking at the Environmental Bonds conference in London in the winter of 2012-13. In June 2013, on a flight to San Francisco, Michael Eckhart took the time to hammer out the first draft of the principles, in a focused period of work for three hours. He told the flight attendant to make sure his wine glass was full!

While SEB’s sustainable finance team initially resisted the formation of the GBP they soon joined its executive committee and collaborated with the other banks. After establishing the

Green Bond Principles, the banks then searched for a third organization to be a secretariat for the principles, and coordinate communication and future work amongst the banks. They settled on the International Capital Markets Association (ICMA), an international association based in

Switzerland, focused on promoting robust debt capital markets.

With clear guidelines on how to issue a green bond now available to prospective green bond issuers, 2014 and 2015 continued the upward momentum in the green bond market. The

24 http://fortune.com/2018/08/20/bank-of-america-wind-solar-energy/

25 http://investor.shareholder.com/jpmorganchase/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=818581 82

year 2014 ended with $36.6 billion issued by 73 institutions, bringing the market to a total of

$53.2 billion outstanding green bonds (Olsen-Rong 2015). By the end of 2015, the green bond market reached $100 billion (Climate Bonds Initiative 2015a: 1). In 2016, supported by the

People’s Bank of China’s green bond guidelines, 39% of 2016’s green bonds were issued by

Chinese State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs), totaling $36.2 billion. The People’s Bank of China and the NDRC came together to issue China Climate-Aligned Green Bond Guidelines. This dramatic market growth demonstrates the impact of momentum from multiple angles of the market, both the private and public sector. The success of China’s Green Bond Guidelines spurred public entities around the world to create their own versions of green bond guidance.

In 2016, large green bond issuance by New York City’s Metropolitan Transportation

Authority and Apple, with a $1.5 billion green bond, continued to grow the market (Climate

Bonds Initiative 2016). 2017 began with optimism off of the dramatic growth of 2016, and continued to beat projections, particularly with a large reclassifying of bonds as green by Fannie

Mae from their Energy Star certified green mortgages program at the very end of the year. This large reclassification of bonds highlighted the emergent structure of green bond market infrastructure, and how it would interpret the reclassification of bonds.

Fannie Mae Reclassifies into the Green Bond Market

Nearing the close of 2017, Fannie Mae’s multifamily green financing program reclassified

$24.9 billion of its bonds as green, boosting total issuance in 2017 to $155 billion. 26 This reclassification was spearheaded by Chrissa Pagistas, the Director of Green Financing at Fannie

Mae. While there had been talks between Climate Bonds and Fannie Mae about putting together a green bond program over the summer of 2017, it was unexpected that they would recategorize such a large swathe of their bond program so quickly. Following market practice, Pagistas and her team established a dedicated web page for Fannie Mae’s green bonds to provide visibility on the program to investors. In August of 2017 Fannie Mae had also issued a REMIC, Real estate mortgage investment conduit, that was backed entirely by mortgages to green homes, which was already included in green bond lists. These bonds were reviewed by Second Party Opinion provider CICERO, initially a research institute branch of University of Oslo that was spun out in

2019 as a for profit entity due to its fee intake from providing opinions in the green bond market

(interview Moody’s September 26, 2019).

Thus, while $120 billion was the touted final 2017 figure by the Climate Bonds Initiative,

Bloomberg and other market watching organizations, with Fannie Mae’s rebranding of its bonds as green the number jumped to $155 billion. Media outlets were taken by surprise by the quick surge in green bond numbers by the year, but the new number was also quickly accepted and consistent with media stories of exponential market growth. Bloomberg accepted Fannie Mae’s

26 https://www.climatebonds.net/2018/01/2017-gb-issuance-usd1555bn-new-record-all-2017-numbers-count- our-green-bond-highlights 84

green bonds readily into their database, prompting the Climate Bonds Initiative to add the bonds to their yearly tally as well. The bonds in the Climate Bonds Initiative market list were continually reviewed by the Markets team, to see if the infrastructure funded by the bonds was in line with the company’s Climate Bonds Standard.

With the Fannie Mae green bonds, there was a question about whether the environmental standards (Energy star ratings) by which the green buildings receiving mortgages from the program were up to par with the taxonomy that the Climate Bonds Initiative wanted to see from the green bond market. Certified sustainable buildings represented only about a third of Fannie Mae’s green bonds, with the rest of the bonds financing energy and water efficiency mortgages, which target 25% reduction in consumption, with the minimum acceptable for Fannie

Mae to buy them under the program being 20%.

As a Climate Bonds analyst stated while reflecting on the bonds, “In principle, the fact that buildings are certified is currently sufficient to include them in the database… In cases like this we comment in the blog that we prefer stronger standards. In any event, they are interested in getting certified so there are many conversations to be had about the certification standard so plenty of scope to convince them to improve their thresholds (I hope).” Fannie Mae’s green bonds were ultimately accepted by Bloomberg’s and other green bond lists, despite critique by the Climate Bonds Initiative. However, when an oil and gas company tried to enter the market in

2017 its bonds were resoundingly rejected by green bond indices and market watchdogs.

Repsol

The Spanish energy company Repsol’s green bond issue in April 2017 was a big moment in the market. This was the first time an oil and gas company issued a green bond. Repsol’s green bond was for energy efficiency improvements on an oil refinery and gas plants.

In the words of one green bonds analyst:

If you invest in improvements in a gas plant are you just encouraging more gas to come through a leaky system, negating and emission savings? Potentially; so you at least have to have system measuring - which largely doesn't exist on the planet at this stage. When you hear people talking about emission savings from gas they are generally talking about "deemed" emission savings - estimated. Turns out that when we do get a chance to test (cf two NOAA reports in the US) there is a big discrepancy between estimates and reality. There has to be a much higher bar on fossil fuels proving their value, especially because the blow-out risks - one blow-out and you wipe out savings.

While Repsol’s green bond was rejected by sustainability investors and the green bond market, the bond was still bought by mainstream investors. Repsol even got a sustainability award from the Petroleum Economist magazine.27 In response, one green bonds advocate stated, “Well, an award from the Petroleum Economist magazine is dubious at best - I think they were a shoo in!…

I'm sure the Petroleum Economist Magazine is well-practiced at keeping a straight face when it comes to speaking about the sustainability of the O&G industry!” Repsol continued to look at the green bond market with interest throughout 2017 and 2018, with their bond underwriter Citi, encouraging discussions between the company and the ESG sector. Repsol’s green bond issuance reignited calls for standards in the green bond market, and while its rejection from green bond

27https://www.repsol.com/en/press-room/press-releases/2017/11/23/repsol-green-bond-wins-petroleum- economist-award.cshtml 86

indices was seen by analysts at the Climate Bonds Initiative and other entities as a sign of market robustness, financial journalists found the self-labelling alarming.2829

Standardizing Green Bonds

Beginning in 2011, the Climate Bonds Initiative worked to develop the Climate Bonds

Standard for different project categories of green bonds to organize expertise around different sustainable infrastructure types. As aforementioned, under the Standard’s Taxonomy infrastructure categories include Solar, Wind, Low Carbon Buildings, Bus Rapid Transit,

Bioenergy, Water, Agriculture and Forestry, Geothermal, and Low Carbon Transport. The categories are ultimately approved by an independent Climate Bonds Standard Board made up of experts in finance, engineering, environmental management, and law (Climate Bonds Initiative

2015b). Through creating the Standard, the Climate Bonds Initiative cemented itself as a standardizing agency in the green bond market, insuring the organization a place in both public and private green bond market development discussions around the world.

In establishing the Climate Bonds Standard, Climate Bonds analysts draws from numerous forms of expertise to create different categories of green bonds for certification. Climate Bonds legitimizes its Standard through the organization of scientific and industry bodies of experts to both create and assess the certification scheme. While it is scientific knowledge that legitimizes the certification scheme, this knowledge must still be made legible for finance professionals. As

28 https://impactalpha.com/green-indices-reject-repsols-green-bond-13a2f01ace2e/

29 https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-07-18/green-bond-market-needs-to-get-tough-to-blossom 87

a Climate Bonds team member in charge of organizing expert panels for different Climate Bonds

Standard groups stated, “the moment you say science people think everything is too difficult.

Science is numbers, graphs, scary stuff. Investors understand risks and impacts really well, it’s a different type of expertise.” Thus, Climate Bonds team members work to translate scientific knowledge into risk and impact as understood in monetary terms by finance professionals

(Tripathy 2017).

While the Climate Bonds Initiative pushed its own third-party certification scheme for green bond issuers in order to set a standard beyond the broad overview provided by the green bond principles, governments around the world began to take steps to put forth their own guidelines for domestic green bond issuance. The Climate Bonds Certification scheme began in

2014 with the certification of bonds financing solar farms in the United Kingdom that were attached to German solar developer Belectric.

Regional green bond standards, guidelines and regulations

As green bond standards were developed by the Climate Bonds Initiative as well as by the

International Organization for Standardization, governments around the world also entered into the market, putting forward their own standards to encourage domestic issuance of green bonds.

In their work, climate finance practitioners at Climate Bonds argue that the history of successful capital markets goes hand in hand with strong public sector policies. For them, with the growing political will for climate action, green investment offers an opportunity to strengthen both public and private sectors by providing a space of collaboration. Their view of the green bond market is

inherently pluralistic and defies any categorization of the market as private or public, as they see the market as a space of collaboration between NGOs, governments, and corporations.

The Paris Agreement and Climate Finance

Global climate agreements and negotiations shapes green bond regulation and the proliferation of regional and national guidelines. The Chinese green bond guidelines came out just before the ratification of the Paris Agreement. Chinese government officials had argued that they were a developing country in the Paris Agreement, and not that they would be producing climate finance. Climate finance according to the Paris Agreement definition flows from developed countries to developing countries. Climate finance must be defined by the needs of developing countries. In the definition of green bond taxonomies, the needs of developing countries is not being taken into account (Inquiry 2016).

In December 2015, the People’s Bank of China released their Green Bond Endorsed

Project Catalogue, followed by guidelines from the National Development and Reform

Commission released in January 2016.30 These guidelines were the product of the Green Finance

Taskforce lead by the People’s Bank of China in collaboration with the United Nations Inquiry into the Design of Sustainable Financial Markets, the Climate Bonds Initiative, and other sustainable finance entities such as the UK Green Finance Taskforce and the United Nations Inquiry into

Sustainable Financial Markets. The Chinese regulators were focused on aligning their guidelines with what international investors, specifically European and American investors, wanted to see

30 https://www.climatebonds.net/files/files/CLIMATE BONDS-IISD-Paper1-Final-01C_A4.pdf 89

financed by green bonds, in order to attract international capital with offshore Chinese green bond issuances.

Similarly to China’s guidelines, the green bond guidelines released by the Brazilian

Banking Federation (FEBRABAN) in October 2016 were also produced in collaboration with the

Climate Bonds Initiative and other entities such as the International Capital Markets Association, the Climate Bonds Initiative, and a larger Brazilian sustainable finance consortium.31 However,

FEBRABAN was focused on developing a domestic green bond market in contrast to the China regulators. While FEBRABAN still drew from the work of the Climate Bonds Initiative and language from the Green Bond Principles, their focus was on presenting the potential for the development of a uniquely Brazilian green bond market in order to gain political support.

While Japan had been a big location for retail green bond buying early in the market when the World Bank and other development banks sold green bonds in the Japanese Uridashi market, in 2017 there had yet to be a green bond issued by a Japanese entity, despite Japan having the second largest bond market. In March 2017, the Japanese Ministry of Environment published green bond guidelines, and the city of Tokyo issued trial green bonds, backed by an assertively green municipal government. Green bond guidelines from the public sector also proliferated in

South and Southeast Asia. In India, the Securities and Exchange Board of India issued disclosure requirements for issuance and listing of 'green debt securities' in June 2017, these requirements were supported by the Climate Bonds Initiative in collaboration with KPMG. In November 2017, the ASEAN Capital Markets Forum launched green bond standards for ASEAN member

31 https://portal.febraban.org.br/pagina/3188/52/en-us/guidelines-issuing-green-bonds 90

countries. 32 Simultaneously, Indonesia's financial services authority Otoritas Jasa Keuangan published a regulatory framework to develop a domestic green bond market.

In response to China’s Green Bond Guidelines, The European Union convened a High-

Level Expert Group on Sustainable Finance over 2017. After the deliberations of the High-Level

Expert Group were published, in 2018, the EU then convened the EU's Technical Expert Group on

Sustainable Finance that will deliver proposals for an EU green bond standard in 2019.33 With the development of the Climate Bonds Standard and the proliferation of green bond guidelines calling for external review of green bond projects, a growing number of companies and firms entered into the green bond market as sustainability reviewers and verifiers.

The Auditors of the Green Bond Market: Second Party Reviews and Verifiers

As the market grew past the purview of CICERO and SEB’s collaboration, other environmental entities entered into the field to serve the role that CICERO had for the World

Bank’s green bonds as Second Party Opinion providers on the sustainability of green bond projects. Building from the Green Bond Principles, Second Party Opinions (SPOs) provide more detail on the sustainability aspects and impact of green bond financed projects. In contrast to

SPOs under the Climate Bonds Standard, environmental consulting firms had to have assurance status under ISO, and they serve as third party verifiers under the Standard.

32 http://www.theacmf.org/ACMF/upload/ASEAN_Green_Bond_Standards.pdf

33 https://www.environmental-finance.com/content/analysis/green-bond-funds-table.html 91

These environmental auditors included Sustainalytics and DNV-GL most prominently. The entrance of these two organizations demonstrates the mixed connectivity in the market. DNV-

GL had preexisting expertise as an engineering and certification firm, while Sustainalytics was a rapidly growing sustainability consulting firm. Trucost, an environmental assessment company established in 2000, became a Second Party Opinion provider as well under the Climate Bonds

Standard and Certification scheme, rapidly building its own environmental finance credentials before the company was bought by S&P Global to support the rating agency’s sustainable finance division.34 Demands for green bond sustainability standards from investors, the public sector, financial media and climate activist groups led to the proliferation of green bond guidelines as well as Second Party Opinion providers and sustainability verifiers in the green bond market.

Normative Market Narratives

The growth of the green bond market during my fieldwork buoyed up and was driven by a number of narratives projecting current market activity into future possibilities. These narratives form from the interests of different stakeholders in the market, including underwriters, asset managers, civil society, public policy, central bankers, and pension funds.

Beyond the dominant three narratives that drove the initial growth of the green bond market, these following five narratives were tied to one or more of these stakeholder groups and were contested between them. As one climate finance practitioner noted in conversation on thematic framing work for green bonds: “Focus relentlessly on the future.” There was a buzz of activity

34 https://www.trucost.com/about-trucost/company-history/ 92

around pushing campaigns that would project continued growth of the market into the future, as well as mobilize green bonds to fit a number of public policy ends, from limiting climate change to achieving the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). I understand this activity to be the result of the convergence of several narratives on the green bond market.

Here I discuss five green bond market narratives produced and supported by NGOs, public policy think tanks, and bank research divisions. These narratives are notable in terms of how they frame and laud or critique the growth of the green bond market, and in the centrality of time in all of the narratives in either the fruition of certain narratives or by their critiquing of the present market activity.

$1 Trillion by 2020

Over 2017, Andrew Whiley, the Head of Communications at Climate Bonds began to push the concept of $1 trillion in green bonds by 2020 into the market reflection, drawing from the

Boston-based climate finance NGO Ceres’s 2014 report, Investing in the Clean Trillion and discussions from the International Energy Agency (IEA) and the Intergovernmental Panel on

Climate Change (IPCC) (Fulton and Capalino 2014). According to Mark Fulton and Reid Capalino in their investment report, to “have an 80 percent chance of maintaining [a] 2 °C limit, the IEA estimates an additional $36 trillion in clean energy investment is needed through 2050—or an average of $1 trillion more per year compared to a ‘business as usual’ scenario over the next 36 years” (Fulton and Capalino 2014: 2). Fulton and Capalino were the first to highlight the need for

$1 trillion in clean energy investment each year. They arrived at this figure from the scientific and economic research of the International Energy Agency (IEA), where economists run cost benefit 93

analysis on top of climate change models to establish necessary financial action in response to environmental risks. With the scientifically credible IEA behind the $1 trillion by 2020 campaign, the Climate Bonds Initiative began a deliberate campaign that pushed this number into policy reports and private sector projections of green bond market growth.35

The communications team at Climate Bonds disseminated numbers such as $1 trillion by

2020 through both social media as well as by embedding the message into Climate Bonds research and reports. In putting a market report together in 2015, an analyst mentioned that

“the story that graphs tell is the most important.” The analyst argued that when putting large numbers in a report, another number needs to be included for comparison in order to give readers perspective. Otherwise, according to the analyst, the reader has no way to distinguish the difference between 1 or 2 trillion. On the Climate Bonds Initiative’s 2017 State of the Market report, the final page had a infographic that focused on grounding $1 trillion by 2020 not only in relation to the green bond market’s current growth but in relation to the conference timeline of the United Nations’ key climate change negotiations conference, the yearly Conference of the

Parties (COP).

35 https://insideclimatenews.org/news/20140915/only-1-trillion-annual-investment-goal-puts-climate-solutions- within-reach 94

Figure 10: State of the Market 2017 (Initiative 2017) This calendar graph parallels the climate policy world’s yearly Conference of the Parties, and frames green bond growth in tandem with climate change policy time (Chakrabarty 2009).

The calendar is focused on global climate negotiations, with a numerical value of green bond market issuance. The $1 trillion by 2020 campaign brings climate science, policy, and finance into a common horizon.

Figure 11: Climate Bonds 2020 Twitter Banner In October 2020, green bond market journalists began to report that the green bond market had reached $1 trillion in total issuance, with much of the benchmark reached due to a large amount of issuance in September. The Climate Bonds Initiative’s green bond market Excel

spreadsheet database hit $1 trillion in December 2020 (Initiative 2020). The $1 trillion green bonds by 2020 campaign seems to have come to fruition, albeit at a time of global upheaval in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Figure 12: Bloomberg New Energy Finance Green Bond Issuance36 Aligning the Sustainable Development Goals with Green Bonds

In 2015 the United Nations established the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development with 17 focal points for sustainable development.37 The Sustainable Development Goals agenda grew over 2016 and into 2017, merging with discourse from the 2015 Paris Agreement to keep global warming below 2 degrees Celsius. At Climate Bonds Initiative, along with the $1 Trillion by

2020 campaign, there was also a communications campaign to align the sustainable development goals with the green bond market.38 This campaign was also supported by the United Nations’

36 https://about.bnef.com/blog/record-month-shoots-green-bonds-past-trillion-dollar-mark/

37 https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/development-agenda/

38 https://www.climatebonds.net/2018/06/green-bonds-bridge-sdgs-focus-sdg-6-7-9-11-13-15 96

2017 Conference of the Parties (COP) 23 in Bonn, Germany, where the majority of the climate finance flows tracked at the conference were solely green bond issues. The market growth was used as a highlighting story during the conference and was brought into UN discussion around how to galvanize global capital to finance the sustainable development goals.

Policy narratives continued to enter into the green bond market over its growth, and it is a key entry point for scientific analysis on climate change trajectories to evaluate the impact of the market against climate change and environmental degradation. Aligning with the Sustainable

Development Goals both drove green bonds as a sector, but also expanded its utility in the eyes of public policymakers. While the Climate Bonds Initiative and other groups tried to hone the focus of the green bond market on climate change solutions, aligning the market with the sustainable development goals continued to bring calls of social impact evaluation and resiliency into the market.

A Hot Air Balloon?

As the green bond market grew, narratives of the need for further green bond issuance by 2020 and to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030 have made headway.

However, this growth also pushed forward calls for an assessment of the material impact of green bonds against climate change.

Over the summer of 2018 a report came out from the climate finance NGO 2° Investing

Initiative (2DII), arguing that the additionality of green bonds in financing sustainable

infrastructure is negligible.39 The basis of this claim came from 2DII analysts looking at the entire carbon footprints of companies that had issued green bonds, and arguing that despite issuing green bonds these companies were still operating unsustainably to keep climate change within

2 degrees Celsius. The NGO’s argument rested on critiquing the notion that green bonds were shifting company activity toward a low-carbon model, by saying that green bonds issued were only a fraction of the company’s activity and did not transfer any cost of risk from issuers to investors. Thus, there was no additionality in the transaction. Green bonds are only supporting infrastructure that could already be built in current market conditions. In 2020, researchers at the Bank of International Settlements issued a paper building in some ways off of the 2DII critique

(Ehlers, Mojon, and Packer 2020). Attempting to answer whether or not the green bond market has decreased global greenhouse gas emissions, the researchers argue for an emissions intensity rating at the issuer level for companies and governments involved in the green bond market.

Opponents such as the Climate Bonds Initiative to the 2° Investing Initiative’s narrative and its continuation in research such as that done by the Bank of International Settlements argued that green bonds open a pathway for companies with traditionally brown assets such as oil and gas production or standard combustion vehicles to green their balance sheet. This argument flips the critique by 2DII that it is a bad thing that green bonds are still on the balance sheets of overall high carbon dioxide emitting companies. In the transition argument, green bonds issued by brown companies can help shift more investment into sustainable infrastructure.

By being part of a company’s balance sheet, a green bond issuance is able to attract investors

39 https://2degrees-investing.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Green-bonds-contribution-2Dii-May2018.pdf 98

who have the assurance that the debt is backed not only by the green assets financed but by the entire company, including its preexisting operations.

The debate from the 2° Investing Initiative’s white or position paper demonstrates the mixed perspectives in the green bond market, and how much of what green bonds are assumed to achieve is a result of how market actors look at the financial product. This debate rests on the scale of which one defines sustainability, and over what time horizon (Limbert and Carr 2016;

Jaramillo 2013).

Is there a Greenium?

From the market’s early days, green bond advocates were already arguing that green bonds were a means to get cheaper capital to companies developing green infrastructure.

However, green bond analysts were unable to test the claim that green bonds did provide issuers with cheaper capital until there existed a large enough green bond market size, as well as enough green bonds issued simultaneously with par vanilla bonds to allow for robust comparison.40 This comparison, which would show if there was a discount or not for green bonds, came to be known in the market as the greenium. This neologism became a central point of contention in the green bond market, and the title of numerous conference panels and papers.

In 2015, analysts at the British bank Barclays published a report detailing that investors in the secondary bond market are willing to buy green bonds on average 20 basis points above on par regular bonds (Preclaw and Bakshi 2015: 3). Barclays’ analysts Preclaw and Bakshi ran

40 Vanilla bonds are conventional bonds without any unique characteristics. 99

regression analysis of the Barclays MSCI Green Bond Index to determine the value of green bonds in basis points for investors, finding green bonds to have 20 basis points less yield than comparable bonds, meaning a higher price for investors (Preclaw and Bakshi 2015). Barclays’s research reflects the developing reification of the green bond market. The emergence of analyses of a green bond market and indices, exchange trade funds off of the green bond market performed and defined the market’s boundaries (MacKenzie 2008). The valuation work of

Barclays occurs down the pipeline of work done at organizations.

In April 2017, the Climate Bonds Initiative began to publish Green Bond Pricing reports looking at the particular characteristics of green bonds in relation to vanilla bonds (Harrison,

Partridge, and Tripathy 2020). The goal of this series of reports was to move beyond hearsay in the market that green bonds were performing better than vanilla through confirming the difference with quantitative analysis. As the report series outline puts forth:

… anecdotal evidence suggests that in some markets, green bonds are receiving better pricing than vanilla counterparts due to high demand for green labelled paper. A primary market ‘greenium’ would imply lower funding costs for issuers and lower yields for investors. We aim to separate fact from hyperbole and provide an evidence-based analysis of activity in the green bond primary market.

Simultaneously Andrew Whiley and the Communications team commenced a long-term campaign to highlight the ‘greenium’ concept and use it to stimulate mainstream discussion around the role of green bonds (in 2017 still seen as a niche product) in climate finance. While the market analyst at Climate Bonds in charge of the pricing report series was cautious in her claims about green bonds, her work was replicated by the research teams of other green bond market participants with bolder statements on the qualities of green bonds. Michael Ridley’s

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sustainable finance team at HSBC argued that green bonds performed better than vanilla on average.41 This claim began to spread amongst sustainable finance divisions in investment banks and law firms as I detailed in the last chapter.

A Market Born out of Low Interest Rates

While arguments around the additionality of green bonds centered on differing perspectives on how the market would develop over time, market analysts, particularly more theoretical analysts, debated the potential outcome of changing macroeconomic trends on green bonds. Analysts argued that over its ten-year span, green bonds had emerged in a low interest rate environment as a result of central bank decision making in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. Analysts predicted that with rising interest rates in the future, green bonds could distinguish themselves with vanilla bonds by having a premium. In other words, an environment where capital was scarcer than at present would allow the green bond market to develop further its special value for investors and price premium for issuers.

Green bond analysts argue that the surge in capital that was going into negative interest rate investments, in part due to the 2008 recession making capital more risk adverse, needed to be harnessed to rebuild the world with green infrastructure. With increasing arguments about a price point advantage for green bonds, in a high interest rate environment there emerged the argument that green bonds would maintain their value above vanilla bonds. Practitioners argue

41 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-09-05/evidence-mounts-for-green-bonds-outperforming- conventional-hsbc 101

that as green bonds have more thorough vetting for systemic risks such as environmental degradation, they have more value than vanilla bonds. Higher interest rates would then decrease the value of purely financial investment in bonds. Similar to other narratives around the green bond market, this story of interest rates projects future possibilities onto the current characteristics of green bonds.

My Vantage Point

In parallel with the dramatic growth of the green bond market between 2014 and 2018, embedded within the Climate Bonds Initiative, I observed the reactions of my interlocutors to market activity. The worldview and work of Climate Bonds employees was ground zero of my fieldwork in the green bond market. I observed this market within the Climate Hub, from the office spaces where I worked on the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd floors. The Climate Hub is a dedicated office building to climate change in South London, not far from London Bridge. Filled with climate media, finance, and climate activist organizations in an open office setting, the Hub was a unique vantage point from which to experience a multitude of perspectives and organizations pursuing different strategies to mitigate climate change. The office building was also known affectionately by its residents as the Green Blob, an epithet coined by British MP Owen Paterson and initially given to the building and the organizations within it by right leaning media in the UK.42

42 https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2807849/EXPOSED-shadowy-network-funded-foreign-millions- making-household-energy-bills-soar-low-carbon-Britain.html 102

The Climate Bonds Initiative grew in parallel with the growth in the green bond market.

When I first met the Climate Bonds team in January 2015, it was four people huddled together in a small nondescript office in Shoreditch. Over the summer of 2015 the number rose to 11 employees in the London office, before doubling in 2016 and again in 2017. As the market grew, so did the size and complexity of the Climate Bonds Initiative as an organization itself, which had to navigate cultural and structural change from being a startup to a multi-branched global organization.

While market growth did not occur from green bond issuance by UK entities, many green bonds were launched at the London Stock Exchange over the course of 2017 and 2018. Within

London, the UK Green Finance Initiative (GFI) and City of London worked to support sustainable finance initiatives within the city. Within London representatives of companies and governments from Mexico, China, India, Brazil, and South Korea gathered at events that I both attended and supported organizing. I also attended 2017’s Climate Week in New York City, organized by the

London-based climate finance NGO, The Climate Group. Thus, from the Climate Hub in London and in New York City conference panels, I was immersed in the conversations, email exchanges, and events that emerged from the dramatic momentum market participants were perceiving in the green bond market. The final conference I attended in person during my fieldwork in London were the 2018 Climate Bonds Initiative Annual Conference and Green Bonds Awards, which had the theme of "Getting to a Trillion Dollar a Year Market" and London’s first Climate Action Week in July 2019.

During the time I was in the field, the green bond market experienced a period of intense growth and significant change. Trends that had developed over the market’s first seven years led 103

to this growth as the concept spread throughout debt capital markets, spearheaded by ambitious environmentally minded investment bankers, public policymakers, and NGO activists. This growth both created new organizations such as the Climate Bonds Initiative and Environmental

Finance, as well as brought more public and private sector organizations into the market.

Simultaneously, the green bond market’s growth from 2013 to 2018 furthered the construction of narratives both from private sector financial actors as well as governmental and public policy spheres about the present of the green bond market and its future.

In this chapter I have identified three narrative themes that spearheaded the growth of the green bond market as a solution to environmental and climate risks. This growth brought the market to a level that attracted multiple normative interpretations by market actors. Here, I have analyzed five of these normative narratives, and shown how they frame and evaluate the quantifications of the green bond market and impact its activity. This impact stresses the continued importance of the performativity thesis for the green bond market and climate finance

(Cabantous and Gond 2011; MacKenzie 2008).

In a May 2020 video conference brainstorm session on climate resiliency narratives in the

Climate Bonds Initiative’s communications department, narratives were stressed as first and foremost before bonds. At the end of the session, Sean Kidney resoundingly stated that “Green bonds are just what you do when you are financing all this stuff [climate resiliency projects]. So, there is your narrative!” Whether related to climate resiliency or dealing with environmental impacts and other upheavals, from its beginning the green bond market has developed as a market solution to public concerns, which is continually contested by public and private entities as financial agreements are made and more green bonds are issued. 104

Chapter 3: The Times of Climate Finance

A New Time in Finance

The span of time over which climate change takes place forces climate finance practitioners in the financial industry to reframe its existing temporal considerations in investment decision-making. Currently, climate finance practitioners aim to make this possible, and plausible, through the expansion of climate finance. Climate finance practitioners and the growth of climate finance reframe the finance industry and its preexisting temporal relations against the temporal processes of climate change (Chakrabarty 2009). Climate temporalities are distinct from those already at work in finance, and it is in this contrast that climate finance emerges as a fraught synthesis of the times of climate change and the times of finance. This repositioning produces new categories, assets, and people within the financial industry, challenging an industry accustomed to operating on milliseconds for financial return to account for geological timescales when reviewing the sustainability impact of its investments (Lockie and

Wong 2017). Climate finance brings climate change and its material temporal processes into finance.

In the literature on time and finance, finance traditionally subsumes other forms of time, such as agricultural and cooking times (Thompson 1967; Souleles 2019; Cronon 2009). For economic reasons, increasingly farmers bound to mainstream financial structures must give financial analysis more weight in their decisions than the ecological health and cycles of flora and fauna. However, in climate finance the urgency of climate change alongside material analysis and projections of warming continually disrupt financial logic. Trajectories of climate change over the

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next fifty years paradoxically demand large scale action in the present. The empirical reality of climate change does not bend to the will of finance – rather, this it continuously threatens the legitimacy of finance times. Eons of geological time are incommensurable with the everyday investment and deal-making in finance that climate finance practitioners engage with. While financiers may argue for the support of their instruments as effective solutions for climate change, ultimately the full effect of their work will be judged materially over time, in parallel to

Karl Marx’s assessment of global capitalism through its material impact (Marx 1867). Yet, this awkward interchange has rapidly grown climate finance as a sector of finance.

My focus on time lays the foundation for my subsequent chapters on the key components of work, people and data in the green bond market. I argue that through climate finance work and the materials produced from that work (documents that frame infrastructure as sustainable), time priorities in finance are reconfigured, thus creating new markets (green bonds) and people

(climate finance practitioners). These processes mirror processes of industrialization that produced new subjectivities and products (Thompson 1967). The significance of time here is always in relation to the green bond market. Daniel Souleles traces the importance of time and value in the creation of private equity deals, time – and emic and etic understandings of it – continually shape the dynamics of the green bond market’s daily functioning and growth

(Souleles 2019). Here I show the significance of time in the macro framing of the green bond market as well as in the everyday work of climate finance practitioners.

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The Times of Climate Finance

In this chapter, I demonstrate how people in climate finance organizations translate climate change into financial decision-making and into the production of new financial markets and instruments that produce new types of professionals based on preexisting structures in finance. I argue that this occurs through four distinct scales of time that shape how climate change can exist in financial markets. While other forms of time seem to be subsumed by financial logic (Souleles 2019), the times of climate change are not. Climate change forces change in financial markets due to both the immediacy and the longevity of its impacts, both of which subvert financial framing focused on short term financial value gains. Continually recast narratives on climate change trajectories assess climate finance and the financial industry and the continued growth of emissions balks against the legitimacy and positivity of climate finance’s impact. Despite rapid growth, climate finance has yet to cause a systemic impact that aligns with decreasing climate change in the long-term. This tension is present in climate finance, through the ongoing assessments by climate finance practitioners of the effectiveness of their work and careers.

To show the force of climate time and how climate finance emerges through the intersection of climate and finance times, I first outline how time exists in finance and how this has been theorized in anthropology. I then present the three distinct times at play in climate finance and the green bond market:

1) How Temporality Frames Climate Change in Global Public Policy

2) How Climate Change Time and Finance Time Interact

3) How Time Structures Everyday Work for Climate Finance Practitioners 107

By mapping these three distinct times that are at play in climate finance, we can better understand what aspects of climate change are acknowledged and acted upon by financial institutions in climate finance, and what time processes are ignored by the decision making of financial professionals. I conclude by arguing that the meta-level processes of time translation outlined here are acted on, and produced through, the everyday work experiences and activities of market actors across climate finance as well as in the green bond market. At this level, climate finance practitioners have to deal with discordant ideas about time given the different timescales on which their activities operate. They work to produce change that they cannot perceive in current time, but that is always mapped onto a future time.

In this chapter, I put the everyday office time and careers of climate finance practitioners in relation to the geological and institutional times with which climate financiers work. Through situating office, career and geological climate time, people deal with an immediate urgency and impetus to act on climate change. However, it is only over time that the work of many climate financiers will face its ultimate evaluation and moral reckoning. I trace these different times in order of scale from the largest to the smallest. The first level of knowledge production that ties climate finance and the lives of its practitioners to time is the production of climate change and the Anthropocene. This knowledge then enters into policy circles that assess and instigate climate finance market activity. These processes of knowledge production over time shape how the green bond market does and does not respond to climate change.

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EP Thompson 2.0 for Green Bonds

Time, and how it is managed and understood, has a profound power to shape human life experiences (Brightman 2012). In my analysis of time from the macro to the micro level of experience in climate finance, I am inspired by EP Thompson’s analysis of the effect of England’s industrialization on time (Thompson 1967). In his work, EP Thompson reflects on the varying understandings and workings of, and on, time present in English society that transformed structures of labor as a result of newly emergent technology and social orders. Reflecting the transformation of the “apprehension of time” in Western Europe, EP Thompson begins his article on Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism with a reflection on Chaucer and the way he writes of time in The Canterbury Tales. Thompson writes that “Chaucer… was a Londoner, and was aware of the times of the Court, of urban organization, and of that ‘merchant’s time’ which

Jacques Le Goff, in a suggestive article in Annales, has opposed to the time of the medieval church” (Thompson 1967: 56). Reflecting on the different times that were active in England’s past, Thompson attempts to break down how the temporalities in England were transformed through industrialization. Thompson argues that “If the transition to mature industrial society entailed a severe restructuring of working habits—new disciplines, new incentives, and a new human nature upon which these incentives could bite effectively—how far is this related to changes in the inward notation of time” (Thompson 1967: 57)? Thompson analyzed and reflected on time as it was reframed in the transition to an industrial society; to comprehend the social impact of climate finance and green bonds, I do the same here. EP Thompson shows how industrialization’s temporality – which centered on immediate production – shifted the experience of time in England. 109

The questions that EP Thompson asked of industrial society about time are useful for dissecting the impact of climate finance as well. Climate finance centers on transitioning the infrastructure and economic activity begun by the industrial revolution to lower their environmental and climate impact. This sector tries to align this transition with the timeline of action required by people to reach a less destructive climate change scenario in the future.

Focusing on time allows us to ask how this transition argued for by climate financiers, activists and sustainability professionals to a low-carbon, sustainable, and climate resilient society reframe time yet again, or to what extent (Klinenberg, Araos, and Koslov 2020)? Beyond industrialization, climate change challenges us to grapple with organizing on a time scale that is not immediate and extends into prognostics of the future (Ferry 2016). How do a multitude of times intersect with time-disciplined power orders (Glennie and Thrift 1996)?

Climate bonds are produced by the analysis of the Climate Bonds’ Market Intelligence team. These bonds finance infrastructure that the Market Intelligence team assess as being resilient to warming scenarios and greenhouse gas emissions in the future. Currently, these criteria are shaped by the Paris Agreement’s required designation to stay within 2 degrees Celsius warming (UNFCCC 2015). The value at play in climate finance and the green bond market, at least according to Sean Kidney at the Climate Bonds Initiative and other analysts on his team, is a meaningful decrease in global emissions and climate impact. The key performance index of all their work is whether global emissions decrease or not. This is success point is increasingly uncertain, as global greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise.

The translation by climate finance practitioners of knowledge that passes between climate science and finance – and that produces climate finance and the green bond market – 110

relies heavily on reframing time through climate change modelling and charting investment requirements onto these models to produce different climate change impact scenarios. These framings of time make climate change exist for climate finance practitioners both emotionally and professionally. Sean Kidney’s Twitter handle reads “We have 5, maybe 10 years to fix things.

Don't walk, run.” Sean’s Twitter handle remained over my six years of fieldwork. As time went on, the urgency and temporality of climate change remained unchanged on Sean’s Twitter account.

The urgency of the timeline for climate change that practitioners constantly read about in their work led some to work stressful hours and burn out. Practitioners sensed urgency, but in an amorphous way because the imminent deadline was never straightforward. As Aurora

Schmalz, a Senior Communications Manager at Climate Bonds told me, “There is no time, but also time because it isn’t going to happen tomorrow; at the same time, it is imminent, but it is not imminent.” Former Climate Bonds policy analyst Linnea Sonegstud told me that when she left Climate Bonds, she had to work on reframing her life without thinking about climate change constantly, which had been mentally exhausting.

Conceptions of time within climate finance produce create demands for climate finance practitioners beyond what has already been documented by anthropologists studying scientific and financial processes (Traweek 1988; Preda 2009). The time of climate change produces an urgency that drives both the personal experiences of climate finance practitioners and larger market narratives. When we try to figure out how to understand these experiences, we need to take into account the way that time influences people’s lived experiences of working in climate finance. 111

Time and the Anthropology of Finance

Time in finance begins at the inception of finance, which originates in debt. The word

“finance” derives from the Old French finer which means “make an end, settle a debt” (Merriam-

Webster). The first financial instruments were debt tied to temples in Mesopotamia – they are, coincidentally, our first record of writing (Graeber 2014). As with the management of money, finance is about future expectations and acting on those aspirations in the present. Thus time, along with value, are fundamental elements of the financial industry.

In more recent anthropological studies of finance, time has become a central organizing principal used to distinguish different professional groups of people in the industry. Daniel

Souleles asserts that time and value orientations are an important point of comparison for anthropological studies of finance. He argues that, “once you accept that financialization is a good domain under which money management and investing, Wall Street and finance, and wealth and poverty creation all exist, the division of the spectrum of time-value orientations helps categorize the anthropology of finance” (Souleles 2019: 93). Souleles distinguishes his community of private equity investors from other groups in finance through time and value.

Likewise, I find time to be a key distinguishing element of climate finance. The time that my practitioners grapple with comes from outside of the financial domain as well (Deringer 2017).

Here I focus on time in climate finance and how time is central to its internal functioning as well as to the absorption of climate change into the financial purview (Miyazaki 2013; Bear

2015b; Souleles 2019). As Daniel Souleles notes, “For everyone in finance, it is a productive question and a potent line of comparison to wonder about what timescales are good for one’s 112

particular type of investing” (Souleles 2019: 97). Laura Bear has looked at global investment networks that impact the infrastructure of Kolkata’s docks and the operations of Scandinavian shipbuilding companies, summaries time studies in anthropology in a 2016 article entitled “Time as Technique” (Bear 2016). A focus on time in financial activities allows for a point of ethnographic comparison.

In Songs of Profit, Songs of Loss, Daniel Souleles builds off of earlier anthropology of finance and attempts to build a framework for the anthropological research that has been done in this space, and also for what the stakes can be for future ethnographic research in this fieldwork space. Souleles argues that in an anthropology of finance, “the question then, for any empirical study of finance, is how and under what timescale do financiers realize value” (Souleles

2019: 97)? In the case of climate finance, trying to get climate change into a timescale that financiers can value, and thus act on, is the work of climate finance practitioners.

While private equity’s modus operandi is the generation of value, climate financiers focus on producing action on climate change in the time that they feel we have left to act. The key performance indicator for climate financiers is action on climate change and other environmental concerns. In other words, a decrease from the current trajectory of environmental devastation and rising greenhouse gas emissions from our global economic activity. As Sean told me, in his mind the key performance indicator for the Climate Bonds Initiative would be a decrease in global emissions. This dissonance of financial value with an awareness of climate risk, and the experience of these timescales, led to anxiety and hope amongst climate financiers.

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How Time Frames Climate Change in Global Public Policy

Time, Climate Change and the Anthropocene

Figure 13: Climate Spiral The centrality of time in framings of sustainability and climate change makes time particularly significant in climate finance. Climate change has reframed our current geological era, with the emergence of the Anthropocene. Geologists and climatologists produce this reframing through comparative evaluations of scales of time and climate (Schinkel 2016; Ivry). In the social sciences, the concept of the Anthropocene has had an impact. Dipesh Chakrabarty notes that the period of time marked as the new geological period of the Anthropocene focuses on the scalar effect of human activity on the earth as a geological force (Chakrabarty 2009). Social

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and political agency are being reimagined by scholars in relation to the entirety of the earth system (Clark and Yusoff 2017).

In response to the Anthropocene, anthropologists have located this transformation as being embedded within capitalist relations. The idea of the Anthropocene can either imply a

“triumph of humans” or human agency being overwhelmed through the combined effect of human and nonhuman processes (Tsing 2015: 19). In light of these contradictions, Tsing ties the development of the Anthropocene firmly to the history of capitalism – of which climate finance is one extension. She argues that “the most convincing Anthropocene timeline begins not with our species but rather with the advent of modern capitalism, which has directed long-distance destruction of landscapes and ecologies” (Tsing 2015: 19). Climate finance, and its reframing of the impact of corporate and government infrastructure and extraction processes in relation to the cost to the environment, is based on seeing both material impacts and the time of climate change as an extension of capitalism.

In her collaborative ethnography tracking the Matsutake mushroom, Anna Tsing sees moving beyond Man and Nature as an opportunity to reimagine and change relationships between all life. She states that “without Man and Nature, all creatures can come back to life, and men and women can express themselves without the strictures of a parochially imagined rationality” (Tsing 2015: vi). The re-imagination suggested by Tsing is not a move to a utopian vision, rather through moving beyond binaries anthropologists can more fully engage with our current political reality and forms of domination and resistance in the world. The increasing financialization of the environment through climate finance relates to work in ecological and

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environmental anthropology, as these fields question what the environment is as well as explore human interaction with different concepts of nature.

Conceptualizations of nature have been used to justify legal, social, and economic systems

(Polanyi 1957: 131). There is a long history in anthropology of looking at the environment and forms of social organization from a materialist and ecological perspective (Godelier 1987; Lee

1979; Malinowski 1978; Rappaport 1967; Sahlins 1972: 14-28). More recent scholars have also looked at how societies use relationships between humans and nonhumans along with what is defined as nature to support political organization (Escobar 1995: xxviii; Latour 2004; Shiva 2010:

229). In the green bond market, the infrastructure and projects associated with green bonds are framed as nature and the environment.

Time has long framed the production of materials in public and private processes, such as in the extraction of resources from the environment (Ferry and Limbert 2008b). Ferry and Limbert argue that “to define something as a resource is to suspend it between a past ‘source’ and a future ‘product’” (Ferry and Limbert 2008: 6). In this, we see how our current global economy is connected to time processes from the very start of the system’s interactions with the environment. This temporal framing of the environment sets the stage for the Overton policy window for political action. To capture the spatial and temporal scale of climate change, philosopher Timothy Morton proposes climate change as a hyperobject (Morton 2013). As a concept, the Anthropocene originates from geology and scientific material studies to make sense of our world and planet in a significantly transforming state under largely human-influenced

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activities. This shift undermines the basis of resources and natural capital that supports our political economy – and harkens its end (Mitchell 2011; Scranton 2015).

The framing of the Anthropocene highlights the significant impact of people on global biological processes, but also risks ignoring the power and resource divisions amongst people and what political systems engender the Anthropocene. In Environmental Futures, Elizabeth

Ferry points to how knowledge about environmental processes is called on to frame political prognostics (Ferry 2016). Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing draw from Ursula Le Guin to highlight the specific processes (Capitalocene) that cause the material state of the Anthropocene (Haraway

2015; Le Guin 2017).They stress that capitalism, rather than humanity as a monolithic entity should be the focus of critique and transformation in our contemporary moment. Along with economic systems, the Anthropocene erases violent racial hierarchies that ground and support socioeconomic and environmental exploitation (Karera 2019; Moore 2015).

Earlier anthropological research has stressed people's relationships to time as inherently social, material and political (Bear 2016; Munn 1992; Greenhouse 1996). How does this new social and political framing develop in and impact climate finance? Does time actually impact the workings of climate change, and if so, how does this happen? I argue that this begins in the public policy circles and evaluations of climate change in relation to government action that have produced climate change as a global entity (Tsing 2004).

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The Sustainable Development Goals and Time

The importance of time, and of time synced response to the temporal stressors of climate change, are visible not only in the naming of the Anthropocene. The momentum behind the private sector’s interest in channeling capital towards climate and environmentally aligned projects creates the need for a theoretical positioning of climate finance, and green finance more broadly. This discussion necessarily begins with the discourse on Sustainable Development, defined by the Brundtland Commission (1987) as “Development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own need”

(Bruntland Commission 1987: 37). This definition is fundamental to the international community’s sustainable development agenda, which led to the 8 Millennium Development

Goals, and more recently the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) which were hammered out in 2015. It defines sustainable development directly through reference to time – the time of future generations.43

The Sustainable Development Goals are a universal call to action to end poverty, protect the planet and improve the lives and prospects of everyone, everywhere. Today, progress is being made in many places, but, overall, action to meet the Goals is not yet advancing at the speed or scale required. 2020 needs to usher in a decade of ambitious action to deliver the Goals by 2030.44 Near the end of 2017 and the beginning of 2018, conversations around the UN Sustainable

Development Goals and how green bonds could be a key financing tool entered the office as well as the larger climate finance media circuit.

43 https://www.climatecentral.org/news/one-billion-people-face-entirely-new-climate-by-2050-study-16587 44 https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/blog/tag/2050/ 118

The Sustainable Development Goals were developed by the United Nations out of the

Millennium Development Goals. The Millennium Development Goals are a straightforward engagement with time. The goals were signed by countries at the United Nations in September

2000, and the work towards these goals was to be evaluated in 2015.45 These goals reflect a time- bound understanding of how to respond to numerous factors that are challenging human wellbeing. 2030 and 2050 are now emerging as the next pivotal staging points in climate finance public and private circles. Within the language of the Paris Agreement in 2015, 2050 was also established as the peak focus for climate modelling.

Time progresses through the SDGs. The SDGs establish 2030 as a significant year in which to evaluate progress in sustainable development. This date in turn is tied to the temporality of bonds as instruments. Bonds have an end date when the financial instrument is said to “mature” or can also be issued as a perpetuity bond. A climate finance practitioner I encountered at the annual Moody’s Climate Week New York City event, which began in 2014, told me that they thought SDG bonds were ridiculous given their time horizon. How could we think about long- term sustainability of bonds with only a 10-year time horizon? The bond market, and the multiple classes within it, of which green bonds are one, is continually transforming as new bonds are issued and old ones reach maturity. In this context, building an SDG bond class connected to the year 2030 is impractical given the time dynamics of the bond market.

45 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_hLuEui6ww 119

How Climate Change Time and Finance Time Interact

A Trillion by 2020: Market Narratives and Time

The Millennium Development Goals and the Sustainable Development Goals connect to larger processes of time in policy that entered into the ways climate finance practitioners frame markets and time. As I mentioned in the history of the green bond market’s development, narratives focusing on benchmarking the required growth of the green bond market to mitigate climate change propelled its forward movement (Figueres et al. 2017). These narratives included both positive and normative assessments of the green bond market. A trillion by 2020 became trillions in the 2020s when it looked like the totality of the green bond market would not reach

$1 trillion in outstanding issuance by 2020. The meaning of this number is also debatable. The original Clean Trillion referred to how “the IEA estimates an additional $36 trillion in clean energy investment is needed through 2050—or an average of $1 trillion more per year compared to a

‘business as usual’ scenario over the next 36 years” (Fulton and Campalino 2014: 2). The time of climate change frames these reflections on the development of the green bond market and climate finance by central bankers and policymakers.

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Figure 14: Twitter logo for Ceres A Clean Trillion campaign

Emic Discussions of Time: The Tragedy of the Horizon

Within the green bond market and climate finance more generally, time is at the top of many climate finance practitioners’ minds when they consider the significance and purpose of their work. In 2015, Mark Carney, the governor of the Bank of England, made a speech at insurance conglomerate, Lloyd’s of London, titled Breaking the Tragedy of the Horizon – climate change and financial stability. The speech 46 made waves by acknowledging how different incentive structures and organizational positions stopped financiers at different levels in the industry from taking climate change risk into account in their investment decisions.47 Carney’s argument demonstrates that key financial authorities are questioning the time logic of finance

46https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/speech/2015/breaking-the-tragedy-of-the-horizon-climate- change-and-financial-stability.pdf?la=en&hash=7C67E785651862457D99511147C7424FF5EA0C1A 47https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/sep/29/carney-warns-of-risks-from-climate-change-tragedy- of-the-horizon 121

by positioning it in relation to climate change, rather than the dominant immediacy of traditional financial markets.

Figure 15: 2ii Investing Finance Time Horizons Image Carney’s focus on the misfunction of time horizons in finance presents a strong counterpoint to Frederick Hayek’s influential argument that private markets are the most efficient in distributing resources given their ability to factor in economic activity immediately (as opposed to the after the fact analysis done by government bureaucrats) (Riles 2011: 158). In the face of climate change, the instant market activity feedback of a Hayekian free market does not create an efficient response to climate change, but rather inaction. In climate finance, the timescales of finance are brought up against the geological timescales of climate change as well as those of policymaking (as defined by the Conferences of the Parties, currently on their 25th iteration in Madrid) as well as the Sustainable Development goals. Carney’s Tragedy of the

Horizon explicitly acknowledges the tension between time in financial markets and the time of climate change.

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Temporality and Bonds

While they focus on the urgency of climate change in the future, climate finance practitioners in the green bond market work with bonds in the present that finance infrastructure projects already or to be built. Time is integral to the structure of bonds as financial products.

Instead of the wild fluctuations of equities, which provide no guaranteed stability to stockholders, bonds are tied to a series of interest or coupon payments and connected to a year of maturity.

The tenor, or period of time, that a bond pays interest before its repayment, ranges from perpetuity to periods of between 30 to 10 to 5 years. Over its tenor, the value of a bond varies day by day through trading variations, but an investor who holds a bond through to its time to maturity can also potentially look forward to lump payments (coupons) through this duration.

Over the course of my fieldwork, the tenor range for green bonds stayed fairly consistent.

In the green bond market Orsted, a Danish wind energy company, issued the first perpetual green bond, with a tenor of 1,000 years.48 This was in essence a perpetuity bond, but under Danish law the bond had to be tied to a 1,000-year period. Perpetuity bonds have a long history in the bond market and have even been linked to a bond that would qualify today to be a green bond. The

Yale Museum has a bond that has been argued to be one of the first green bonds, which continues to collect interest to this day. The bond was issued by the Dutch water authority, Stichtse

Rijnlanden, in 1648 (Cummings 2015).

The tenor, price, and yield of a bond all come together to produce a bond’s yield curve

(Zaloom 2009). In the bond market, bonds are analyzed and priced by the yield curve. Mauss and

48 https://www.businessinsider.com/danish-energy-company-1000-year-bond-2017-11 123

Graeber both have outlined the importance of time in value transactions (Mauss 1967; Graeber

2014). Drawing from Mauss’s The Gift, Nancy Munn in The Fame of Gawa, also lays out how time frames value in exchange over time and space (Munn 1992). By charting a yield curve, a bond’s intertwined time and value is interpreted by financial professionals.

More than 60% has tenor longer than 5 years 100%

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0% 2017 2018 2019 2007-2019 Up to 5Y 5-10Y 10-20Y >20Y Perpetual N/A

Figure 16: Climate Bonds Initiative Green Bond Market Data49 Bonds are priced and valued through time. The time of these bonds as well as the infrastructure to which they are connected is now quantified to meet the climate finance objectives outlined in policy analysis that arises from a temporal interpretation of climate change

(Lahsen 2005). The timescales of green bonds as well as the infrastructure with which the bonds are associated are continually evaluated by the potential imperiling of the future. These bonds were issued off of new projects or refinancing. As the growth of the green bond market either

49 Climate Bonds Initiative Green Bond Market Data, January 2020 124

means the construction – or refinancing – of infrastructure, my interlocutors felt anxiety as to the effect of potential over construction. Walking across London Bridge in 2017 into the city’s old financial district with Mary, then Head of Markets at Climate Bonds, she and I discussed how our work focused so much on constructing new buildings and infrastructure. In such a future, how much of our planet could be preserved from development?

Beyond too much new construction, there was also concern among my interlocutors that bonds bought and sold today could distract market participants from further action on environmental and climate risks. As communications specialist Aurora told me, “I’ll issue a bond today and it lasts 10 years, so I think that I am doing something for the next ten years. But am I really doing anything?”

Figure 17: Tenor of green bonds (Filkova, Frandon-Martinez, and Georgi 2019)

Time in Finance: Are you an actuarial scientist or an accountant?

Time is integral to the organization of professions and work in contemporary finance.

Professions are defined by time. For example, time creates distinctions between types of bookkeepers and analysts in finance. Accountants and actuarial scientists’ professions are

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defined by the time period of the financial transactions that they audit. While most finance laymen do not know about this distinction, it was made clear to me by an actuarial scientist working on climate change on June 24, 2016 – the day after the UK Brexit vote. After work that day, many climate finance practitioners had left the climate hub to go around the corner to a local pub. The liberal-leaning, multinational climate finance practitioners got drunk and shouted

“LEAVE” while pointing fingers at each other in an attempt, perhaps, to collectively accept the shock of the vote for the United Kingdom to leave the European Union.

After several hours of drinks, myself and a Climate Bonds colleague walked with a group from the Brexit grieving party to London Bridge station to catch the Jubilee Line to an after-pub drinks gathering in Canada Water at the flat of an Italian communications specialist working at the climate finance NGO, Carbon Tracker. This flat was formerly a public council estate that had been privatized and sold off for municipal profit.

While we waited for the tube, I made lightly inebriated small talk with an actuarial scientist. We discussed the work we were doing in climate finance: I told him that I was an anthropologist looking at the social dynamics of the green bond market. He told me that he was an actuarial scientist working on insurance modeling for climate change risk. To this, I nonchalantly stated “So you are just an accountant, no?” He semi-offendedly exclaimed quickly to me, “Calling me an accountant is like me calling you Indiana Jones!” Actuarial scientists focus on the future and the “science” of managing its risks, while accountants account for past activity in the present. Both professions encompass a similar degree of interpretation and forms of bookkeeping in terms of investment cost and return. However, the focus of accountants on the past and actuarial scientists on the future cuts a clear line between two professions. This is similar 126

to the division of expertise in anthropology, where our Indiana Jones archaeologists analyze the past, whereas cultural/economic/linguistic anthropologists focus on the present.

Despite our professed fields of expertise, by this point my interlocutor no I were merely actuarial scientists or anthropologists. We had been shaped through our professional work as climate finance practitioners, engaged in promoting investment in infrastructure climate change solutions involving engineers and management consultants in engineering firms, economists and policymakers in central banks, financiers in investment banks and underwriting firms, and climate activists and analysts at climate finance NGOs. The time of climate change entering into these institutions and forms of expertise produced both climate finance and climate finance practitioners.

How Time Structures the Everyday Experience of Climate Finance Practitioners

Time in Work

The lived reality of the workday at the Climate Bonds Initiative orientates multiple dimensions of time in a day’s work. This work focuses on temporalities in financial markets and on climate change, but this must be done each day during working hours. While climate finance is an attempt to respond to the time of climate change, this change of focus still occurs during similar workday hours to mainstream financial work – which errs on the side of overwork. Some interlocutors such as Pedro Miguel who had previously worked 7am-7pm at Goldman Sachs, could draw on that experience to influence their climate finance work. As another analyst told me at Climate Bonds in June 2019, “No one leaves Climate Bonds at 3 o’clock!” Climate Bonds

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employees were often the last to leave the Climate Hub, setting the climate finance NGO apart from the other climate change focused organizations in the building.

Climate finance work engages with the empirical reality of climate change, which invokes time scales in deep time, far beyond people’s lived experience. However, through climate science and its financial translation, climate finance focuses on time periods that intersect with the immediate as well as the intergenerational impacts of climate change. Climate change in this context exists as its impact on humanity in the present and the near future. These multiple futures motivate the work of green bond analysts, and influence the development of the green bond market in the present. There are multiple projections of the future that provide the impetus for the work of green bond analysts. These past, present, and multiple futures are all in a day’s work for green bond analysts.

It is ultimately in the course of the workday that the effectiveness of climate finance framings around the times of climate change is negotiated (Bear 2015). In my research, it is in the workday of climate finance practitioners that these relationships come to the center stage, and the product of their negotiation can be understood. Through different framings of the past, present and future, green bond analysts interact with conceptions of nature, infrastructure, resources, and the city of London. We can only understand the lived experience of the timescales

I have outlined here by seeing how people struggle with and negotiate the immediate expectations of these times in their work (Bear 2014). People who are juggling spreadsheets also ask whether their work impacts long scale climate change. At the same time as they keep their climate finance organizations afloat, they also work to support their own careers and personal livelihoods. 128

Green bond analysts typically work from roughly 9am-7pm, meaning they experience

London’s urban spaces in the particular present of the rush hour. Going through a financial center such as Canary Wharf is dramatically different during off-peak hours compared to morning or evening commute times, when commuters must navigate packed escalators and tube trains. In order to avoid congestion, some cycle in while others take above-ground buses between work and home. These journeys frame their sense of space in London.

Once at the organization’s office on Bermondsey Street, analysts take coffee breaks throughout the workday – either within the office building or at one of the coffee shops that line the gentrified street. These breaks frame engagements with space either in the office building or on the street, giving analysts moments of reflection between research (Özden-Schilling 2016). In the context of gentrifying South London where many green bond analysts live, the past exists in the perception of urban change in London. Since most analysts are not originally from London, the city’s past is most evident for them in stories of gentrification that span the last five to ten years – typified by rising rent and property values along with the proliferation of coffee shops.

One of the few analysts who grew up in London chronicles the transformation of Camden in her lifetime through the storefronts that changed from budget grocery stores to thrift stores, expensive restaurants, and music shops. As analysts in the green bond market bring the time of climate change to bear in finance, they are also experiencing the passage of time and transformation of the urban zones in which they live – areas that are often thoroughly financialized, as the gentrification in Bermondsey attests.

While analysts experience the past and present in urban space, in their market and policy research they work through multiple futures. Analysts organize information regarding new green 129

bond issuances by time of issuance and date of maturity, when the bonds are paid in full to an investor. Green bond market updates on the latest market developments are produced every two months. This information spurs speculation in financial media on the future growth of the green bond market that influences market actors present behavior. Spreadsheet work also focuses on the total growth of the market by year, and in July the analysts work feverishly to finish the State of the Market report for a launch event.

Along with market research, in policy reports, analysts attempt to move the investment timescales of institutional investors and investment bankers from short-term strategies focused on profit in the present – where an investment that goes for over a year is long-term – to long- term strategies that must take into account market risks and opportunities for the next fifty years. This timescale shift is justified by climate science models that climate change advocates use to argue that the next thirty to fifty years are the final window to make a significant difference to the scale and damage of climate change on the environment to which humanity has been accustomed. Green bond analysts translate this information into prognostic financial actions, such as a yearly $1 trillion investment into sustainable infrastructure through the green bond market. (Ferry 2016).

Time zones framed the work schedule of analysts, managers, and designers at the Climate

Bonds Initiative. As Mark Turner, the lead designer of the organization’s reports told me:

You've got a CEO who seems to work 24 hours a day, but often he is in another time zone to you completely, so you have that, but for instance, you know on some things I'm working with Mary in Australia sending her a file at the end of the day here and she's sending me revisions first thing in the morning that I then work on during the day, you know. And then working with you know, might be something on Brazil or something like that, so that is unusual for me to have that kind of level of you know, things going on in different parts of the world. I think is quite unusual. 130

Turner’s reflection on time and his experience of working in the green bond market stress the centrality of time and space on the organization’s activities. The incessant work by Climate Bonds staff was accounted for and evaluated by the organization as a whole at the start of every working week of my year-long fieldwork in a Monday team call at 12pm GMT. The spread of Climate Bonds employees around the globe, allowed for a constant experience of work for those in the company. There literally is no hour where no work is being done in the organization. Employees have a constant awareness of where fellow employees are. This kind of temporal globalism has both benefits and drawbacks. Much as climate change itself is a problem incorporating the whole world, it is also the spread of work across the whole world that marks work at the Climate Bonds

Initiative

Monday Team Calls

Starting in mid-2016, as the Climate Bonds Initiative grew, weekly team calls started as a way to keep everyone around the world in the loop about all the different projects in which the

NGO was involved. The calls continued through March 2018, before a break of a year while a new

HR department was being hired. Every Monday the week would begin with a team call at 12pm

London time. Being in London was convenient for connecting with other team members based on the time of day in China, the US and other parts of the world. The agenda would open with updates from Operations, Standards, Certification, Policy, Communications and the CEO when between travels, before moving to the country teams.

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In the Climate Hub, Climate Bonds’ analysts working would leave their desks and gather at a circular table in the back corner of the second-floor office. I was put in charge of setting up the team calls, and I would get a cheap Bluetooth speaker together with the iPhone 4s that was the official Climate Bonds’ phone for the London office. Through MyGlobalConferenceCall.com,

Climate Bonds staff around the world could tune in via their phones or computers. The call agenda was based on the structure of the company, with the Markets, Partners, Policy,

Certification, Standards, and country teams giving updates to the whole company on their work.

Mark Turner, the company’s graphic designer, who worked as a private contractor for his own design company, would occasionally sit in on team calls.

I sat on a team call you have on Monday yeah… it was interesting that you know, people were calling in from everywhere and you can see how that is quite an operation to make sure that people understand what other people are doing half of the time. And it is very different, most of my other clients are London-based… I don’t expect to get up and look at my emails in the morning.

The intention of the team call was to gather everyone to discuss their current work streams, success and difficulties, and to encourage dialogue across teams and around the world. The call was also a source of complaint by employees across the company. Employees complained about how long it would run on, how long certain employees would talk, and the time the call would take away from getting “actual” work done.

Salaries, time, and self-auditing

At Climate Bonds, I also negotiated my salary by time Over my full year of onsite fieldwork.

I requested a year contract, coming into the office four days a week, with the fifth day being my anthropology day to consolidate fieldnotes and material from my observations in the office. The 132

contract was written for one year, and did not include any set vacation time, which could not be included as I was joining as a contractor. I provided the Climate Bonds’ Director of Operations with an invoice at the same time each month during my employment. Halfway through my fieldwork, I moved to focus more time on partnership work. The Director of Operations had me map out my daily workload by day and amount of time spent on each task during the week.

Linnea, the early Climate Bonds policy analyst, later cut back her hours at Climate Bonds and began working as a consultant. In April 2017, as we chatted in Hampstead Heath, she told me that having to account for her hours made her look at her work differently. Keeping track of her hours changed how she felt about her work and her passion for going beyond these hours.

Tracking hours made her work more of a job rather than a vocation. Linnea did feel though that treating her work more like a job was beneficial to her health through limiting overwork, but it did change the meaning of work as well.

This accounting and how it frames my interlocutors’ perceptions of time relates to another Climate Bonds policy and standards analyst who told me that she did not view her job as labor, because labor is just what is accounted for on a company’s balance sheet. She was trained in accounting, and so she was familiar with company accounting practices documenting employee work as labor in unites of time. The value of their work is quantified solely by time.

This accounting influences how employees and contractors view the jobs and work that they do during the time they work for mainstream finance and climate finance organizations.

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Time and Career

As the various work streams focused on climate futures continued in the workdays of green bond analysts, their careers were also progressing through time. Over the course of my fieldwork, interlocutors who had joined Climate Bonds as interns became analysts – and then senior analysts – before leaving for other companies, changing career, or taking time off work.

Another temporality at play here is that of being tied to different organizations through a career. During the leaving drinks for a longtime Climate Bonds Initiative colleague in July 2019, a key point of focus in CEO Sean Kidney’s words to her was that she had spent “15% of your life!

15% of your life” at the NGO. The colleague was moving to Affirmative Investment Management, a boutique sustainable debt asset manager which was one of the first firms to buy green bonds from development banks. At 29, the senior research analyst had spent the last five years at

Climate Bonds, making the percentage more like 17% – but Sean liked round numbers with meaning such as 15%. Sean tended to focus on the effect of numbers rather than their accuracy.

I myself had begun my research on the company around the same time: 15% of my life had also been spent in the organization and in researching the green bond market.

I don’t know what Climate Change is

In August 2016, as I was just finishing three months of fieldwork, I was about to fly back to Boston to start putting together my dissertation research proposal. The current director of market development at the Climate Bonds Initiative wanted to have lunch with me before I left.

We had gotten a drink the day before, but time had been short. We went to grab sandwiches on

Bermondsey Street and walked around the corner to Tanner Park to eat lunch. Over the 134

sandwiches, we talked about our work in finance on climate change. Judith remarked to me that,

“I work in this field, but I don’t know what climate change is. I just tell people that there are others who will make the decisions for them.” Her words stayed with me. As one of the people campaigning for decisions to be made on climate change, that she herself felt that she had not experienced climate change and felt ignorant of what it actually is, highlights how climate change is acted upon through other ways of knowing. Judith doesn’t directly experience climate change, but her job involves the constant invoking of it to evaluate infrastructure and financial products that she interacts with on paper.

The way that climate change becomes known at Climate Bonds and among other climate finance organizations is through the work that climate finance practitioners do on a daily basis.

Climate change is the entity that analysts use to classify what is green and what is not, what is climate resilient and what is not. Climate change exists in financial terms and interpretations of the environment.

Time in the Museums of my Fieldwork

I did not spend all my time working, while I was in the field. Being in London, I was surrounded by a multitude of free museums, filled with temporary exhibitions, for which visitors had to pay a fee. These ticketed exhibitions are also often sponsored by the banks I was working with at Climate Bonds. Many banks and financial institutions throughout London also have their own museums or galleries of various sizes (Ferry 2020). During my first period of London fieldwork over the summer of 2015, Climate Bonds cofounder Nick Silver gave me a ticket for an exhibition at the British Museum called Defining Beauty: The body in ancient Greek Art (Jones 135

2015). When I went to the exhibit on June 27, 2015, it transpired that the exhibition was funded by a private equity fund. Much like the green bond market, London’s gallery and art world is a public and private affair.

Public galleries host private and corporate events in rooms alongside their public exhibits to balance their budgets. The 2016 Bonds and Climate Change report launch occurred at the Tate

Modern. The narratives and discourses of climate finance are visible in many public spaces throughout London. Reflections on time, the past, the future, and our relationships to climate change occur through art as well as through work. When not working on the time of climate change in financial markets, I spent a lot of time over fieldwork in museums and public spaces around London, where I encountered further reflections on time. When travelling to Canary

Wharf for meetings in the financial district in 2016, I ended up walking through an installation called Six Clocks (1999) by designer Konstantin Grcic right on a main walkway. The six double- faced clocks, which were based on the design of the Swiss railway clocks, were adjacent to the

Thomson Reuters building which carried a news feed on its exterior, and continually apprised commuters of current events and shifts in financial markets (Mansfield 2014).

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Figure 18: Canary Wharf Swiss Clocks (June 17, 2017) The evocation of time by Canary Wharf’s clocks significantly rests in Reuters Plaza, the recent headquarters of global information services and journalism company Thomson Reuters.

Time, news, and data intersect in the commuter square (Boyer 2013). The Canary Wharf clocks were the midpoint of my commute from Langdon Park to London Bridge. Over my years of fieldwork, I happened on two major exhibits on time and capitalism. I describe these two exhibits below.

Raqs Media Collective Exhibit

In February 2018, I was invited by Ismail Ertürk, a lecturer at Alliance Manchester Business

School, to join a discussion at the Whitworth Gallery in Manchester titled Time, Economy and

Everyday Life: Reflections on Raqs Media Collective’s Twilight Language. With my trip expenses sponsored by the business school, I took a train north from London to Manchester and walked

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around the city before entering the Whitworth Gallery. The Raqs Media Collective exhibit focused on themes of time management, colonial resource extraction and global relationships.

Figure 19: Raqs Media Collective Exhibit Many of the exhibit’s pieces centered on the emotional experience and framing of time.

Having organized time in my google calendar to be able to attend the event, the pieces resonated with me; particularly, a clock focused not on numerical time but on the emotions that myself and my interlocutors experience over time. This piece caught me as reflective of my work experience at Climate Bonds, and the emotions that take place while in an office over working hours.

Figure 20: Raqs Media Collective Exhibit

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Greenwich Mean Time and the Royal Observatory Museum

An earlier visit to another museum during my fieldwork had gotten me thinking deeply on time. In June 2017, I visited the Royal Observatory and the National Maritime Museum in

Greenwich. I was living in an apartment right next to Langdon Park Station, and took the DLR train through Canary Wharf, one of London’s key financial districts, to Greenwich. It was in the midst of my fieldwork, at a time when I was working around the clock to organize green bond meetings and share information across teams at Climate Bonds. The museum highlighted the importance of time in all of this activity, as well as the historical and political roots of the time governing work at Climate Bonds, in addition to the conception of planet earth as a whole.

The observatory, which stands on the key line for longitude that structured the world’s time in relation to itself, was funded for centuries by the English monarchy and later became a base of the British navy. The Royal Observatory markets itself to visitors as the “home of

Greenwich Mean Time (GMT)”. On the Observatory’s website it states: “Find out how the Royal

Observatory became the home of Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) and the first state-funded scientific institution of its day. Stand on the historic Prime Meridian of the world, where East meets West.”50 Nick Robins, a longtime climate finance practitioner, was a consultant on the

Royal Observatory time exhibit. One of the central exhibits in the exhibition is a circular display of time, in which work and its relationship to time is the central focus.

50 https://www.rmg.co.uk/see-do/we-recommend/attractions/home-time 139

Figure 21: The Royal observatory 2017 Greenwich Mean Time Exhibit The Observatory’s exhibit was titled “Work Time.” According to exhibit text: “The lives of millions of people are governed by the needs of the factory and its machinery, the office and its boss.” The exhibit text continued: “In an industrial society, entire communities travel to work together, work the same hours in the same factories or offices, go on holiday on the same days, listen to the same radio programmes in the evening and even finish drinking at the same time in the pubs.” These words rang true to my experience at Climate Bonds, where my life was bound to the Climate Hub office, to the national holidays in the United Kingdom (referred to as Bank

Holidays; interesting that vacation for the country is based on the closing of banks), and the frequent afterwork drinks and climate finance networking events I was attending.

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Figure 22: Greenwich Mean Time Exhibit A photo of the London Stock Exchange trading floor from April 3, 1968 was used in the exhibition to present international time to visitors. For the curators at the Royal Observatory, international time centers on finance, trade and communications. This centering brings time right into global financial centers such as London, Tokyo, and New York City (Sassen 1995; Ho 2009).

The history of Greenwich is tied to European colonialism, which entailed the mapping of the world and the structuring of time. This production of time and space took place at a grand scale at the Observatory. The colonial history and supremacy of the British Empire through the 1800s has established multiple framings of the globe that favor and support London as a social and financial capital (Robins 2012). London benefits from Greenwich Mean Time, which is a function of both colonial history and geographic organization. During one business day an organization in the city can communicate with all continents.

When I asked a senior advisor at Climate Bonds why he thought much of the world’s climate finance work is done in London, he mentioned the importance of the city’s time zone location. As Brett Scott notes, London “straddles three global time zones – Asia and Australia in

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the morning, Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) during the day, and the USA, Canada and South America during the night” (Scott 2013: 22). The global organization of time zones heightens London’s importance as a center of policy and finance, contributing to the clustering of organizations such as Climate Bonds and the other climate focused organizations in the

Climate Hub. As the creation of time zones structured the financialization and organization of agriculture and environmental management in industrialization, so do they continue to play a role in the work that attempts to restructure the financial industry to align with environmental and climate systems (Cronon 2009).

I reached out to Nick Robins many a time to get on one of his history tours of London.

Sadly, with both of our packed schedules, we never found the time to do it, though we continue to see each other frequently at green bond events around the calendar year. Hopefully at one point in the future I will be able to get a historical tour of London by Nick Robins.

Conclusion

In this chapter I analyze time as a key contextualizing axis to my fieldwork and component of climate finance and the green bond market. As anthropologists, we study phenomena that are in flux. Here, I have centered the analyses here on the context of the times in which they occurred. Time has already been shown to be a central driver in the Sustainable Development

Goals and other global policy campaigns. Time increasingly frames climate change and sustainability activity in finance (Bear 2015; Souleles 2019).

What I am grappling with in terms of time and its perception in climate finance has been dealt with in a myriad of ways within anthropology. As Mathews and Barnes note, “Humans have

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always struggled to imagine and predict what is to come, and future-orientated practices are as old as human society” (Mathews and Barnes 2016: 9). From Evans-Pritchard to Alfred Gell, anthropologists have grappled with time (Evans-Pritchard 1951; Gell 1992). A similar dynamic between work and time was explored by Susan Traweek in Beamtimes and Lifetimes where she traces the careers of physicists who study space time across their own individual space times

(Traweek 1988). As anthropologists have studied time throughout the history of the discipline, time itself has also significantly structured what anthropological research and fieldwork mean.

A hallmark of anthropology is the longitudinal view that our research provides. One of the key tenets of fieldwork is being in the field for at least a year or more. Over this academic timespan I was able to observe and participate in the green bond market. I cannot speak for the lived reality of climate finance before or after my period of fieldwork, but as an ethnographer I capture its reality at the moment that I was in the field, along with my informants’ recollected knowledge of the institutions which they navigated before my fieldwork, and my own understanding of how these entities evolved over my time in the field.

In this chapter I have focused on the everyday experience of time in work among my interlocutors as well as the development of temporal narratives in the market that drive market and organizational activity. Climate change connects all of these conversations around time.

Finance, development, and governmentality all intersect in temporal interpretations of climate change. Climate finance and the green bond market as solutions to climate change rest on time scales. Materiality in infrastructure is developed, as is a willingness on the part of governments to scale up the pace of change required to meet climate change and net zero targets (EU

Sustainable Finance Taxonomy). Whether this market is indeed effective or is mere greenwashing 143

is dependent on environmental change that will be analyzed in the coming decades and communicated back to finance through governmental bodies that process scientific research.

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Chapter 4: Working with Green Bonds

Figure 23: Cartoon from The Economist51 The majority of my fieldwork involved being a participant observer in the different forms of green bond work taking place at the Climate Bonds Initiative. From this position, as the green bond market grew, I observed the work and career trajectories of climate finance practitioners both at Climate Bonds and at other climate finance organizations. It was through work that I saw the tension in climate finance work processed through calculative methods, such as: the analysis of green bonds and the development of green infrastructure standards. Work became a central focus in my research, as it comprised my daily experience and was also what my interlocutors were most passionate to discuss.

51 https://www.economist.com/briefing/2020/06/20/how-much-can-financiers-do-about-climate-change 145

Once I began to conduct formal interviews, I designed my research questions to learn more about the experience of work. In my open-ended interview guide my first question for interlocutors was “Tell me about your work in climate finance. How did you enter this field?” As

I conducted fieldwork, my understanding of climate finance as a sector began as a field of work.

Focusing on work reveals tensions that practitioners experience in connecting their daily tasks to the changes they hope their work will have on the world (Archer 2020). Examining these tasks, and the tension practitioners experience in interpreting them, illuminates how people determine what constitutes important and valuable work in the midst of markets that are continually lauded and critiqued for their environmental and social impacts. Negotiating the tensions of bringing the time of climate change into financial markets produces dissonance and stress for climate finance practitioners. This dissonance and stress is also present in climate finance practitioners’ career decisions and their pursuit of a good life (Fischer 2014). Sometimes climate finance practitioners sustain this navigation and develop careers in the sector. In other instances, burnout leads to long breaks from work or contemplation that instigate new climate finance interventions.

The work involved in the green bond market focuses on making climate change legible to financiers and policymakers. Making climate change legible within financial markets requires the production of policy reports, market analysis, and the coordination of experts from environmental NGOs, engineering and accounting firms, and civil society. The green bond work at Climate Bonds is an example of the “mediations in labor of the contradictions generated within contemporary capitalism” (Bear 2014: 86). While nature and the environment are polysemic terms, used in relation to many different cultural projects, through their work, climate finance and Climate Bonds researchers put forth their own interpretations that make the terms legible 146

in finance (Williams 1976). Where finance and industry have traditionally been exploitative against a framed ‘nature’, in climate finance these categories are merged in contradiction (Ferry and Limbert 2008a). Work both metabolizes the environment for human use and produces pollution and impacts that have led to global climate change. As James Lovelock writes in Gaia,

“Pollution is not, as we are so often told, a product of moral turpitude. It is an inevitable consequence of life at work” (Lovelock 1979: 25). The translation of climate change into climate finance involves both the mobilization of broadly-defined terms such as green infrastructure and climate risk into finance jargon, as well as the production of granular information on the amount of carbon dioxide emissions equivalent per capita generated by light rail in comparison to gas fueled cars (Tripathy 2017; Sussams, Sheate, and Eales 2015).

Understanding what rationale and motivations guide the decisions of climate finance practitioners that impact and create the green bond market and other climate finance markets requires thick description. As Laura Bear argues, anthropological research must “return to a focus on labor as an act of mediation in both markets and places of production” (Bear 2014: 73). Labor is as much a vital part of how change and the everyday functioning of financial markets occurs as labor is in material production.

While Caitlin Zaloom and Karen Ho have furthered research on the experience of work in financial markets, there is currently a lack of literature on the labor that goes into the creation and maintenance of financial markets (Zaloom 2006: 95; Ho 2009: 87). Laura Bear argues that in past anthropology of finance research, “although the categories of agency and knowledge are central to these accounts, the sources of these concepts in the experiences of acts of work are not explored” (Bear 2014: 72). She goes on to argue, “unless our theoretical and ethnographic 147

accounts take notice of this central and mediating role of labor, they will remain profoundly incomplete. This is equally true of our understanding of markets, governance, production, or finance” (Bear 2014: 86). Thus far, Kimberly Chong’s book on management consultants in China, has begun some of the work needed to understand forms of work in finance and the implications of this work (Chong 2018). In my research on climate finance here, I too work against the lack of research on work in financial markets. I learned about the green bond market by working daily with green bonds, as did the climate finance practitioners that I worked alongside. It is through analyzing bonds, filling in spreadsheets, writing policy reports, and networking at conferences, workshops, and roundtables that climate finance practitioners become green bond experts. A fluidity of movement by practitioners characterizes this space as their careers develop.

Practitioners experience burnt out, move to other professions or organizations, and new generations of climate finance practitioners take on their jobs and make these positions their own.

In this chapter, I present different work activities that are undertaken at Climate Bonds. I begin by situating Climate Bonds as an organization, and as a place where work occurs. I describe what these forms of work entail, and what activities are attached to them. I analyze this work in its physical environment, and also detail the digital and physical elements of climate finance work

(Krause-Jensen 2010; Boyer 2013).

Bullshit White Collar Green Bon Work?

I begin my reflection on work in the green bond market with a vignette on white collar work at large, that draws from recent anthropological research. This reflection highlights a 148

tension in finding meaning in white-collar labor at large. This search for meaning extends to climate finance. However, the perceived urgency of climate change shapes the anxieties and aspirations that practitioners experience in their careers.

Figure 24: Bullshit Jobs quote52 I first entered the East London Shoreditch office of the Climate Bonds Initiative in January

2015. To get to the office, I travelled from Woking, a commuter town south of London, walking by the World Wildlife Foundation’s UK headquarters on my way to take a South Western Railway train to Waterloo station. I then took an underground tube line to Old Street Station. As it so happened, at the same time as I took the London tube to start the work for my research on the

52 https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/yvq9qg/david-graeber-pointless-jobs-tube-poster-interview-912 149

green bond market, the tube carriages had just been plastered with quotes about the meaninglessness of most jobs and work.

The quotes were written by fellow anthropologist David Graeber, in an online essay that went viral and became the basis of his book on work: Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (Graeber 2018).

According to Graeber, “On January 5, 2015, a little more than a year after the article came out, on the first Monday of the new year—that is, the day most Londoners were returning to work from their winter holidays—someone took several hundred ads in London Underground cars and replaced them with a series of guerilla posters consisting of quotes from the original essay”

(Graeber 2018: xxiii). In his book, Graeber argues that most current white-collar jobs exist solely to justify our current unequal distribution of wealth, rather than providing services that improve people’s lives materially or mentally.

That Graeber’s reflections on this topic covered advertisement signs across the London underground journey I took to begin my work in climate finance – a white-collar profession that does posit transforming people’s material conditions for the better – provides a fitting context for the start of my research, which ended up consisting mostly of white collar work. During fieldwork, my daily experience was in the forms of work that made climate change legible to financial markets, as well as climate finance practitioners. I was surrounded by climate finance practitioners at the Climate Bonds Initiative who had a variety of jobs in numerous teams that divided the company. Are these, as Graeber puts it, bullshit jobs? And if so, why should we care if they are or are not?

Kimberly Chong expands on Bullshit Jobs in her research on managerial consultants in

China (Chong 2018). She argues that the work of management consultants both legitimizes and 150

enacts a hierarchical capitalist knowledge scheme through the corporate enforcement of managerial best practices. This power is bureaucratic yet valued through its dominance of decision-making ability and cultural power (Chong 2018). Rutger Bregman in Utopia for Realists refers to Graeber’s writings and argues that society can last for quite some time without our current financial industry, as demonstrated by the six-month long banker strike in Ireland in 1970

(Bregman 2017: 158). The economy of Ireland did just fine, while a 1968 strike by waste management employees in New York City quickly brought the city to a standstill as trash piled up

(Bregman 2017: 153-54).

Years after my first day at work in climate finance, I had a conversation with Climate Bonds

CEO Sean Kidney about what he thought about work, both in his company and as a concept. In

July 2019, while Climate Bonds CEO Sean and I had lunch together at his home in North London,

I looked through the LinkedIn profiles of old employees of Climate Bonds to begin organizing an alumni group and came across a former International Project Manager. She had left Climate

Bonds to first become a Yoga teacher at Do Yoga Be Happy, and now was working as an

Ontological Integrator: a type of unlicensed therapist who teaches people to reflect on how they are beings in the world, sometimes with the aid of ayahuasca (Günel 2019). When I told Sean about his former employee’s career trajectory, he told me, “What we do is inherently meaningless, and our work is as meaningful as hers, it all comes down to whether what we are doing helps other people or not.” In the CEO of the Climate Bonds Initiative’s perspective, the utility of Climate Bonds’ work would come from whether or not global greenhouse gas emissions starts to decrease in the future.

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In our conversation, Sean continued to reflect that “life is work, automatically it is a struggle, so might as well try to make the change we want, you are change regardless.” Sean’s reflection reminded me of Hannah Arendt’s breakdown of labor and work, with work being for her what the body does to live (Arendt 2013). Work for Sean is a given, but we can attempt to gain some agency for change we want to make in the world. While my climate finance interlocutors often debated the impact of their work and ability to establish a work-life balance,

I found that regardless of skepticism and debate, people felt they were working in this space not for bullshit but for their own purpose, of which their work was an intimate part.

Office Space: Working in the Climate Hub

“In the future, all this car parking will be parks,” Sean commented on the view outside. “Is that what you are working for? Your office view?’ (October 11, 2017)

The majority of my fieldwork as an anthropologist and my experience of work as a Climate

Bonds employee in the green bond market centers in the physical space of the Climate Hub office building, which is located around the corner from London Bridge station in the borough of

Southwark (Strathern 2008). This was ground zero of my fieldwork, and I entered the office five days a week for six months over the summers of 2015 and 2016, and four days a week from April

2017 to March 2018, often from 9 to 7pm. This adds up to approximately 340 days and 3,060 hours of time spent in the Climate Hub over my fieldwork.

In an echo of my earlier meeting with David Wood, Sean had told me in our first meeting at a Shoreditch coffee shop in January 2015 that with green bonds at this moment, it would be more insightful to do a study on the bankers and financiers working on green bonds in their

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offices, than to go to green bond financed infrastructure project sites if I wanted to learn what green bonds are about. While a growing number of ethnographies on sustainable infrastructure development sites have found significant impacts from particular financial mechanisms and sustainability initiatives, the mainstay of the change that has occurred with green bonds thus far rests in the white collar accounting and evaluating of the market (Howe 2019; Jaramillo 2018;

Boyer 2019; Günel 2019). I thus took this advice wholeheartedly in structuring my fieldwork

(Rissing 2017). Sean had perhaps not expected it would be his offices that would be the center of my research. However, Sean fully supported my fieldwork at Climate Bonds.

Figure 25: 40 Bermondsey and Floor Layout

Sean himself had been reluctant in the early days of Climate Bonds to commit to a physical office. Padraig Oliver, the first official Climate Bonds hired employee, told me that he had to beg

Sean to lease the company’s first two room office space in Shoreditch. Padraig was going mad 153

working in his apartment all day! Padraig ended up leaving Climate Bonds before the company’s move into the Climate Hub to join the Climate Policy Initiative, another climate finance NGO. My fieldwork has encompassed the totality of Climate Bonds’ time leasing office space in the Climate

Hub, from the move into the building in 2015 to the abandonment of the building in July 2020 with the COVID-19 epidemic.

Conducting fieldwork in the hub allowed me to experience the working styles of a number of small to medium sized climate change focused organizations. The Climate Hub was also known as the Green Blob (Rose 2014). This term was first coined as an insult by Prime Minister David

Cameron’s onetime environment secretary, Owen Paterson, when referring to the European

Climate Foundation – the European Union funded organization that had attracted many of the other climate change-oriented NGOs to the building. When Paterson was fired by Cameron, he attributed it to his opposition of environmental NGOs which he viewed as being backed by

American billionaires and supporting energy policies that were not in the best interest of British taxpayers (Sparrow 2014).

Figure 26: The Green Blob (Rose 2014) 154

The climate change advocates, activists, financiers, and journalists working in the Climate

Hub took the term to heart and began to affectionately call the building the Green Blob. They also started to refer to each other as Blobbers. The hub began in Spring 2015, the European

Climate Foundation (ECF) moved into 40 Bermondsey Street, an old warehouse building. The building was cheap office space by London standards due to the investment time horizon of

Sellar, the property manager that owns 40 Bermondsey Street. Sellar Property Group plans to redevelop the Neighborhood building into a second Shard or a similar type high value commercial district, and submitted plans to do so in 2019.53 ECF was followed by Carbon Tracker, Carbon

Brief, and Sandbag. These companies are other small climate finance, activist and journalism

NGOs, many these organizations receive funding from ECF (Black 2018). Other organizations connected to European Climate Foundation funding also moved into the building. The Climate

Bonds Initiative moved into the Climate Hub in May 2015, leaving the company’s cramped office in Shoreditch, East London.

Bringing all of these climate initiatives together led many who worked in the building to have productive, impromptu interactions that supported their work in the burgeoning sector of climate finance (Leins 2018: 50). As one climate journalist who worked on L2 (the office floor’s second floor) commented in her leaving remarks to the building’s email listserv, “despite the lack of a proper social space I’ve enjoyed the many conversations snuck in the corridors/besides the fridge/… loos etc.” The design of the space meant climate finance practitioners bumped into each other, whether they desired it or not. As Bruno Latour argues for social theory that acknowledges

53 https://bermondseystreet.london/redevelopment-proposed-for-40-44-bermondsey-st/ 155

unintentionality, the haphazard design of the Climate Hub to fit white collar office space from its industrial past highlights the unintentionality that surrounded climate finance work (Latour

1987).

Sellar Property Group painted the Climate Hub’s walls white, and the floors a deep, calming blue, which gave the building an open, new age office space feel. The building was also filled with plants, on lease from deedman.co.uk, an office plant rental company founded by Butch

Deedman and operating in the United Kingdom since 1974. In email exchange, Butch told me via email that:

I started our company back in 1974 with a view to green the concrete spaces – so I was one of the first to introduce the office plant display as we know it today in offices in England. Our early views were that we were increasing the office oxygen levels but soon found that many of the plants we used also absorbed the chemicals that you write about. There is also the view that we are also adding to the office humidity levels creating a better breathing environment – we helped O2 in one particular case. As to what plants we choose – this really has to do with the available light and conditions we are placing the plant in. It is all very well to say that “this plant benefits us in this way” but if it cannot survive where you place it you do more harm than good. Our main objective is to place the right plant in the right area so that is survives – well. Once you have this then the other benefits of each particular healthy plant come into play. This was how the final plants were chosen for 40 Bermondsey.54

Butch’s response highlights both the aesthetic and utilitarian value in his opinion of office plants.

He wanted to green concrete spaces, but also came to value perceived environmental benefits for people from office plants. Butch also has a pragmatic perspective, choosing plants that he believes have a chance to survive in an office environment.

54 Email correspondence from August 10, 2015. 156

The Climate Hub’s leased plant workers were watered twice a month by a woman named

Leanne who worked for Butch. Leanne would rush around the office floors with a plastic watering can in hand. Leanne tended to plants in a number of other office complexes in London. She told me, “the worst offices are the ones where office workers think they can feed the plants coffee.”

Leanne was an unknown person to the rest of the Climate Bonds team and other climate practitioners in the hub. She came into the office at the periphery of their daily work to water the plants that surrounded their desks and computers. Mat Hope, editor of DeSmogUK, a climate change media outlet, told me that during his time in the hub, he barely noticed the plants.

However, Mat would occasionally find himself bumping into them while walking around during conference calls with a MacBook in both hands, and his ears tuned into meetings.

Kentia forsteriana or (Howea) Palm

This is another Victorian plant which was seen in many a fine restaurant.

This plant again loves a shady position.

Its natural habitat is on the Lord Howe Island (hence its other name) this island was discovered in the late 1700. Lord Howe Island is situated off the coast of Australia.

The plant naturally grows on the lower slopes and down to the sea on this island.

Figure 27: Kentia Forsteriana Deedman’s description The plants that Deedman provided the Climate Hub to furnish the offices of climate finance analysts and activists have their own particular histories linked to colonialism and the development of finance. The Howea palms (Kentia forsteriana) that populated the office were

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tied to British colonial expansion in the South Pacific. Botany and empire are intertwined, and this legacy continues in climate finance.

Later in my fieldwork I discovered that calling the building the Climate Hub or the Green

Blob was particular to this initial group of workers. When I returned to the Climate Hub for

London’s first Climate Action Week in July 2019, Pedro Miguel, a market analyst who had recently joined the Climate Bonds team, thought my calling the building the Climate Hub was quite interesting. He was unaware of the nickname of the building he associated just with his job.

Pedro: “Haha, that’s funny that you call it the climate hub

Aneil: “Well it is also called the Green Blob. What do people call it now?”

Pedro: “It’s fucking work for most of us! haha…”

Over my fieldwork, the Climate Hub became central in my experience of climate finance and my understanding of what work in this space is and how it happens through each workday (Yaneva

2009). The majority of Climate Bonds’ staff continued to work in the Climate Hub until the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Climate Bonds officially ended the company’s office lease at the end of July 2020. Staff had to reenter the hub to take their belongings. As Deputy Head of

Market Intelligence Xing Liu remarked to me, “That was a surreal experience, seeing a place that you entered every day becoming unfamiliar.”

Understanding Climate Finance Work

While I observed the growth of the green bond market and the development of climate finance spaces and practitioner identities, the mainstay of my fieldwork consisted of participant 158

observation in concrete acts of green bond labor. The majority of the work at Climate Bonds focused on defining the characteristics of green bonds, the infrastructure the bonds financed, and the larger dynamics of the market overall (size, global spread, and projected growth). This labor codified what made a green bond a green bond.

In Liquidated, Karen Ho takes steps in the study of labor proposed by Laura Bear (Ho

2009). Ho details how it is through labor that salaries are legitimized, and their scales derived from financialization. In her ethnography, she shows that in investment banking, a “culture of overwork” legitimizes the labor of investment bankers, giving them the ability to judge the companies they evaluate as inefficient (Ho 2009: 102). Here, I argue that both the cultural identities of my interlocutors as well as the interaction between machines, software interfaces, spreadsheets and people are key components of database and performative work in the green bond market (Özden‐Schilling 2016; Beunza and Ferraro 2019). This work is how the reframing of finance through the time of climate change is produced. The work at Climate Bonds and other climate finance NGOs produces the data and people that create sustainable financial products and the labelling of the projects connected to them as sustainable.

These jobs – and the forms of work associated with them – translated climate change into the green bond market, and also kept the Climate Bonds Initiative going as an organization. It is through these jobs, that our global financial industry responds to climate change in the manner that it has without consistent political will to grapple with this urgent societal concern from governments around the world. Whether or not this work is bullshit, in Graeber’s meaning, will be determined by the impact of climate change on humanity and biological life over the next fifty years. 159

My Work in the Green Bond Market

At Climate Bonds, my work varied over time. Starting out from that meeting in January

2015, I worked as a policy intern. I did research for a policy guidebook on scaling up green bonds while I was back at Brandeis University over Spring 2015 and continued to work on the manuscript through Summer 2015 when I joined the team at the Climate Hub (Kidney et al. 2015).

During Summer 2015, I would come into the office building and write up case studies on particular public-private financing arrangements, outlining how governments could support sustainable infrastructure financing by leveraging private capital (Kidney et al. 2015). From June

2015, I have had a Memorandum of Understanding with Climate Bonds that I could use all work experiences for my own research, without any review or oversight from them.

My first case study looked at how Small Business Investment Company (SBIC) and Small

Business Innovation Research (SBIR) funding from the US government supported private sector innovation. From the beginning I was told that the work at climate bonds was to mobilize capital in the private sector to support government intervention and finance sustainable infrastructure.

Initially, I worked closely with Linnea Sonegstud, a Norwegian policy analyst who was at Climate

Bonds from 2015 until 2018. Working on the policy book over the summer of 2015, I would write up 1-2-page overviews to put into a larger report on which she spent many hours proofreading and structuring. The focus of my case studies was on public-private partnerships which stressed the historical precedent for public and private partnerships in markets. I researched and wrote on innovation financing and transit-oriented development sustainable models.

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Performance and communications were high in the mind of the CEO. Even as an intern I was asked to talk in a recorded session where all team members introduced themselves and described their work. These videos never surfaced, apart from the State of the Market report. I continued work on the policy guidebook through August 2015 as a researcher, returning to

Brandeis for the academic year. From this time until December 2016, I managed the Climate

Bonds LinkedIn and Twitter accounts as well, reposting blogposts and managing conversations on the social media platforms. I then returned to London from June to August 2016, where I worked on the Climate Bonds’ supported Green Infrastructure Investment Coalition. I organized and facilitated meetings between the Heads of Debt Capital Markets at Indian banks (including

Yes Bank and others) and asset managers such as BlackRock and HSBC in London.

In April 2017, I began to work in the Climate Hub as Sean’s executive assistant. My title was Executive Associate and Assistant to the CEO, and I held this position until March 2018. My bio from the Climate Bonds website team page at this time read:

Aneil is our CEO Sean Kidney's executive assistant and provides him with administrative and logistical support. Prior to his current position, Aneil was a Climate Bonds researcher involved in our policy and market related research projects.

In this job, while I was supposedly managing the CEO, most of my work was managing relationships and work streams across the company (during which I took notes on everything). I managed meetings for multiple green bond market development teams (India, Brazil, China), wrote a successful grant to collaborate with other organizations on a program to bring the US

PACE sustainable home financing model to the European Union (EuroPACE 2020). I planned a US municipal green bond market engagement strategy as well. I continued in this role until March

2018, when I returned to Massachusetts to focus on dissertation writing. 161

Different Forms of Work at The Climate Bonds Initiative

My active participant observation through work at Climate Bonds allowed me to enter the organization first as a policy researcher, and later allowed me to observe the workings of the entire organization as the CEO’s assistant. Within the London office of the Climate Bonds

Initiative there was a multiplicity of workstreams focused on churning out both green bond market analysis as well as certification to leverage climate science in the market. At the Climate

Bonds Initiative, employees were divided into teams focused on particular workstreams in the organization. These teams evolved from an initial four employees focused on green bond market analysis, policy, and standards. Climate Bonds’ certification program was run remotely from

Australia by Rob Fowler, a former consultant turned carbon credits analyst who lived on a farm north of Melbourne with an very intelligent pet pig.

The Partners programs and Market Development teams were most involved in networking and disseminating the research from policy and market intelligence teams. The

Standard program focused on gathering scientific knowledge through organizing industry and technical working groups. The Communications team developed and implemented global strategies and campaigns that built narratives around the work done by individual teams, weaving them into Climate Bonds image as an NGO with an expansive international green finance agenda.

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Research and Database Work

Figure 28: Climate Bonds Data Portal Those working most directly with market data, and focused on research work at Climate

Bonds, were the Market Intelligence team. The Standards team focused on translating climate science and environmental engineering into expertise understandable to financiers. From 2015, the green bond market quadrupled over the course of my fieldwork, and this growth was captured by Climate Bonds market analysts in the team’s Excel spreadsheet.

Market analysts gather quantitative green bond market data in two different ways. The

Markets team focused on assembling green bond market data. The Standards team was focused on putting together documents for technical working groups to review, before being brought into conversation with industry working groups. These criteria were focused on establishing clear metrics to evaluate the sustainability, in terms of climate change adaptation and mitigation, and, increasingly towards the later part of my fieldwork, resiliency.

This work involved both the production of data and green bond analysis through the use of the company’s Thomson Reuters Eikon account, PPTs, and Excel spreadsheets (Ozden-Schilling 163

2016). Canay Ozden-Schilling describes these work processes as “database work.” According to

Ozden-Schilling, database work “entails an endless, often tedious process of generating data and making them usable in computer models” (Ozden-Schilling 2016: 68). This work is also screenwork, akin to Dominic Boyer’s description of German news making in The Life Informatic

(Boyer 2013). Boyer writes “that professional practice takes place in offices, in front of screens, undertaken by professionals who have developed a habitus to insulate their expert epistemic labor from the distractions of private lives and loves” (Boyer 2013: 8). Knowledge is produced through organizations which accumulate information from other sources. The cohorts of 25-35- year-old green bond analysts on Bermondsey Street spend their days organizing and sorting through information which is then used to influence debate.

In the second half of 2018, the market intelligence unit of the Climate Bonds Initiative became the biggest team in the organization, albeit mostly backed by a cadre of interns. Market analysts worked literally around the clock, with team members in London working from 9am to

6.30 pm, before Mary, then Head of Markets in Sydney, Australia took over the work through the

London night.

During the time I was in London from 2016 to 2018, the Markets team was headed by

Mary in Australia. With one Bloomberg Terminal and one Eikon account between them, the markets team handed their Excel sheets and account access over to each other at the end of each working day. In this way, they populated the Excel spreadsheet through which Climate Bonds assembled the totality of the green bond market, as well as the Climate Aligned Universe. This information was distilled for communication to market participants through market roundup reports released on the Climate Bonds blog as well as in yearly annual State of the Market reports. 164

Observing the work of the Markets team at Climate Bonds alerted me to the messiness of creating calculative tools for a new market. It is through the use of calculative tools, which range from an analyst’s form of expertise, Excel spreadsheets, Bloomberg terminals, and standards boards that the environment, nature, and climate change become legible in the green bond market. Indeed, it is the Climate Bonds markets team that initially screens green bonds based on the infrastructure that the bonds finance. The analysts decide whether a bond is sufficiently green based on reading the documentation provided by issuers about the projects financed. The findings of this labor were periodically published to the market through blog posts and reports, with the largest report event being the State of the Market.

The Climate Bonds’ green bond market Excel sheet that the markets team populates and updates on a daily basis (or really hourly, with market analysts in London and Sydney working around the clock in all time zones) links to the organization’s online blog. The Climate Bonds blog reports on market updates also include normative reflections and analyses of the latest green bond issuances, both praising and critiquing the different corporations, governments, and projects in the market. The company’s blog functions as a mechanism for performativity in the green bond market, both describing green bond issuances while simultaneously defining what green bonds are for market participants. Performativity involves a representation of a market which acts in effect as an intervention, creating what the study describes (Mackenzie, Muniesa, and Siu 2007: 4-5). Climate Bonds’ market tools both describe the value of green bonds as well as create the market’s parameters.

While Ozden-Schilling identifies database work in the context of electricity market analysts, I perceive the consequences of this work in another form of market communication as 165

well. The other side of database work is communication and forms of performative work, which was a constant in the office. Small talk taking place around desks organized the Climate Bonds

Communications, Partners Programme, Certification, and Standards teams. Outside of the office,

Sean, Manuel Adamini, the Head of Partnerships in 2017, and Judith Maybell, Director of Market

Development, who later became Deputy CEO in 2019, began to increase their number of speaking engagements at conferences and events around the world. Having grown up in Germany and worked as a banker in the Netherlands, Manuel focused his speaking and networking efforts on

Europe.

Climate Bonds Standard and Certification Work

While the Markets’ team was engrossed in analyzing the growth and parameters of the green bond market, as well as the particular financial and environmental characteristics of green bonds, the Standards team focused on producing Paris Agreement compliant evaluation systems for green infrastructure financed by the market. The labor and work of climate finance practitioners – as well as the graphic designs they create in market reports – connect nature and the environment to finance. This connection is furthered through the production of calculative tools such as sustainability standards.

As climate finance practitioners at Climate Bonds work to create standards for green bonds, they bring together multiple fields of expertise, from scientific, governmental, and financial organizations; creating a new form of knowledge with which to evaluate infrastructure.

Anna Creed, the head of the Standards team from 2017 to the present, came from a background in accounting. She started her career at Arthur Andersen and was lucky to leave before the 166

accounting firm’s Enron scandal. Anna then went on to work on the Prince of Wales sustainability fund.

The standards work was a direct translation of knowledge through an objectified system of knowledge production. The backgrounds of the standards analysts, from geography and carbon accounting to architecture and biology, fed into their production of green bond standards.

Climate Bonds develops the Climate Bonds Standard for different project categories of green bonds to collate expertise around different sustainable infrastructure types. These categories include Solar, Wind, Low Carbon Buildings, Bus Rapid Transit, Bioenergy, Water, Agriculture and

Forestry, Geothermal, and Low Carbon Transport. The categories are certified by an independent

Climate Bonds Standard Board made up of experts in finance, engineering, environmental management, and law, to name a few (Climate Bonds Initiative 2015b). Çalışkan and Callon note that “the public- and private-sector research centers that prepare new products and processes, the international monetary or financial institutions, the regulatory or standardization agencies”

(Çalışkan and Callon 2010: 8) are some of the main entities in establishing markets. By creating the Standard, Climate Bonds exists as a standardizing agency in the green bond market.

In establishing the Climate Bonds Standard, Climate Bonds analysts draw from numerous forms of expertise to create different categories of green bonds for certification. As Heather

Lovell states, “standardisation of new things is always done with reference to what has already been standardised, to the existing body of standards, but at the same time existing standards and classifications are always subject to revision: there is a constant tension between continuity and change” (Lovell 2014: 264). Similarly, Arjun Appadurai writes that there are “‘likenesses’ or similarities in the efforts of investment banks to provide contact languages of valuation for new 167

financial products” (Appadurai 2012: 9). Climate Bonds’ analysts legitimize Climate Bonds

Standards through the organization of scientific bodies of experts to both create and assess the certification scheme. While it is scientific knowledge that legitimizes the certification scheme, this knowledge must still be made legible for finance professionals.

As a director in charge of organizing expert panels for different Climate Bonds Standard groups told me, “the moment you say science people think everything is too difficult. Science is numbers, graphs, scary stuff. Investors understand risks and impacts really well, it’s a different type of expertise.” Thus, Climate Bonds’ team members work to translate scientific knowledge into risk and impact as understood in monetary terms by finance professionals. Climate Bonds employees engage in translation work between disciplines and different fields of expertise

(Tripathy 2017).

Figure 29: Climate Bonds TWG and IWG Process 168

The process of putting together the Climate Bonds Standard began with the formation of technical working groups. Putting together overview papers on particular infrastructure forms such as hydropower, marine resources, and forestry, the Standards team then coordinated

Webex calls with technical experts to flesh out standards to evaluate projects. Industry working groups would be convened to examine the final document produced by the technical working group. The final documents produced through this process would then go out for public consultation via the Climate Bonds blog.

The makeup of the industry working groups was a result of communications, networking, and organizing that diffused throughout Climate Bonds grew from Sean’s initial networking at the start of the Climate Bonds Initiative. Sometimes this networking fell flat, as a Climate Bonds analyst in charge of the building criteria told me while we were on a lunch break walk outside the

Climate Hub: “We don’t have AECOM, or Arup, Carbon Trust, or a single architecture firm in the buildings criteria. We are going to reconvene the technical working group next year.” Climate

Bonds continually revises the Standard through new network relationships and partnerships.

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Certification

Figure 30: Climate Bonds Certification Scheme The criteria that the Standards team produced contribute directly to the labor of the

Certification team. This team is in effect the applied extension to bring the scientific and industry- based thresholds established by the Climate Bonds Standard into the green bond market. The particularities of this team largely remained a mystery to the other employees. As Judith exclaimed to a policymaker, “With certification you would have to ask Rob, it is a black box to me!” Judith had helped establish the Climate Bonds Standard as her first role at Climate Bonds.

Her background in biology and as a scientist had helped develop the Standard’s technical and industry working groups. However, the Climate Bonds Certification process was initially established by Rob Fowler, an Australian with a decade long career in carbon offsets and project review under the Gold Standard. Rob had experience in carbon offsets and in consulting, both of which proved to be useful when Rob structured the Climate Bonds Initiative Certification program.

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Figure 31: Assets Eligible for Certification55 The first certified Climate Bond came to market in 2014, issued by the UK subsidiary of

Belectric, a German energy producer focused on solar. This certification was spearheaded by Paul

Camp, who I met at the Climate Bonds Conference in March 2019. This certified bond had been attempted to be marketed to retail investors in the UK such as pensioners, and other smaller investors. Climate Bonds staff argued that getting a green bond certified as a Climate Bond would convey benefits. The following is posted on the organization’s certification webpage on the company website:

55 https://www.climatebonds.net/files/files/CBI_Certification_Brochure_September_2020.pdf 171

Benefits of Certification

FOR ISSUERS

1) More diverse investor base: Certification signals the low-carbon integrity of the bond and is important for investors looking for climate related investments. Most issuers of Certified Climate Bonds find that the range of investors interested in their bond is much broader. 2) Easier-to-find: Certification allows potential investors to quickly find a credible green / climate bond on Bloomberg and via other providers of market information. 3) Enhanced reputation: Certification allows an issuer to associate its organisation with efforts to scale up financial flows for delivering the low-carbon economy and securing prosperity for future generations. 4) Lower cost: issuers pay less for Certification than for a second opinion and investors avoid the cost of environmental due diligence. What is innovative about the standard is that it allows not only obvious project bonds for renewable energy generation or green portfolio bonds to be labelled as ‘Climate Bonds’, but it also allows corporate bonds to be linked with low-carbon activities, without compromising on the normal credit ratings of the issuer. A robust and credible standard eases decision-making and focuses attention on credible climate change solution opportunities. The easier it is to use the faster the market will grow. Climate Bonds Initiative Certification webpage (January 31, 2020)56

Drawing from the environmental and climate infrastructure assessments produced by the

Standards team’s development of the Climate Bonds Taxonomy and Criteria through the convening of technical and industry working groups, the Certification team managed conversations with green bond issuers attempting to get their green bonds Climate Bond

Standard Certified. The majority of these conversations occurred during the bond issuance process, as a green bond was being brought to market. Along with the leverage of scientific expertise by the Climate Bond Standard, the Certification program uses the International

Standards Organization’s standards to evaluate potential Climate Bond verifiers. All Climate

56 https://www.climatebonds.net/certification

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Bonds Standard verifiers must be certified under the International Standard on Assurance

Engagements 3000 or equivalent assurance standards. Climate Bonds uses this distinction to lend credibility and stringency to the certification program, in contrast to less robust Second Party

Opinions and self labelling which Climate Bonds’ argued lacked consistency and grounding in larger climate science and climate change scenarios. Many Climate Bonds verifiers also provided

Second Party Opinions to green bond issuers under the Green Bond Principles.

Standard and Certification work at Climate Bonds are centered on bringing a level of climate science robustness to the green bond market (Rose 2018). While the Climate Bonds

Standard and Certification scheme work in parallel to other forms of environmental and climate auditing in the green bond market such as Second Party Opinions and the Green Bond Principles as convened by ICMA, the Climate Bonds’ third party certification system and the criteria it relies on brings together another level of organizational and scientific complexity.

As outlined in Chapter 2, calls for standards in the green bond market continue to support both the work of the Climate Bonds Initiative and other organizations attempting to bring different forms of audit to the green bond market. For example, The International Standards

Organization has convened multiple working groups to establish standards for green bonds. The

Green Bond Principles are themselves framed as guidelines, which impact green bond frameworks. Climate Bonds frames its certification program as a form of assurance, which has its own consulting guidelines in comparison to an opinion. Explaining certification, the Certification

Manager outlined the process as follows:

The Climate Bonds Standard has a governance body, a governance structure behind the certification scheme. The Green Bond Principles don’t have that in the sense that it is left to the Second Party Opinion model to decide whether a bond is green or not. So the 173

methodology of assessment provided in the Second Party Opinion model is by the verifier, the auditor… In the Standard we provide the methodology with the Standard and with sector criteria… the sector criteria are a set of requirements expressed in CO2 emission reductions that describe what projects and assets should look like in order to be compliant with a 2050 net zero carbon future So the purpose of certification is very specific. When investors see the Climate Bond Standard logo on prospectus, they would identify that the bond is in compliance with a 2050 zero carbon future. The level of ambition for Climate Bond Standard Certification is higher than your average Second Party Opinion, because we identify with a science-based analysis what a decarbonization based trajectory should look like from now to 2050.

This description of the Climate Bonds Standard and Certification scheme highlights the organizational and technical elements that compose the scheme as well as its utility the green bond market. The forms of green bond auditing at play in the green bond market rest in the mainstay of the work done by climate finance practitioners from their desks rests on organizational dynamics, wordplay and referring to documentation to legitimize sustainability opinions (Riles 2006). The validity and effectiveness of this documentation ultimately rests on the climate change scenarios tied to emissions trajectories in reports such as those published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The production of these reports have been analyzed by anthropologist Pamela McElwee and others (Pearce, Mahony, and Raman 2018;

McElwee 2020).

Over 2017-2018, in the Climate Hub office, Rob Fowler managed the Climate Bonds

Certification program remotely from his farm outside of Melbourne, Australia with Matteo Bigoni working in London as Climate Bonds’ Certification Manager. Prior to Climate Bonds, Matteo had worked as a development consultant focused on carbon accounting, similarly to Rob’s background working with the Gold Standard. By the end of my year of office fieldwork in London,

Matteo became the Head of the Certification Scheme, while Rob transitioned to running Green

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Bond Bootcamps around the world to train current and potential green bond market participants in Climate Bonds’ perspective on what the green bond market is and what the market should be.

Designing over Time in Climate Finance: Reports

Figure 32: Reports in Climate Bonds Office

Climate Bonds market reports gained notoriety for the organization, particularly for their distinctive design. The analysts in the Markets team not only produced the quantitative data that fed Climate Bonds’ reports; they also brainstormed with the Communications team some of the most charismatic images in the reports. These images where most captivating when they illustrated both the green bond market and climate change/sustainable infrastructure (O'Reilly

2017). Through material documents, policy and government work occurs (Hull 2012; Gupta

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2012). People negotiate organizational expertise through the production of official and white paper documents and reports (McNeill and St Clair 2011).

The use of market reports and other climate finance documents by climate finance practitioners parallels the use of documents by NGO delegates at UN conferences that Riles observes. She states that “The documents were valuable collection items when delegates took them home in their suitcases to place on library shelves” (Riles 2011: 83). Documents have continued to be theorized in anthropology (Riles 2006). As the analysts at Climate Bonds continued their data work, the organization continued to design and publish their numbers and information in country specific and global market reports.

In an interview in February 2018, Climate Bonds Initiative head graphic designer, Mark

Turner, told me that most of what he does as ephemeral. He produces not the substance but the coating. Turner told me that for him, “As a graphic designer, everything you do is kind of ephemeral, it is made for a specific moment in time.” He went on to note that, “A yearly state of the market really only has relevance in that particular year that you publish it, so yeah these things are kind of ephemeral.” Apart from Climate Bonds, he does a lot of design work for Royal

Mail, on stamps, real estate signs and advertisements, an array of images. He lives in North

London.

In August 2015, I first met Mark. He entered the Climate Hub and joined Sean, Linnea, an intern and I at the office roundtable to brainstorm how to design the scaling up green bonds report. I had been reading a lot of Latour at the time, and was particularly into Latour’s

Reassembling the Social, due to it being freely available online (Latour 2005). I thought what the

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Climate Bonds policy team was trying to convey to our readers was about how to construct a green bond market. The cover of Latour’s book inspired me in relation to the Climate Bonds report. Since we were focusing on strategies and how to build components to scale up the green bond market, the design of the publication could mirror that of a green bond assembly line. Mark took all of our collective ideas into account and went to work on designing the report.

Figure 33: Covers of Reassembling the Social and Scaling up Green Bond Markets While Mark told me that what he produces is ephemeral, reports designed now might not be relevant or useful in a year, as the resident Climate Bonds anthropologist, I was and remain an avid collector of Mark’s previous Climate Bonds reports. I collect the reports in a similar manner to a stamp collector, alluding to Mark’s work as well as a stamp designer for the Royal

Mail. These reports mark a historical archive of the organization’s work. West of the Atlantic, I curate the most comprehensive collection of Climate Bonds reports outside of the Climate Hub office to my knowledge. One of the earliest documents that Mark designed is a folder for the

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Climate Bonds Initiative. The images are rudimentary and nothing like the standout colors of

Mark’s later work, but on the reverse side of the folder is a list of the company’s network, comprised of individuals Sean had met around the world and whom he had added to an advisory board. On this list, organized by location and beginning with Boston, the first name is David

Wood, the Director of the Initiative for Responsible Investment at Harvard’s Kennedy School and my own entry point into the Climate Bonds Initiative’s network.

Figure 34: A Climate Bonds Report in Progress Aesthetics at Work

In her article Best Practices: Research, finance, and NGOs in Cairo, Julia Elyacher, drawing from Annelise Riles (Riles 2001), analyzes the purpose of research and what is produced in articles or from research as content (aesthetics) or objects. Elyacher argues, “Once we can turn our attention to the artifacts of research, as opposed to focusing on the content of research, we can 178

begin to investigate the functioning of research artifacts as conveyors of value” (Elyachar 2006:

415). Elyachar’s framing of research as artifact aligns with my experience of the use of Climate

Bonds reports and other analyses of the green bond market by market participants.

The Climate Bonds green bond market reports were material objects for ends that were framed in academic aesthetics. These reports contained references and data but were also graphically appealing and telling in their depiction of climate change and the green bond market.

These reports were the result of in person and virtual meetings, green bond market database work, and the navigation of documents across desks and between computers as Adobe InDesign files. As Bruno Latour states in Reassembling the Social, for lawyers “the system of law is compiled using folders, libraries, meetings, etc. Even Karl Marx in the British Library needs a desk to assemble the formidable forces of capitalism” (Latour 2005: 175). For Latour, work must be traced through the interactions of humans and nonhumans. This includes calculative labor.

Latour argues for a study of “centers of calculation” (Latour 2005: 178) in their entirety. Climate

Bonds reports are digital and material manifestations of the Climate Bonds Initiative as a “center of calculation” in the green bond market.

Camille Frandon-Martinez is the research analyst who came up with the image of an iceberg to depict the size of the green bond market in contrast to the total global bond market.

She worked as an analyst in the Markets team at Climate Bonds from March 2016 to May 2019.

With a year of research experience on green bonds by summer 2017, she thought of the iceberg image as a great way to portray the size of the green bond market in relation to the total amount of bonds financing infrastructure and projects that met Climate Bonds’ assessment for green infrastructure. Discussing the company’s division between aesthetic report design and analysis, 179

Sean stated firmly that “Camille thought of that image because she was familiar with our work”.

This knowledge was being developed within the Climate Bonds Initiative team and was a synthesis of market knowledge and aesthetic design. Camille’s image of an iceberg tied together both market narratives of the size of green and climate bonds, and the potential of the market, along with the imagery of climate change and charismatic data about it (O'Reilly 2017; van Beek et al. 2020). The importance of the imagery in Climate Bonds reports highlights the performative work active in the organization (Beunza and Ferraro 2019). These images and the construction of

Climate Bonds’ reports highlights an iterative process which involved digital and material interfaces often centered in Climate Bonds’ Climate Hub offices (Yaneva 2009).

Figure 35: State of the Market 2016 Iceberg Graphic

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PowerPoint

With Sean, the CEO of the Climate Bonds Initiative, constantly presenting on green bonds and climate change in front of audiences of financiers and policymakers around the globe,

PowerPoints were circulated constantly within the Climate Bonds Initiative and the company

Dropbox. These PPTs drew from the images of charismatic data in Climate Bonds reports and presented information in a storytelling style to green bond market participants and potential participants. As part of white-collar labor, PPTs are vital to highlight work processes and to establish the value white-collar labor (Prentice 2019; Knoblauch 2012; Chong 2018). Climate

Bonds PPTs drew from the aesthetics of the Climate Bonds market reports. These reports not only attempted to highlight the data that the company’s Market Intelligence team produced through tallying green bonds in Microsoft Excel, but also attempted to highlight trajectories for the market as a whole in producing impact to deal with climate change.

Physical and Digital Green Bond Work

In the Climate Bonds Climate Hub office there was both a continual flow of meetings done in the small and large conference rooms on the second floor, as well as in the padded call conference room on the third. These calls and the work in-between them, mark the interface between physical and digital work in the green bond market. Financial markets have moved increasingly into digital space (Zaloom 2006; Pardo-Guerra 2019). The PowerPoints produced at

Climate Bonds were constantly put to use and revised by the CEO and the heads of the Partners

Program, in order to develop relationships with green bond issuers, investors, and financial intermediaries, and market development leads around the world. These leads concentrated on 181

developing relationships to get green bonds issued in Nigeria, Chile, Brazil, India, and China, to name a few.

Figure 36: A commentary on green bond networking work (Financial Times 2015)

Climate Bonds reports highlight the interplay between digital and physical work at the organization. While analysts spent their hours behind computers compiling green bonds in excel sheets and writing up reflections for reports designed using Adobe InDesign, other members of

Climate Bonds travelled between meetings and conferences around the world disseminating both physical copies of the reports as well as digital ones via Gmail. In the following sections, I detail further examples of the interplay between physical and digital work at Climate Bonds.

Many of these categories of work intersected physical and digital realms, with meetings being in person as well as via conference call software.

Meetings

Meetings, both physical and digital, are a mainstay of work life in climate finance. As

Adam Reed has found, meetings can frame the relationship between people and the organizations in which they work (Reed 2017). Officials from the government of Mexico came

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into the Climate Hub for my first meeting at Climate Bonds as an executive associate in April

2017. We chatted over water in the Hub’s large conference room, and I brought in Climate Bonds reports to distribute. One of these reports was the policy guidebook that I had worked on during my first summer with Climate Bonds in 2015. In this meeting, I witnessed the utility of the guidebook firsthand, as the Mexican government officials skimmed through the guidebook and reports as we responded to their questions about green bonds and the market.

The climate of the conference rooms was a consistent complaint and physical constraint on meetings, with Dyson fans in the corner of the offices. There was a large conference room and a small conference room that were used collectively by the office floor. The rooms were booked via Skedda57, a scheduling program that is free online. With doors closed the rooms would heat up rapidly if there were more than three participants. Since I was a notetaker/convener for a number of weekly and biweekly conference calls, for the senior management, India team, and cross project coordination, there would be days when I would be in the conference room for hours at a time.

Alongside in person meetings every day, there were usually one or two virtual meetings carried out through WhatsApp, Skype, WeChat, Zoom, or WebEx, as well as hybrid meetings with people in the London office and others. WhatsApp was used for the India team due to its popularity in the country. Skype was the mainstay of most calls with the United States as well as with collaborating European organizations. The Climate Bonds WebEx account was dominated

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by the Standards team for their calls. My Global Conference Call58 was used for larger talks with team meetings as well as for communicating with outside organizations. These calls coordinated workflows and centralized conversations, while also being a constant source of complaint and stress amongst Climate Bonds staff. One call in particular that was both a coming together of the whole team, as well as a bemoaned collective exercise, was the Monday team call, where all

Climate Bonds staff from around the world dialed in to communicate with those working in the

London office.

Coffee shops and Finance Work

London coffee shops have long been a focal point for financial innovation. Financial institutions including the London Stock Exchange and Lloyds of London originated in London’s

17th century coffee houses (Preda 2009; Pollan 2019). Following in this tradition, it is fitting that

Climate Bonds began when Sean Kidney and Nick Silver met to chat in a now defunct London coffee shop near Karl Marx’s tomb in Highgate in 2008. At the Climate Bonds 10th year anniversary Zoom celebration in December 2020, noted jokingly that he thought that the former coffee shop’s building has had “the biggest impact from Highgate on the world, second only to

Karl Marx.”

While the Climate Bonds office was in Shoreditch, green bond meetings would occur frequently at Shoreditch Ground, a coffee shop on the “Silicon Roundabout”. This coffee shop played a vital role in hosting meetings that established some of the core components of the green

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bond market, such as the initial brainstorming behind the Barclays MSCI green bond index. While working at Barclays Scott Harman, who put together the Barclays MSCI green bond index ran into

Sean at a conference. After Sean’s presentation, Harman reflects that “I came up afterwards and said I am thinking about doing a green bond index. Several coffees around Shoreditch later and this ended up in the Barclays Index.”

When Climate Bonds moved into the Climate Hub, the coffee shops surrounding the office complex became escapes from work for employees. Throughout the workday, many would go on innumerable walks away from computer screens with discussions on projects of the time as well as life goals and other thoughts. The Hide, Woolpack, Fuckoffee, and Watch House next to a park with flowers specifically planted to help the local bees on the rooftops, run by Bermondsey

Beekeepers to harvest honey. Bermondsey Street was a late stage gentrified neighborhood over the course of my fieldwork, and the streets coffee shops were a focal point for this gentrification

(Keddie 2014). Trips to these coffee shops structured much of the work day for many Climate

Bonds’ employees.

Gmail at Work

Like my university email, the Climate Bonds Initiative team email was run by Gmail. From

2017-2018, I managed the Gmail suite, setting up google groups for different sections of the company, such as a managers email and google group, as well as troubleshooting how to make emails from Chinese servers able to message accounts (a hectic task that was time sensitive to finish a collaboration to grow the Chinese domestic green bond market).

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The Climate Bonds Initiative Gmail also utilized email extension software from the company Cirrus Insight that connected emails and email recipients to the company’s Salesforce database. Salesforce, the same company that dominates the skyscraper that neighbors the NYC

HSBC offices where Sean gave his State of the Market keynote at the beginning of this dissertation, also plays a key role database work at Climate Bonds. Through Cirrus, emails could be connected to certain contacts or organizations, and emails coming from people who had never interacted with a Climate Bonds employee before via email were made available to the whole organization. The Climate Bonds Salesforce database was filled with all the contacts and relationships that had developed from the organization over the years, even just one email or one handshake and exchange of business cards would result in new entries into this database.

My email account at Climate Bonds, [email protected], was one of the earlier company emails and thus had my first name informally typed in lowercase. Subsequent new email accounts as the company grew contained first and last name separated by a period. It was on this account that I spent much of my time through the working day. My ability to stay off email during nonworking hours was highly dependent on what type of phone I was using during fieldwork. In 2015 I did not have a smartphone in London, I had an old Alcatel phone that I had bought for 15 quid as a study abroad student at the LSE (Coupland 2014)). In 2016, I began to use an iPhone 4 I had purchased in 2013, but my pay as you go phone plan on Orange had limited data and I used it sparingly. At the start of my 2017 fieldwork, I continued to use the iPhone 4 before receiving a Moto X that I had left in January 2017 in India with a cousin to repair the charging plug there. My graphic design working cousin dropped the Moto X off at my friend’s

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mother’s house in Bangalore, who brought it to Sienna, Italy for his wedding on April 14, 2017.

She gave me the phone there and I began using it immediately back in London.

Once I had a smartphone with data in April 2017, my experience of work at Climate Bonds changed dramatically (Gregg 2013). I downloaded my Climate Bonds Gmail account and ended up with a fully structured google work account interface. This work account then framed my

Brandeis university Gmail account as well as my personal Gmail accounts as Personal. I have the ability to turn off my work account by clicking the info button in the shape of a briefcase. With my work Gmail on my phone, I also utilized WhatsApp, WeChat, Facebook messenger, and Skype extensively to connect with Climate Bonds analysts and managers around the world. I would come into the office, place clementine oranges on my desk, walk to the kitchen to get a glass of water, and open my laptop, surfing the web immediately to get an inflow of emails, checking the [email protected] account, along with [email protected], and the Salesforce database of contacts.

Business Cards and Physical/Data Work

The Climate Bonds Salesforce database intersects between the organization’s digital and physical work. Through networking at green bond market events at universities, stock exchanges, law firms, and banks, my interlocutors and myself gathered thousands of business cards. The collection of these cards, and their scanning into the customer management software of the company for use in emails and email campaigns, highlights a bridge between physical and virtual work.

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To make these cards useful for the whole organization, I was put in charge of getting interns, mostly art school friends of the CEO’s daughter, to come into the Climate Hub and scan cards into the company’s Salesforce database. Once scanned, the data on these cards would need to be cleaned, misspellings of the computer scan would need to be edited, and leads would be converted to contacts that would be compiled into lists for specific tasks. Team members would wonder how many financial journalists we had information for in Germany to update them on an upcoming German green bonds report, or how many bankers we knew in Japan, or people who worked at stock exchanges around the world for a stock exchanges study. The networking at

Climate Bonds produced data that in turn supported the other forms of data production and research, supporting both the production and dissemination of the organization’s reports.

Slack

In the summer of 2016, the coordinator of the Green Infrastructure Investment Coalition and the Climate Aggregation Platform signed the team up for Slack. Slack was never fully embraced by the employees of Climate Bonds, and mostly became the center for afterwork drink sharing as well as for music track sharing between three members of the company, myself included. In 2019, Slack became a publicly listed company, trading on the New York Stock

Exchange under the symbol WORK. Slack’s motto is Slack: Choose a better way to work.

Utilized by climate activists, bloggers, podcasters, and companies, Slack attempted to cut across communication silos in companies, or to help build tightly knit teams. In May 2020, with the spread of COVID-19 and the move to work from home, the Climate Bonds Operations team

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restarted the company’s Slack account. In a buyout deal in 2020, Salesforce, the CRM system used by Climate Bonds, ended up taking over Slack.

A Contested Website

The Climate Bonds Website was a point of contention throughout my time in the company. This website was my first experience of Climate Bonds, and I was drawn to the vibrant color scheme, the blue, and the Whitney font of the pages. The Climate Bonds website began as a WordPress account. In July 2014, Climate Bonds changed the website from WordPress site to a cheap paid site that isn’t very functional according to Georgia and many other Climate Bonds analysts. The website was coded in Drupal and managed by an old colleague of Sean’s based in

Australia. Martin Chadwick ran Interlated, a web company in Australia.59

Emotional Labor

For all of my interlocutors, their daily labor on white papers, reports, emails, and in webex calls and in person meetings was rewarding at moments but also mentally and emotionally taxing

(Hochschild 2012; Gregg 2018, 2013). The multitasking required at the organization was exciting, and many young analysts felt abuzz being able to enter into high level conversations with executives and also

The experience of screenwork had a toll of mental exhaustion, as described by Dominic

Boyer in The Life Informatic. Boyer writes that “The attentional density and dynamism of

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screenwork generates an experiential horizon unto itself, one that can be (and perhaps necessarily is) cut off for significant lengths of time from offscreen engagements” (Boyer 2013:

139). Boyer works to “highlight the phenomenology of screenwork as another, relatively unexplored, dimension of news imitation” (Boyer 2013: 139). “A day’s screenwork can be exhilarating or boring, but even on the best occasions one leaves work feeling exhausted from coping with so much flow. The feeling of being an isolated user, adrift in a vast ocean of information, also belongs to this phenomenology” (Boyer 2013: 140). This daily exhaustion could and did lead to chronic fatigue amongst green bond analysts I worked with. I myself felt the mental effects of chronic activity, particularly during my full year of fieldwork. It became much harder to concentrate.

One interlocutor fresh from a vacation after a period of burnout, messaged me on

WhatsApp that with regards to the stress she felt at her job: “one thing I learned is that it’s always about people, not actual work”. In order to rebalance her emotions, the interlocutor had reframed her emotional connection to her job. She told me that “now I just don’t bother putting too much emotion to the work.” At Climate Bonds, multiple interlocutors expressed frustration with the number of interconnecting tasks and deadlines that they had to balance. Bill Watson, a former water engineer who became the organization’s grant administrator told me that during his workdays: “you have a list of things you want to get done, and you end up going backwards!”

Similarly framing the multitasking at Climate Bonds as a type of movement, an event organizer whose main work before running the Climate Bonds Annual Conference was organizing Comida

Fest, a Latin American inspired London Food festival, told me that “the ball is being kicked around and one person thinks you are supposed to kick and another tries to grab the ball!” My 190

interlocutors stressed that such a manic work environment was often exacerbated by their own passion for their work on climate change. As Aurora Schmalz told me, “if you are really passionate about it then it is no longer just a job. A passion for work can turn into being a workaholic.”

A sustainable finance analyst at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, told me that his passion was in working and organizing for the Sunrise Movement in New York City. His job at BAML was for him something that he did in his spare time.

In my free time I work at a Bank of America as a Bank of America sustainable investing analyst, but the fact that I like there's a… the time that I spend in places is not indicative of what I care about because I spend a lot of time at BofA, but I am like just, like a tectonic shift away from the people that I work with, it's not maybe the right wording but I'm just so ideologically different than the Mike Bloomberg Democrats that are on my team and we're a little bubble of liberals. Not really me, but we are. And around it is just a bunch of apathetic folks, or Trump conservatives.

He concluded his self-reflection on his work to me and a colleague in a NYC bar with, “So that is my world, I go between more radical politics and then sustainable investing.” The overwork caused by screenwork, drawing in emotional labor frames people’s life experiences in their climate finance work, and perhaps also the possibilities of the sector as a response to climate change (Hochschild 2012). Dominic Boyer argues that the intensity of information may have a neoliberal quality in itself (Boyer 2013). An influx of information overwhelms the ability of an analyst/journalist/researcher to discern truth or merit, and the focus of analysis then rests on production for compensation as an end in and of itself.

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Green Bond Market Work and Labor in the Context of Nature

In environmental history, Richard White has most directly engaged work and labor in relation to the environment. White critiques Bill McKibben, founder of 350 (whose UK branch was located in the Climate Hub on the same floor as the Climate Bonds Initiative during my fieldwork), of immortalizing a notion of nature as romanticized and separate from human activity and labor.

In an impassioned line from “Are you an environmentalist or do you work for a living?’:

Work and Nature”, White’s chapter in the volume Uncommon Ground, he writes that:

When McKibben writes about his work, he comments that his office and the mountain he views from it are separate parts of his life. They are unconnected. In the office he is in control; outside he is not. Beyond his office window is nature, separate and independent. This is a clean division. Work and nature stand segregated and clearly distinguished… unlike McKibben, I cannot see my labor as separate from the mountains, and I know that my labor is not truly disembodied. If I sat and typed here day after day, as clerical workers type, without frequent breaks to wander and to look at the mountains, I would become achingly aware of my body. I might develop carpal tunnel syndrome (White 1996: 184).

White’s reflection on the connectedness of work and the environment encapsulates the work of the Climate Bonds Initiative. In spaces of open office, with white desks covered in monitors that team members would plug their Acer and MacBook computers into, analysts labored day by day

(with quite a few developing carpal tunnel syndrome) to produce reports, respond to emails, and setup conferences and events to propel forward the green bond market. This seemingly detached from nature work at the Climate Bonds Initiative is how conceptions of the environment and material relationships are made tangible in financial markets.

Echoing a middle ground between McKibben and White, Robin Wall Kimmerer describes the connection she feels towards more seemingly organic matter such as pencils and metal lamps

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in contrast to computers encased in plastic. However, she acknowledges the potential that exists to make sense of plastic as the result of organic and environmental processes that connect us to the Earth (Kimmerer 2013: 155). However, Kimmerer argues that “We’ve got work to do” to make these connections (Kimmerer 2013: 155). Perhaps the processes of work I have observed at the

Climate Hub open a space to make these connections.

Chapter Summary

In this chapter I detailed the everyday forms of labor that went into producing the green bond market and the careers of climate finance practitioners. I argue that while the structural and power elements of the financial industry have been examined in the social sciences there are few accounts of the everyday experience of labor in financial markets. This focus is vital to understanding how the worldview of both mainstream financiers and climate finance practitioners is produced and hardened over careers. It is in work that the tension of climate time and finance time meet, and this tension is mediated through the production of numbers and the growth of people as climate finance practitioners.

In order to figure out how to best reach and influence the attentional spheres of financiers, one must understand how to infiltrate and shift elements of their everyday experience. Indeed, the growth of climate finance in itself is the result of shifting rhetoric as well as mundane activities such as maintaining Excel spreadsheets and documenting climate finance markets through devices such as Bloomberg Terminals, Eikon accounts, and via the proliferation of contact databases, emails, and blogs. In the following chapters, I examine the products of this

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work: people and data. I argue that this mediation between climate change, environmental degradation, and finance produces distinct categories of people and data.

In July 2020, The Economist published an article on what bankers could do on climate change (see Figure 21). Included in the issue were two cartoons depicting bankers at work on climate change while the material effects of climate change plagued the office where they worked. These cartoons depict both utopian and dystopian visions for climate change, but tellingly in both visions work is a constant. I emailed George Wylesol, graphic designer for the article, and his response was also a reflection on work. He stated:

Unfortunately that job had a super tight deadline, so The Economist basically just asked if I could draw that scene. I don't think I even had any text or article to read. I do like to develop my own personal concepts for doing illustrations, but with this piece the deadline was so tight that I just drew what they asked for.

While Wylesol sought to illustrate working climate finance practitioners, he himself was under a tight deadline, which limited his ability to learn about and act creatively on the topic.

When I left the Climate Bonds Initiative to return to Boston in March 2018, the company bought me an Amazon $100 gift certificate, thinking that I would be in need of money and that I would in particular need money for books. The Director of Operations had thought about getting me a pass for concerts in Boston as well, but the Amazon gift card won out. The message on the gift certificate, along with a photo of the full Climate Bonds team at that year’s annual conference was as follows:

Dear Aneil, Thank you for your incredible work! We wish you the best for your year in Boston! Please come back soon! Lots of love Your friends at Climate Bonds

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My year in London at Climate Bonds was work, and this is what I was being thanked for in the company’s final message of the year to me in March 2018. I had embedded myself into the many activities the company’s employees embarked on under the banner of mobilizing debt capital markets for climate change solutions. As I continued to analyze my experience at the

Climate Bonds Initiative, I found work to rise as a key point.

Figure 37: Cartoon from The Economist60

60 https://www.economist.com/briefing/2020/06/20/how-much-can-financiers-do-about-climate-change 195

Chapter 5: People in Climate Finance

Figure 38: Indian Railways Green Bond Launch at the London Stock Exchange How time is perceived and acted on by people in climate finance markets through their work impacts not only processes of financial work but also the people involved in this work. The time of climate change motivates my interlocutors to build their careers over time while working in the green bond market. As green infrastructure is considered green based on the longevity of its assessment, so too do climate finance practitioners become experts over time in this emerging sector that blends environmental and finance expertise. Looking at the decision-making processes and pressures experienced by climate finance practitioners over the course of their careers in the green bond market highlights what the possibilities are for the sector as a whole to create change (Orlove et al. 2020). Through their work, what are finance workers’

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imagination/understanding of environmentalism and climate change? How does this affect their career trajectories and livelihoods over time?

People working in the green bond market and other climate finance markets navigate becoming, being and staying climate finance practitioners. This involves navigating the tension between a sustainable work-life balance and finding meaning in climate finance work in the context of mounting evidence of catastrophic climate change (Zaloom 2008). The continual evaluation of climate finance as an ethical field produces tension in relation to the material effects and evaluation of the sector and the work done by climate finance practitioners. The navigation of this tension results in some continuing to work in climate finance, while others move to other professions, between companies, or take time to recharge.

In this chapter, I focus my attention on the careers and identities of my interlocutors to gain a sense of how their career decisions and identities are shaped by and in turn shape climate finance and green bond activity. This approach parallels David Graeber’s study of anarchist activities in Direct Action (Graeber 2009: 251). Graeber's argument is that given that being an activist in the circles he participated in/studied has such high demands that lead to burnout it is unlikely that we will see much impact from a lot of the protest movements. Similarly, I think the constraints and experience of becoming a climate finance practitioner structures what we can expect from these markets.

The subjectification in sustainable and climate finance that I have experienced and observed aligns with Dinah Rajak’s findings in her research on corporate social responsibility

(CSR) in an international mining company (Rajak 2011). While corporate social responsibility creates professed organizational statements to support structural changes for welfare and 197

environmental programs, these discussions also underline an individualistic moral narrative for people to take charge of their lives and be good CSR subjects (Rajak 2011). In my fieldwork I focused on understanding and contextualizing the work and lives of climate finance practitioners.

I present this data here.

Generational Narratives, the Good Life, and Materiality

How and why do people enter into climate finance work? What does a green finance career mean and how has this meaning evolved for different generations of practitioners in this space? How do climate finance practitioners become “experts” in green finance and what does this expertise entail? How do they establish the value of their expertise value, which pertains to how they assess the value of infrastructure/products? How do they assess the value of their work and the contradictions that they navigate (Berliner et al. 2016; Archer 2020). Through my analysis of interviews and participant observation with climate finance practitioners below, I show how personal narratives are important to understanding how people provide answers to these questions. In this, I have found several themes. In these narratives, there is a generational divide of first-generation climate finance practitioners having heroic personal narratives and second- generation sustainable financiers being more career focused and pragmatic in their personal narratives in terms of working to make a living in this space.

Anthropological studies on entrepreneurialism and identity is more relevant for first generation of climate finance practitioners (Freeman 2015; Ghosh 2020; Steffen 2017). Whereas studies on making a living are more applicable for second generation (Gershon 2017). This reflects the professionalization and legitimization of climate finance as a space. This transition 198

frames becoming a climate finance practitioner. Sustainability and NGOs frame people through work (Watanabe 2019). The next wave from 2017 onwards of sustainable and climate finance professionals has had a more standardized and less entrepreneurial entry point into the sector.

College students now hear about working in climate finance in universities and aspire to work in sustainable finance careers. Beyond this generational divide, the other main theme I found was relating to material assessments of one’s sustainability. This everyday framing of one’s identity crossed all generations and focused on reframing and assessing one’s material impact and how to be sustainable. As climate finance practitioners, my interlocutors continually had a moral obligation to assess their material impacts in the everyday of office work. Practitioners try to do this through auditing themselves but also thinking collectively at scale, but then viewing sustainability as a collective issue, they realize that a lot of these actions are individualized.

Rejecting the neoliberal argument of sustainability being an individual’s action and consumption choices. The perception of what a good life is, and the requirements of their work frame their decision-making.

The collective effect of seeing exponentially rising global greenhouse emissions produces emotional tension that exists in everyday activity of analysts and other participants in the green bond market. The tension is in their work, and this leads to burnout which I reflect on in the second half of this chapter. This tension can cause practitioners to move between organizations, as they assess the impact of their work as well as their lived experience and the sustainability of their everyday work (Beunza 2019: 11). Staying a climate finance practitioner highlights the tension in this growing industry. In creating a climate finance practitioner identity, burnout.

Burnout was a physical experience. Both of these are market engagements. 199

How does one become a climate finance practitioner? And how do these practitioners frame their career biographies? Anand Giridharadas notes in Winners Take All that having some form of life epiphany that causes them to shift careers is a common trope amongst ex bankers and others going into market based sustainability and social impact initiatives (Giridharadas

2019: 247). In Inside the Economy of Appearances, Anna Tsing highlights that “dramatic performance is the prerequisite of… economic performance” (Tsing 2000: 118). In mobilizing capital for climate change, these practitioners work as “collectors of finance.” Tsing questions

“How do the self-consciously glossy and exaggerated virtual worlds conjured by eager collectors of finance become shapers of radically different peoples and places” (Tsing 2000: 121)? Similarly, in Hirokazu Miyazaki’s research amongst financial traders in Tokyo, he presents the significance of the personal aspirations of derivatives traders at Sekai Securities, and the impact of these dreams on their motivation in their financial work (Miyazaki 2013). A focus on personal life stories, shows us the motivations of those who work in finance. However, unlike Miyazaki’s traders where their finance arbitrage work framed their personal aspirations, here it is the dreams of my interlocutors that lead them to climate finance work (Miyazaki 2013).

Expanding on Giridharadas, Tsing, and Miyazaki, I question how this process of individual production and knowledge influences the growth of the sector and its impact and potential push on climate change? Here, I trace career development and expertise in climate finance amongst my interlocutors, and also present the everyday reality that I observed of being a climate finance practitioner that I experienced during fieldwork (Sahlins 1981b). This focus on the people involved in transformative social projects allows us to trace many impacts of these projects beyond whether they are ultimately deemed as successes or failures. In her ethnography of the 200

low carbon urban experiment of Masdar City, Gökçe Günel traces the livelihoods and career paths of the designers, engineers, and academics involved in the climate utopia project (Günel 2019).

Who becomes Climate Finance Practitioners?

The emerging demographics of climate finance map on roughly to that of mainstream finance, save for a more equal gender balance (Fisher 2012). A recent survey of 828 sustainable finance practitioners in 46 countries by Responsible Investor found participants to be 73%

Caucasian and 52% female (Fritsch 2019). 55% of participants had worked in sustainable finance for five years or less, marking the youth of this sector. Other para ethnographers have begun to track the growth of sustainable finance practitioners as financial journalists. Environmental

Finance61 reports on movements of practitioners between sustainable finance companies and

Responsible Investor62 has begun surveying the demographics of people who work in sustainable finance. Responsible Investor’s Sustainable Finance Careers demographic survey has found that the racial diversity of sustainable finance mimics mainstream finance in its overwhelming whiteness (Souleles 2019). However, the gender balance of sustainable finance is better than the average in finance. The financial industry as a whole is still overwhelmingly white and male (Ho

2009; Souleles 2019; Zaloom 2006).

61 https://www.environmental-finance.com/channels/people.html

62 https://www.esg-data.com/sustainable-finance-careers

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Figure 39: Responsible Investor Sustainable Finance Careers Survey Within this context of racial homogeneity, the Climate Bonds team was the most racially and geographically diverse team in the Climate Hub. This diversity was not the result of a planned recruiting strategy. The majority of Climate Bonds’ first personnel were a result of who was working on projects adjacent to the company and who ran into Sean at speaking engagements and events. Part of this diversity was from the company’s concerted efforts to build relationships, offices, and networks in Mexico, Brazil, Nigeria, India, Italy, China, Japan and the United States.

Beyond Climate Bonds, out of the 78 climate finance practitioners I developed sustained interlocutor relationships with, 47, or 60% are male, and 57 or 73% are white. This maps closely onto the demographics from Responsible Investor’s study, with my higher male percentage possibly due to the fact that, as a man, I made more contacts with men.

I begin this chapter with the meta-analysis of Responsible Investor to present a snapshot of the people in the sustainable finance sector. This demographic data arguably shows who these 202

people are. However, in my research I found that being a climate finance practitioner has more temporal and material dimensions that frame this demographic data. Here I focus on emic understandings of becoming a climate finance practitioner, being a climate finance practitioner, and staying a climate finance practitioner.

The Responsible Investor sustainable finance careers survey was organized by Dennis

Fritsch. Given the hybridity of those in sustainable finance, Fritsch’s own journey from studying marine biology and completing a PhD in neuroscience to ending up as a sustainable finance researcher seems emblematic of the field. Reflecting on this, Dennis told me that in Germany you are looked at strangely if your job is not something you were explicitly trained to do. He experienced this prejudice, and found refuge through developing his career in the United

Kingdom. In Dennis’s opinion, in the United Kingdom you can be more flexible with your career path and move into roles beyond your academic training.

While this work flexibility is empowering in Dennis’s experience and for many of my sustainable finance interlocutors, Dennis also stressed to me the potential downside as well of having the sustainable finance sector develop with a lack of deeply developed scientific knowledge. In the hybridity of sustainable finance, Dennis Fritsch worried about the potential loss of expertise between sustainable finance practitioners and scientists on key topics from climate change to biodiversity loss. In order to account for and act on climate change, Dennis thinks that it is critical for scientists to be involved in specific decision-making on biodiversity loss and ecosystem management. The environmental and climate knowledge transferred by one- week training courses and executive education in sustainability that many sustainable finance practitioners rely on are insufficient in Dennis’s perspective to communicate the scientific 203

knowledge that the sustainable finance community purports to translate into the language and workings of the financial industry.

The anxiety Dennis conveyed to me reflects the tension in the career of sustainable finance practitioners. As detailed in the previous chapter, their work entails interpreting climate and environmental degradation scenarios, and bringing this interpretation into financial markets in a format that ideally will influence investment flow away from worsening these negative impacts. This negotiation is ongoing, and practitioners must grapple with anxieties about the future and balancing their work and life in the present.

In analyzing the green bond market as a heterogenous network, here I focus on climate finance people as one of my key green bond market components (Lovell 2015). I present the career biographies of climate finance interlocutors, drawn from both their reflections to me and their documentation of themselves on LinkedIn and resumes, I then analyze what it is to be a climate finance person on a daily basis, while working in climate finance markets. I begin by presenting and analyzing the epiphany stories and career biography performances of my interlocutors in the first generation of climate finance practitioners. I then detail the career biographies of second-generation practitioners.

The growth of climate finance is developed by and produces new forms of people. Climate finance and the green bond market interpolate those working in these markets into climate finance practitioners as their careers develop. The green bond market, with the diverse forms of expertise it draws on, allows for the identity of the experts in this space to be analyzed more saliently than in other financial markets studied by anthropologists (Hertz 1998; Ho 2009;

Souleles 2019; Zaloom 2006). The social identities in the green bond market have developed 204

within the last ten years, with most occurring in the last five, these are newly crafted social roles that gain legitimacy through their hybridity.

Climate finance practitioners wrestle with multiple professional aspirations, forms of expertise, and ideas about doing good. The everyday work life of my interlocutors in these market environments is shaped by two motivations: to define their expertise and decide what type of green bond market entity best suits their expertise. While social scientists often treat expertise as a fixed process within systems of power, in this chapter I argue that expertise can also be a creative process that produces new types of people and institutional environments.

Through understanding the formation of climate finance practitioners, drawing from our lenses in anthropology of selfhood and identity I further efforts to understand how labor affects the people in this industry (Bear 2015a). Highlighting expertise as a creative process, I show here how deeply personal questions are connected to a larger question about what climate finance instruments such as green bonds do in the world, namely if this financial sector is a real solution to climate change or just an extension of destructive capitalism.

It was a focus on people that my interlocutors initially identified me as having, with a manager saying directly that “we are all rats in Aneil’s maze,” whenever he would introduce me to climate finance colleagues at other companies. My interlocutors read academic anthropologist

Kate Fox’s Watching the English and popular anthropologist Yuval Harari’s Sapiens, as hints as to what type of knowledge I was producing as an anthropologist (Fox 2014; Harari 2014).

In their movement between NGOs, investment banks, and accounting firms, climate finance practitioners present different identities that evolved over my fieldwork. The green bond market, with its in-formation “series of boundaries, distinctions exceptions, and inclusions” 205

(Mitchell 2002: 9), molds people as well as the notion of the green bond market in its creation.

The presentation of these identities also spreads the many types of value at play in climate finance, from financial to environmental. As “Strathern uses the phrase ‘making visible’ and

‘giving value’ more or less interchangeably” (Graeber 2001: 39), this perspective has direct significance for the green bond market, where the value of green bonds in contrast to regular bonds is in constant debate amongst investment banks, NGOs, and law firms.

In climate finance, the systemic dynamic relates to not a previous system of valuation but the formation of a new one, as well as one that moves beyond traditional capitalist value framing.

Climate finance practitioners exist in a space embedded with a high degree of vocational calling, they engage in their livelihoods to work not for pure monetary reward, while they are engaging the financial industry (Weber 1992).

Looking at how my informants construct their career biographies and conduct themselves in their day-to-day labor in climate finance, I find that analysts, underwriters, and other market actors produce their identity through their career histories. People would talk about their career histories while talking about work, stress, life choices, and applying for new jobs. As Boyer notes,

“we need to move beyond signaling the presence of experts and towards grappling with what kinds of persons they are” (Boyer 2008: 39). Through going beyond presenting solely the career narratives of my interlocutors, and analyzing other familial and personal elements of their decision making, I highlight the personal that influences the formation of expertise

Here, I look closer at the backgrounds, roles, and motivations of my interlocutors in the green bond market as well as others that I encountered in the field, beginning with the first interlocutors I encountered at the Climate Bonds Initiative. I analyze the varied backgrounds of 206

those I worked with and make sense of their identity construction as climate finance people.

Carla Freeman argues in Entrepreneurial Selves that “[T]he process of subjectification… is both individual and social, animated in realms of the imagination and through quotidian practices in private and public life” (Freeman 2014: 3). Similarly to Freeman’s context of entrepreneurs in the

Caribbean, climate finance practitioners engage in “vigorous entanglements of selfhood and labor for envisioning and making one’s self entails particular forms (and particular intensity) of work” (Freeman 2014: 3).

People in Anthropology of Finance

Within the anthropology of finance there is a long tradition of looking at the people, and the cultures and geographical contexts from which they arise (Rudnyckyj 2019; Hertz 1998; Ho

2009; Miyazaki 2013; Preda 2009; Souleles 2019; Zaloom 2015). Hertz looks the people types in

Shanghai that both preexisted and were absorbed into the emergence of the Shanghai stock exchange and the city’s financial industry (Hertz 1998). Zaloom details the transformation of boys from Bethnal Green and Essex into open outcry traders, these identities being drawn on in parallel to the migrant working-class communities in Chicago that financiers believed to be the root of the robustness of Chicago’s commodities markets (Zaloom 2015). In Beyond Debt,

Rudnyckyj summarizes current research trends in anthropology of finance and how Islamic finance highlights how new economic action can create novel forms of subjectivity and collectivity (Rudnyckyj 2019: 10). Similarly to Islamic finance, where sharia law experts come to the table with financial regulators and policymakers, producing new forms of markets and

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expertise, in climate finance, the interaction of different forms lends itself to new identity formation within markets (Rudnyckyj 2019).

Here I capture the world of climate finance in a way that shows a picture that goes beyond economic and business school studies. As Daniel Souleles states, “Before we get to the actual investing… we need to understand what social roles and identities private equity people inhabit and, in turn, how these structure what they think is possible in their world” (Souleles 2019: 31).

While social scientists often treat expertise as a fixed process within systems of power, I argue that expertise can also be a creative process that produces new types of people and careers along with institutional environments (Boyer 2008; Freeman 2014; Mitchell 2002; Kondo 1990). I argue that my green bond market interlocutors’ career biographies and their journeys to becoming climate finance practitioners reveal a fluid balancing of personal aspirations and development of expertise. Highlighting expertise as a creative process, I show how deeply personal questions are connected to a larger question about what climate finance instruments such as green bonds do in the world, namely if this financial sector is a real solution to climate change or just an extension of destructive capitalism.

Anthropologists have analyzed the impact of different sociocultural backgrounds and built environments on the development and functioning of financial markets. Ethnographies by

Hertz, Ho, Miyazaki, Preda, and Zaloom contain detailed studies of the people participating in the financial markets that they studied (Hertz 1998; Ho 2009; Miyazaki 2014; Preda 2009; Zaloom

2006). Here, I argue that the growth of the green bond market is both a product of and an instigator of new framings of finance workers as climate finance practitioners amongst market participants, facilitating the interaction of different forms of expertise and cultural backgrounds 208

previously disconnected. I focus here on the people that create the “heterogenous networks” that Heather Lovell traces in The Making of Low Carbon Economies (Lovell 2015). As an organization, Climate Bonds describes itself as a network in white papers. “The Climate Bonds

Initiative is an international network which promotes the development and use of Climate

Bonds” (Climate Bonds Initiative 2009).

The career biographies presented here are constructed from both my ethnographic research and interviews with interlocutors. These accounts of their diachronic existences are performances that go into their synchronic existence as climate finance practitioners.

Performativity here exists at the level of the individual, much as Judith Butler notes, in both individuals and markets (Gond et al 2015). While Callon, Mackenzie and others have utilized performativity to look at the meta effects of market analysis, I combine both in my take on people and markets. Similarly, to Zaloom’s reflections on the embodiment of risk in traders in the

Chicago pits and London electronic traders (Zaloom 2006). Performativity exists both in the narratives presented by climate finance practitioners as well as their material lived experience

(Haraway 2015).

Annelise Riles analyzes the subjectivities produced by collateral rules governing global derivatives markets (Riles 2011). In the green bond market, I have observed the production of these subjectivities in the production of green bond market governing rules and standards as well as the subjective production of the identities of my interlocutors, both the rule makers and the rule workers. Here I take Daniel Souleles call for ethnographic studies of finance to capture more of the seeds of social change and “investment behavior that centers dialogue, disagreement, and conscious processes” (Souleles 2017: 394). Over the period of my fieldwork I uncovered a process 209

right at its point of germination, and the market grew and unfolded before my eyes. As climate finance practitioners negotiated contesting opinions, forms of work, and organizations in the green bond market, they developed their personas both consciously and unconsciously. The development of both climate finance markets and practitioners is the result of organizational and personal connections and events. As an anthropologist, the value of the heuristics we use is in its ability to demonstrate activity at the community, individual level which is a result of larger material and virtual transactions.

Maverick Pioneers in Climate Finance

According to my interlocutors, while the first climate financiers were deviant in mainstream finance in their framing of climate finance as a possibility, the field has since been mainstreamed as its markets have grown. Their belief in this possibility, and the need for the financial industry to look beyond what was earlier considered to be fundamental analysis of financial performance, made them deviant and questionable to mainstream financiers following financial norms.

Climate finance practitioners were initially unable to get meetings with investment bankers, their views were on the margin of finance. However, this has changed with more public policy and central bankers directly pushing for financial reform focused on climate change adaptation and mitigation. In response to these increased pressures, many investment banks have established in house sustainable/climate finance teams, and the climate finance NGOs that mostly started out of foundation funding have become established entities with multiple funding

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streams from private and public institutions. Climate finance has achieved a heightened legitimacy due to public policy entering into the financial arena. This is a social change story at a level that impacts the world through the power dynamics at play in the financial industry. The growth of this space is significant in the legitimacy that climate finance is being given by governments and civil society as a market engaged solution to climate change.

Emic conversations on the deviancy of sustainable finance frame this sector as positive deviancy. This narrative appears frequently in the career biographies of the first generation of climate finance practitioners, who describe years of marginal conversations that did not get any traction in larger financial institutions. The term positive deviancy comes from public health, and a specific Save the Children program targeting malnutrition in Vietnam (Gawande 2007: 24-5;

Sternin, Sternin, and Marsh 1997). This study showed families that were already breaking with conventional childcare wisdom in a malnourished area could show better outcomes than the norm. The public health experts working on this project sought out these deviants to take what they were doing and make their practices a social norm. The term also draws from sociological literature on deviancy, which has already been used with different spins, such as in Howard

Becker’s extension of deviancy in his study of deviant careers in Outsiders (Becker 2008).

Climate finance activist Raj Thamotheram extended the notion of positive deviancy in his coining of the term positive maverick. Raj viewed deviancy to be too negative as a term, and decided to replace deviant with maverick, a word linking back to Samuel Maverick. While Raj told me that he was initially unaware of the epistemology of the word maverick, Samuel Maverick was a Texan cattle rancher who refused to brand his cattle. The word activist in finance has two roots. Shareholder activists petitioned to divest their investments from commercial activity in 211

South Africa, with global condemnation for the South African apartheid mounting in the 1960s.

In the 1980s, being a shareholder activist became associated with Gordon Gekko in the movie

Wall Street who attempted to reform corporations from CEOs to bring financial value to shareholders under the mantra “Greed is Good (Welker and Wood 2011: S62). This word gets at the public/private division and framing of the financial sector as a whole. There are seemingly democratic notions of accountability to shareholders and responsibility while capital and power is attached to private institutions (Welker and Wood 2011; Partridge and Burda 2011).

Framing himself both as a positive maverick and an activist (both words etymologically connected to white and male figures), Raj Thamotheram, a pioneer in climate risk while having major positions in financial institutions early on in the growth of sustainable finance, came up with the term positive maverick to describe his career trajectory and that of his peers. In an online post for his think tank Preventable Surprises, Thamotheram states that:

I’ve been fortunate to have two of the best jobs in the ESG sector [Environmental Social Governance]—as head of RI[Responsible Investment] at a large UK pension fund (USS) and then being headhunted to the same role at a very large global fund manager (AXA IM). I would not have got either post had it NOT been for my out of the box thinking. As someone who isn’t “into” quant analysis or box ticking activity, and with little knowledge of the investment industry when I entered it, my managers made a contrarian appointment choice and they weren’t disappointed. In my role first as co-founder of the Network for Sustainable Financial Markets and now as founder of Preventable Surprises, I have had the honour to work with a growing band of positive mavericks. Positive mavericks also have to struggle with intellectual indoctrination. I left AXA IM specifically to set up Preventable Surprises. But despite that, it took a full 18 months for the self censorship to fully wash out!63

63 https://preventablesurprises.com/publications/blog/but-you-are-so-different-no-one-would-take-the-career- risks-you-have-taken/ 212

In Raj’s case, after working to unlearn from his previous sustainable finance jobs, he started to speak explicitly about how investors enable corporate and market dysfunctionality. Raj had to do self-work in order to become an effective positive maverick.

I met Raj at finance activist NGO ShareAction’s summer party in a woodworking shop on

Brick lane in July 2017. That day, he had won a lifetime achievement award from the NGO for his campaigning work to reform the financial sector to take into account social and environmental risks, but attendees were worried that he would not make it due to physical and mental exhaustion from ongoing chemotherapy treatments. Raj was diagnosed with cancer in 2016, at the same time as the US presidential election of Donald Trump, and only a couple months post the UK Brexit vote. Raj reflects on this timing, his own experience of cancer, and calls for greater investor action to stem the rise of populist politics in a short piece for Investment and Pensions

Europe, a mainstream finance publication.64 Throughout his climate, sustainable, and impact finance career, Raj has used his personal narrative as a calling point in relation to his professional decision-making and to support the development of alternative organizations in sustainable finance.

An Enigmatic CEO

While I learned from Climate Bonds’ CEO Sean Kidney and conversed with him extensively throughout my fieldwork, he told me the majority of his life and career history while we went kayaking on the Charles River through Cambridge and Boston. After an early morning meeting

64 https://www.ipe.com/long-term-matters-my-inner-trump/10016910.article 213

with a Boston-based bond fund manager and broker, we drove to a kayaking rental shop on the

Charles River, changing from suits to casual clothing before embarking on what turned out to be a five-hour kayaking expedition in September 2016. Over this kayaking trip, Sean spoke a biographical narrative to me that I present here. As Bourdieu notes, there is a biographical illusion element (Bourdieu 2000).

A college dropout at the University of Sydney - Sean could never finish final paper - he told me that he had begun his working life running a magazine design agency, which included doing dispiriting advertising for used car dealerships. That led to becoming convinced that he would only be motivated to work if his labor was focused on something with higher meaning. He moved into publishing and design work focused on social issues. From 1983 to 1988 he was the

CEO of Redfern Legal Centre Publishing, a legal education specialist outfit, and StreetWize

Comics, a social comic series focused on educating youth on issues such as drug use, racism, and domestic abuse. He later developed Social Change Media, a social change-oriented issues marketing company. It was during this time that Sean began to think about the potential of engaging the financial sector for social good. In the 1990s, arising from union pressure, fast growing Australian public pension funds were becoming increasingly activist investors on behalf of their beneficiaries. This resulted in greater investment transparency and increased community outreach directly in their investment portfolios. Social Change Media worked on pension fund communications and ethical fund launch campaigns in the 1990s and early 2000s.

Sean’s career took a dramatic turn when faced with a lull in contracts, Social Change

Media had to file for bankruptcy, and the company was reorganized. In a parallel jolting moment to Raj, while under stress from his company’s bankruptcy, Sean had a stroke. Similarly to the 214

“convergence of illness narratives amid entrepreneurial journeys” that Carla Freeman finds amongst Barbadian entrepreneurs, the same narratives abound amongst the first generation of climate finance practitioners (Freeman 2015: 178). On top of the bankruptcy and the stroke,

Sean’s estranged father became bedridden and neared death. Feeling the exigencies of life very powerfully at the time, Sean took a break from his media career and went to care for his father as he died. While tending to his father, Sean caught up on reading about climate change and decided that he needed to dedicate the rest of his life to this issue. Before leaving Australia, Sean cemented his dedication to working on climate change by doing a passion mapping exercise focusing on how to center his future efforts.65 In his perspective, forming the Climate Bonds

Initiative was a concrete outcome of his passion mapping that focused on getting him to write out what his key motivations for being were.

In Australia, Sean had been involved in some climate activism within the Labor Party, but his first attempt at working full-time on climate change involved getting in the running for an executive position at Greenpeace based in London. This would have given him an entry point into the world of direct climate activism. Not getting the job, Sean began to enter into discussions of climate and systemic risk in finance, working with a fellow Australian to setup the European operations for Climate Risk Ltd, a climate risk modelling company. It was while doing this that he got involved in the Network for Sustainable Financial Markets and chatting with Raj

Thamotheram.

65 https://www.passionmaps.com/peter-wallman/ 215

Driven in his work on climate change, Sean told me that ultimately all of our work and the existence of humanity as a whole is really an “experiment in consciousness.” Inspired by James

Lovelock’s notion of the Gaia Hypothesis, that Earth’s inorganic and organic systems work together for self-preservation, Sean saw humanity as an experiment by Gaia to see if our particular form of consciousness is a good idea. In other words, whether humanity’s ability to pass down cultural and technical knowledge across generations is useful to support life or not.

From this perspective, our ability to perceive humanitarian and planetary threats such as climate change, social inequality or COVID-19 that are difficult for individuals to consciously comprehend are in a sense stress tests for our species. Sean’s words stayed with me throughout my fieldwork, and in his perspective, I saw the main purpose of the initiative as an attempt to communicate environmental consciousness to finance at large. Sean’s energy and drive created the Initiative that was the focal point of my entry into green bonds and climate finance, and his persona dominates the company. The organization that Sean founded provides livelihoods for many of my interlocutors, who entered climate finance with similarly varied backgrounds.

Raj was the cofounder in the Network for Sustainable Financial Markets, out of which The

Climate Bonds Initiative, emerged. This Network is an ad hoc collaboration of “academics and financial market participants” focused on creating a financial system that will provide society with

“long-term sustainable value” (Network for Sustainable Financial Markets 2020). These conversations were enlivened by the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, as the systemic risk that mortgage-backed securities and their derivates had exposed, made financiers attune to thinking about other forms of systemic risk, climate change being one. Participants of the

Network for Sustainable Financial Markets wanted to figure out how to make financial 216

institutions account for climate risk in their decision-making and green bonds were one tool to do this. Sean Kidney became an active member in the Network for Sustainable Financial Markets.

It was out of this network that Sean launched the Climate Bonds Initiative in 2009.

Being a Climate Finance Practitioner at Climate Bonds

When I started my fieldwork at the Climate Bonds Initiative, there were only four people working fulltime. In this section, I detail the career biographies of these interlocutors, presenting both their spoken biography to me, with details also included from LinkedIn and conversations over the course of my fieldwork (Denzin 1989). I begin with the first climate finance practitioners

I encountered at Climate Bonds, before presenting the biographies of analysts at mainstream financial institutions and more recent climate finance practitioners.

I entered the Climate Bonds Initiative’s nondescript East London office in Shoreditch in

January 2015 after speaking with Georgia Waters, a green bond market analyst, on the phone.

Graduating in 2009 after studying economics and Economic history at the University of York,

Georgia had gone on to work at BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager at the time, for nearly four years in their Corporate Governance and Responsible Investment team before joining the Climate Bonds Initiative in August 2014. Georgia grew up in the English Midlands and dreamed of working on tying bonds financing much needed public infrastructure in Midlands’ communities with the pension funds serving the Midlands (Miyazaki 2014). A work aspiration similar to Miyazaki’s documented hopes amongst arbitrage traders in Tokyo (Miyazaki 2014).

While working with Georgia over the Summer of 2015 she told me that while she had been passionate about her work at BlackRock, she had more or less automated her job with Excel 217

spreadsheets and wanted to find a new role where she could make a direct impact on sustainable finance. Her family thought Georgia had been out of her mind to leave BlackRock. Although they didn’t know much about finance, her family knew the name BlackRock from news headlines, and they had never heard of the Climate Bonds Initiative. However, Georgia did not hesitate in diving into the Climate Bonds Initiative, accepting both less job security and a lower wage in exchange for work that felt more impactful and engaged in trying to change finance. Georgia ended up working at Climate Bonds until Spring 2016 when she moved to Affirmative Investment

Management, a small sustainable finance asset manager and one of the first green bond buyers.

Her primary motivation for the move was to establish more of a work-life balance as well as to further her education with a master’s in sustainability at UCL. This master’s also connected to her earlier dream of designing bond products that could benefit regions such as the Midlands, a concept she explored in her thesis.

Entering the small office space in Shoreditch, two rooms filled with four desks, chairs, filing cabinets, and laptops, I encountered Sean on a conference call with Judith Maybell, a

Tennessee born and raised American and professed Sarah Jessica Parker doppelganger (a claim supported by friends and colleagues). Judith had a British father who had given her dual US and

British citizenship, and thus had allowed her to make London her home and place of work without any immigration hassles. Through her 20s, Judith had been firmly on track to be a career biologist.

She studied at Yale and had moved from there to become a lab manager at the Center for

Regulation Genomics in Barcelona, Spain. Judith told me that when she moved to Barcelona she didn’t know anyone and left the US with just two bags. However, she soon became disenchanted with the solitude of laboratory life and decided to get into work that was more engaged with 218

society. Judith packed her bags and moved to India, to work for a charismatic Indian environmental economist on natural capital accounting, based in New Delhi and Mumbai. After

3 ½ years in India, Judith decided she was in need for a change and came to London, where she had some relatives from her father’s family. She quickly got introduced to Sean and started leading the Initiative’s Climate Standard and Market development work. Over my fieldwork

Judith became the main executive force at the Climate Bonds Initiative beyond Sean. She worked as a director for many years before framing herself as the company’s Deputy CEO.

While Judith and Sean were on the conference call, and Georgia was engrossed in Excel spreadsheets full of information on green bond issues, I chatted with Linnea Sonegstud, a policy analyst at the Initiative, about what work I could do on a green bond policy guidebook. As a recent graduate in 2015 of Imperial College’s Environment Technology master’s program, Linnea was

Norwegian and had moved from Oslo to the UK for her undergraduate studies at University of

Bath before her master’s. She had recently turned down a job offer to work on sustainability at the accounting and consulting firm PwC. Linnea viewed the Climate Bonds Initiative as a much more engaged job opportunity, where her writings and thoughts could directly impact the formation of the green bond market, as opposed to being relegated to reports from an isolated sustainability department in an international consulting firm where her work would be subsumed as part of a corporate machine. By rejecting her PwC offer, Linea accepted lower pay and less job stability, but felt her work had more meaning and impact in creating the world she wanted to live in. Linnea was passionate about the concept of a circular economy, where economic value incentivizes reuse and repair, and she hoped that developing climate finance would support such development. At Climate Bonds, Linnea’s work focused on getting policymakers and green bond 219

actors to work together to use green bonds to finance the development of a low-carbon and sustainable economy.

Over the course of my fieldwork, the size of the Climate Bonds Initiative grew dramatically beyond these four people, but their varied backgrounds and motivations are paradigmatic of the types of people and the energy that propelled climate finance teams and organizations forward, as well as the performed selves that populated this space (Kondo 2009). Many of my interlocutors are driven by hope to produce real change in finance, while they were also acutely aware of the injustices and banality of evil inherent in the industry. Their mission was heightened due to a sense of the timescale needed in galvanizing and financing infrastructure to respond to and mitigate climate change. Dealing in a flawed global system, they contemplate how to have a big impact on financial flows into sustainable infrastructure as quickly as possible.

The development of the green bond market, with its potential to tap into large financing movements in the nearly $100 trillion global bond market, provided an avenue for my interlocutors of mixed educational and vocational backgrounds to find a place within the world of finance where they form their own expertise that had value and impact on mainstream financial activity. Their labor and career trajectories in this market formed their identity as climate finance people.

Processes of Financialization and Expertise

While the growth of financialization has long been discussed within the social sciences, with a focus on the subsuming nature of finance, as the backgrounds and motivations of my interlocutors demonstrates, much of the energy behind the growth of the green bond market 220

came from individuals outside of the financial system (LiPuma and Lee 2004). During my fieldwork experience I observed startup NGOs such as Climate Bonds, and individuals such as

Sean outside of mainstream finance attempt to and successfully infiltrate larger financial and policy institutions in order to leverage their work at scale.

Financialization in climate finance was not a push from financial institutions to bring the environment into closer management, but the result of numerous outside entities, activists and fringe campaigners who petitioned banks for years to partner and collaborate on taking climate risk seriously. These academics, lawyers, and financiers worked for years with little return, before underwriters, development banks, and governments started to respond and scale up climate finance as a legitimate field of financial activity. In the green bond market, NGO participants only gained traction in their climate finance campaigning efforts near the end of 2014 when I began my fieldwork. Cary Krosinsky, a longtime sustainable finance practitioner and coauthor of one of the first publications on sustainable finance, told me he remembered in 2014 when Sean would come to New York City and struggle to get even one meeting booked with a financial firm. The growth of the green bond market legitimized the knowledge and perspective of NGOs such as the Climate Bonds Initiative for mainstream financial institutions.

As the green bond market developed in parallel with the expansion of NGO climate finance organizations such as 2 Degrees Investing Initiative and Carbon Tracker, within the investment banks themselves, an increasing number of ESG and environmental investment offices were established. By September 2018, Moody’s ESG investment team numbered 12,

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located mostly in London and New York City.66 S&P, HSBC, Barclays and numerous other firms now produce their own inhouse green bond market analysis. There are now green bond analysts on the trading floors of Wells Fargo, JP Morgan, and Bank of America Merrill Lynch. These roles frame new types of financial people and are developing within the mainstays of Wall Street, and the green bond analysts work in glass offices and boardrooms with suits and ties. The multiple forms of expertise in climate finance (environmental, engineering, financial) synthesize in the skill set of climate finance practitioners.

While many of the initial sustainable finance analysts in mainstream financial firms had the same mixed backgrounds of the first four Climate Bonds employees I encountered, coming from academic backgrounds in history and geography and career backgrounds in communications and climate science, this changed as the sustainable finance grew. Longtime financial professionals, many with traditional financial expertise in accounting and risk structuring, entered into climate finance as green bond activities developed and expanded within the institutions where they already worked.

Most green bond analysts at mainstream financial firms that I encountered were already working on different sectors of the bond market before green bonds came on their radar, as opposed to most of the Climate Bonds analysts who had backgrounds outside of finance. What was unique to these mainstream financial professionals in comparison to their peers, was how they found out about green bonds and climate finance and what their trajectory was to establish

66 Moody’s Climate Finance Conference notes, NYC Climate Week 2018. 222

themselves as green bond experts. Becoming green bond experts was not just a matter of their work, but also connected to their subjectivity and performed ways of being.

The growth of sustainable finance teams in mainstream financial institutions both feeds on and transforms careers for sustainable finance practitioners in NGOs and other nonfinancial climate finance institutions. ESG scholar Kim Schumacher currently has research coming out on

LinkedIn profiles and expertise, the diverse ones are connected to better performance. The need to draw from the community of diverse expertise (history, geography, ESG), rather than the finance people with a week-long ESG degree. As those most focused on producing the hard data on prices and bond characteristics in the green bond market, the identities of green bond analysts are particularly important to understand this market’s dynamics.

Green Bond Market Analysts

Within investment banks, the production of green bond analysts occurred through both organic and top down decision making. Bill Wilson, a green bond analyst working in New York

City at Wells Fargo, told me that as he saw green bonds increasingly issued by municipalities, and when he was first asked about them by colleagues, he started tracking the market on his own

Excel spreadsheet. “Whenever I start to get questions about something, the first thing I do is start tracking it!” He exclaimed to me. As he continued to track the US municipal green bond market this increasingly became his main job at the underwriter, and Bill embraced this role wholeheartedly, becoming a regular speaker at green bond panels in the United States. Bill told me that one reason he got into green bonds was that his partner is British and he hopes to move to Europe one day. However, since Bill’s financial expertise was the US municipal bond market, 223

and there wasn’t much need for this knowledge in Europe, he thought that getting into green bonds would provide him with a skill he could use to work at a European financial institution more involved in sustainable finance. In this way, Bill’s journey to becoming a climate finance practitioner was a result of both personal and career pressures. His desire to move to Europe, motivated by his relationship with his spouse, propelled him to embrace his work on green bonds that had appeared to him through routine bond analysis. Without both of these connections, Bill would not have taken the leap into becoming a climate finance practitioner that he did.

Margaret McCarthy, an analyst I met at a financial strategic consultancy in Boston, told me that the moment she heard about green bonds she immediately got to work seeing what she could find in relation to the bonds’ quantitative characteristics in relation to vanilla, or regular, bonds. McCarthy’s career had spanned time as a project manager and analyst at Fidelity and

State Street, two of Boston’s premier financial entities. While she had a background in environmental science and sustainability from her master’s degree at Harvard in Environmental

Management, her career had been focused on financial data management. On a call with

Margaret, while extolling her passion for diving into the pricing differences and yield curves of green bonds, she exclaimed “That’s what quant finance girls do!” Coming across green bonds allowed Margaret to utilize both her environmental expertise in looking at the infrastructure projects financed by green bonds as well as her quantitative and data focused “quant finance girl” side through analyzing a bond’s financial characteristics. Margaret’s passion for her work reflects back onto her identity that is in part an outcome of her career decisions.

The Moody’s ESG team focused on putting out reports produced by evaluating green bond frameworks by Moody’s rated companies. Comparing their output to the Climate Bonds 224

Initiative, Sarah Wilson, a Moody’s green bond analyst, told me their green bond publications were more granular and focused from their access to the green bond issuers that had paid

Moody’s to rate the sustainability of their bonds. Sarah had studied accounting at San Francisco

State before starting a mainstream accounting career at KPMG in Seattle and London. Before working in ESG and green bond assessments at Moody’s, she had primarily been a mining analyst, where Sarah became familiar with environmental assessments by evaluating the regulatory pressure on US coal mining companies. Her experience working on environmental concerns with coal mining allowed her to transition to green bonds as the market grew. While rating agencies such as Moody’s produce green bond market analysis, the firm produces what it is paid to do commercially, as opposed to the primarily grant funded Climate Bonds Initiative with its nonprofit structure.

At the Climate Bonds Initiative, during my fieldwork from 2017-18, there was a team of five analysts focused on aggregating green bond market data and evaluating the financial and environmental characteristics of newly issued green bonds. One, Jeanne Girard, a young French analyst from Marseilles who had studied at McGill and the London School of Economics, would take frequent smoke breaks outside the building, very secretively for fear of being judged by her colleagues! Jeanne worked very long hours and was highly motivated to learn as much as she could about how climate change was being framed in finance. For instance, we went together to a climate risk event after work hours at Imperial College’s Grantham Institute. She told me stories of how she was inspired to work against environmental degradation from exploring the southern

French countryside with her grandmother and complained about having to live in cramped

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conditions in urban London. She started at the Climate Bonds Initiative as an intern during her master’s degree and became a fulltime market analyst after completing her degree.

One of the most senior members of Climate Bonds and its main green bond pricing analyst, Maggie Austen, worked part time so that she could spend time with her young children, as opposed to her previously long hours at Thomson Reuters and investment banks. Studying

Italian and Business Studies at University College London, Maggie went on to work as a bond analyst at Morgan Stanley before joining Merrill Lynch. Her first experience of sustainable finance was when she left Merrill Lynch to work at Thomson Reuters as an ESG specialist. There she designed a classification system for the ESG elements of bonds and came across the Climate

Bonds Initiative in the process. Maggie left Thomson Reuters and started working part time at

Climate Bonds. Working at the NGO allowed her to do work that she felt was meaningful in shifting financial markets, and also gave her flexible hours. The downside was the compensation.

She told me that when she and her partner talked about the possibility of working more hours at

Climate Bonds, he remarked that “we [their family] are not a charity”. Given the cost of childcare in London, if she worked more hours it would cost her family in total, given that her children would need daycare. For Maggie, her work allowed her to maintain her expertise in finance and continue to work while also spending time on raising a family. This was a possibility available at

Climate Bonds that is hard to find in mainstream financial institutions.

Xing Liu, an analyst from Xian, China, a city home to bike paths that were financed by the

World Bank’s first green bond issuance, joined the Climate Bonds Initiative in May 2016, after completing his master’s degree in Environment Technology at Imperial. Prior to Imperial, Liu had studied management in college, and his first job was at SynTao, a Chinese sustainability 226

consulting firm, where he did research on corporate social responsibility (CSR) and sustainability reports to outline what information was generally disclosed in Chinese markets. Liu saw his entry into this type of work as a direct result of government regulation. In 2007 the China Banking

Regulatory Commission, a government financial market regulator, issued green credit guidelines to encourage banks to give loans to clean industries. According to Liu, the government’s primary motivation behind the green credit guidelines was to decrease the prevalence of high pollution industries near cities.

This legislation supported SynTao’s work in assessing the environmental impact of corporate activities. According to Liu, “sustainability in general is more like transparency”. SynTao consultancy was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, Greenpeace and other organizations based outside of China to do independent research on the state of sustainability in China. After analyzing what Chinese corporations were already disclosing on social and environmental impacts, SynTao then created reporting frameworks to push the firms to become even more transparent. Liu had studied management and public administration prior to his job at SynTao.

However, once he worked for two years in CSR he wanted to improve his own environmental expertise, and in 2016 Liu came to London to study at Imperial College.

SynTao, the Chinese company that got Liu started on his career in climate finance, has its origins itself in opening up the possibility to work on sustainable finance in China. SynTao was pioneering company in China’s sustainable finance world. SynTao was the first Chinese company to work on Environmental Social Governance due diligence and Corporate Social Responsibility

(ESG and CSR). SynTao’s first clients were Chinese branches of multinationals (Volkswagen and others). Before SynTao, its founder Dr. Guo Peiyuan had worked at Calvert Investments, an early 227

impact investing firm in the United States. Peiyuan had studied economics and wanted to work to use economics to support society, but there was no job in China that matched what he wanted to do so he went to the United States. Peiyuan would return to China in order to setup SynTao, cofounding the company with Wayne Sibley, one of Calvert’s cofounders, which became a trailblazing ESG firm in the country’s domestic sustainability networks. It was Peiyuan’s personal career motivations that created the corporate entity that provided Liu with his first experience in sustainable finance.

After a year of courses in environmental science, policy, and finance, Liu found himself most attracted to learning more about green finance. This attraction brought him to the Climate

Bonds Initiative while he was brainstorming a potential topic for his master’s thesis. Liu told me:

“Well… I was trying to think of my dissertation in green finance so I talked to my teacher in the toilet haha, and he asked me ‘have you decided your dissertation topic?’ and I said yeah, ok well basically I want to do something like green finance, he said ‘Yeah, ok well there is another girl who graduated two years ago who is working in an organization about green finance.’ So he introduced me to… Linnea. She is the first person I met at Climate Bonds.” Liu’s early career working on sustainability in China and subsequent interest to learn more technical environmental knowledge and his advisor’s connection to the company through Linnea brought him to the

Climate Bonds Initiative. Over the course of my fieldwork, Liu moved from being a markets intern to being an analyst and then Co-head of the Climate Bonds Market Intelligence team.

Over 2017-2018, the Climate Bonds’ Markets team was managed remotely by a South

African named Mary Basson living in Sydney, Australia. Mary studied environmental science and economics at the University of Cape Town, graduating in 2005. She initially worked as a 228

researcher on platinum production as well as a consultant on public transit and small-scale development in Cape Town, before moving to London in 2008 to work at Pensions & Investment

Research Consultants as a Senior Researcher. Mary advised pension funds on environmental, social and corporate governance issues and conducted corporate engagement on behalf of the funds as well. In this role she specialized in identifying areas of risk and opportunity relating to climate change; this was the first time she started to work in climate finance. It was also at PIRC where Mary met Sean Kidney for the first time, when he started to give a talk at the consultancy, accidently (he had been meaning to go to another PIRC, the Public Interest Research Centre).

After PIRC, Mary then moved to be a Sustainable and Responsible Investment Analyst at

Henderson Global Investors. Her team was made redundant at the end of 2011 and Mary was hired by Sean to manage the first publication of the Climate Bonds’ Bonds and Climate Change:

State of the Market Report. This report, financed by HSBC, became the flagship publication by the Climate Bonds Initiative, providing green bond yearly summary figures and total market analysis. After running the report through 2014, Mary then took a year off to travel the world with her husband, although she ended up spending the majority of her time in Brazil. Settling in

Sydney to be near her husband’s family for a bit of time, Mary then joined up again with Climate

Bonds to head green bond market analysis and research.

While walking across London Bridge after a work dinner and drinks, Mary told me she often pondered about the efficacy of her work at Climate Bonds. With so much of our emphasis on building infrastructure to provide for a low carbon economy, she wondered how we could preserve green space in the world. Working from home, the majority of 2017 Mary was bed bound due to knee surgery from a cycling accident that had occurred several years prior in 229

London. This accident had exacerbated prior knee injuries from a ski accident. While Mary is a very physically active person, she found being bed bound was quite helpful in keeping her focused while working remotely. When Climate Bonds’ market analysts in London were done for the day, Mary would pick up on their work through the London night during Australia’s daytime in Sydney. In 2018, Mary went on maternity leave. As he suggested as a name for all babies born to Climate Bonds’ employees, Andrew Whiley, Head of Communications, put forth the name

Bondy, perhaps a dramatic example of potential identity construction as a result from working in the green bond market.

As this reflection on the green bond analysts at mainstream financial entities and the

Climate Bonds Initiative demonstrates, from the very beginning, novel perspectives influenced both those coming from outside of finance as well as those within the system. The adaptation of these perspectives had much to do with the totality of the analyst’s identity, not merely their career and expertise development but also taking into consideration familial and personal aspirations.

Being a Climate Finance Practitioner

In this chapter, I have gone through a selection of interlocutor career biographies that were recanted to me while working in the green bond market. I traced their career trajectories, ambitions, and future motivations. Looking at the diverse trajectories that brought them to climate finance, this heterogenous field continues to connect persons from very different contexts. I have traced the growth of the green bond market and the career trajectories (both

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audited by LinkedIn and also from interviews and informal conversation) of green bond market practitioners (within the larger category of climate finance practitioners).

As opposed to being an alienating force, climate finance brings into forefront the identity of those in the industry, drawing from their identities as a type of biopower (Fleming 2014). The affect of financialization and finance here engenders the formation of a new category of people and expertise rather than alienation, particularly in the development of climate finance, with its meaningful work being both sought after and a burden to practitioners. The case of people working in climate finance though, an extension of capitalist logic, seems to be creating a collective which is based on action against climate change, which focuses accumulation for the purpose of collective livelihoods.

The Good Life in Climate Finance

While many of my interlocutors expressed regret at the loss of income given their career choices, their consumption decisions were focused on extending their identities as sustainable people. Having water bottles, biking to work, owning homes in the city, these professionals wanted to live comfortable lives but those within the means of the world to sustain (Gershon

2017). Personal sustainable consumption most readily expresses itself amongst my interlocutors in material consumption, but in their personal lives as well there was also discussion of the need for their own financial relationships to be sustainable (Welker and Wood 2011). In parallel to their reflections on personal sustainable consumption, climate finance practitioners place their own investment decisions in the context of collective action. From their perspective, personal acts are only truly sustainable if done at a collective level. 231

Following Sherry Ortner’s call for an anthropology of the good, and reflections on what aspirations drive people to structure their lives in the 2010s, Edward Fischer and Elizabeth Currid-

Halkett have documented the many market based ways in which people around the world craft their identities (Currid-Halkett 2017; Ortner 2016; Fischer 2014; Mathews and Izquierdo 2008).

Fischer traces sustainable egg consumption and agriculture practices in Germany and Guatemala to identity and economic activity (Fischer 2014). Curried-Halkett analyzes quantitative consumption habits across cities and regions in the United States, and explains these consumption trends in reference to people’s reflections on what a good life means to them

(Currid-Halkett 2017). Donna Haraway looks at material consumption as crafting identity tied to economic forms (Haraway 2008).

This current analysis harkens back to Pierre Bourdieu’s reflection on habitus and Georg

Simmel’s contemplations on life in the metropolis. Given their work in climate finance, my interlocutors were driven. In my interviews with key interlocutors, a question of focus was how did working in climate finance influence how the interlocutor viewed the world around them and their own personal consumption choices and way of life. Work and leisure connect in their production in contemporary life (Grazia 1962). When he had a break between jobs, an interlocutor moving from Climate Bonds to the sustainable finance team at a prestigious UK university chose to go on vacation in Cornwall, rather than fly to an exotic locale. He loved to windsurf and found it to be a pastime that helped to center him and get him in the zone.

Vacationing along the Cornwall coast allowed him to recharge from work through windsurfing and also support his perception of himself as a sustainable person by taking a local vacation.

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A Fortune expose on Bank of America Merrill Lynch’s Managing Director in Debt Capital

Markets, Suzanne Buctha, one of the drafters of the Green Bond Principles along with Citi’s Mike

Eckhart, highlights the dual existence that legitimizes climate finance practitioners. She is noted not only as being a banker but also as someone who goes on hikes. As the article notes “One such brainstormer was Buchta, the debt specialist. An avid hiker and nature lover, she had been mulling how to draw investors into green projects, and she knew bonds had advantages over stocks.”67 This mix of traits paints Buchta as a multifaceted individual that gives legitimacy for her role in climate finance and for being a positive maverick in this space.

Material engagements cement climate finance practitioner identity. At climate finance conferences I would collect conference swag handed out by conference sponsors and market actors that often attempted to highlight sustainability through their material composition. I came across wooden business cards and pens. The Dutch bank ABN AMRO gave out recycled plastic wallets at the Climate Bonds 2018 Annual Conference. At the 2019 Climate Bonds Conference, the Climate Bonds Initiative distributed canvas bags with the Climate Bonds’ logo made canvas bags for conference participants. In the Climate Hub after the conference, Candace, a climate finance researcher who also like myself leveraged time between completing a PhD in sustainability at University College London to do green bond pricing research at Climate Bonds, did a presentation on plastics in July 2019, when she discussed the use of a canvas bag in comparison to a plastic bag in terms of how often the bag would have to be used to have the same greenhouse gas emissions equivalency. Objects and the use of objects in relation to

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emissions intensity and climate change scenarios frame being a sustainable person in climate finance.

Outdoor activities are crucially important to the climate finance practitioners I worked with. Sean was an avid kayaker, and told me about scuba diving in Australia, and going on camping trips. Rob Fowler, the initial head of the Climate Bonds Certification scheme, told stories about snowboarding in the Rockies in Utah which is where he learned mandarin. The Head of

Communications at Climate Bonds, Andrew Whiley was an avid surfer on Bondi beach in his youth. These outdoorsy manifestations and pastimes displayed a loyalty to concepts of nature that then had to be balanced with consumption and flying, and material relationships through climate finance work. The work of climate finance practitioners though, while being in markets, made them aware and critical of neoliberal framing of individual changes being the solution to climate change.

The career journey of James Mitchell, a serious cello player transformed into a climate finance practitioner, highlights this tension. He had originally wanted to be a cellist, but a wrist injury had derailed a professional cello career. The next best thing in some ways in his opinion was his career in climate finance. When I first met James in 2017 in the Climate Hub, he was a project manager for the Carbon War Room before its absorption by the Rocky Mountain Institute, a longtime US-based environmental NGO. In 2018, I sent James a recording of a presentation I had given on climate finance careers at the Society of Economic Anthropology, which included many of the stories discussed earlier in this chapter. He told me that:

I, too, have weighed and balanced my career on personal considerations. I knew that I would be crushed in minutes by going into the private sector to sell widgets, so I’d have to find another way to make my living. One of the reasons that I went towards climate 234

finance was that I thought I could see some real impact there. However, the other reason was this: Knowing that I had student loans piling up, I made a calculated decision to go towards “the money” in the non-profit sector: climate finance. Can’t say I’ve made it big, but I think that I can say that by finding something slightly more technical, something that needs at least some degree of a “highly valued” expertise, that I think I’ve found a middle ground that takes away financial stress and lets me get what I need out of work.

After receiving a master’s degree in Nature, Society and Environmental Policy from the Smith

School at Oxford University, James navigated a work intensive career at Rocky Mountain Institute

Speaking to the financial considerations James notes in his decision to enter into climate finance, many of the other members of his master’s cohort went into a variety of fields, from academic geography to veterinary work. Their careers mark the multiplicity of types of sustainable work that exist as well as the varying pay grades that comes with these careers.

James and I reconnected when he moved to the Boston area. We got into rock climbing and using a rock-climbing gym as a coworking space over 2018-2019, where we worked together from our particular angles in climate finance. I wrote my dissertation while James worked on developing the Poseidon Principles, a climate-aligned finance framework for lenders in the global shipping industry to decrease the sector’s carbon emissions intensity. Along with the balancing of making an impact along with having enough money to achieve the lifestyle he desired, my experience working in the rock climbing gym with James also highlighted to me a desire that was expressed to me by many other climate finance practitioners. This is a desire to work in a personally sustainable way: a balancing act of doing meaningful work, exercising, and building and supporting social and familial relationships (Moore 2017).

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Stress and burnout in climate finance life

While the release from individual sustainability micromanaging was helpful for some sustainability practitioners, they also had to deal with the demands from their work and the toll it took on their framed individual work sustainability. Many of my interlocutors struggled with a drive to overwork given the scale of climate change and suffered from burnout. This burnout was perhaps a result of climate change being a mega problem that showed little overall remission due to the efforts of climate financiers. The meaningful project that supported the justification of a good life for climate financiers could thus be undermined. As Fischer notes, “Having such larger purpose and being part of meaningful projects that go beyond narrow self-interest are central to wellbeing among both the affluent and the poor” (Fischer 2014: 7). While “we see people building meaningful life projects oriented around visions of the good life” (Fischer 2014:

7), the hint of a lack of meaning or impact of work could undermine the good life, resulting in burnout.

During my fieldwork I experienced five burnouts close at hand. During my first weeks in

2015 at Climate Bonds, the communications manager, who had just recently gotten married, decided to move back to Poland. As Georgia mentioned about her departure, “If you aren’t committed to the cause why would you want to work so many hours for less money?” An events manager became a yoga and ontological specialist, leaving climate finance entirely. Another moved back to her home country of Brazil and became a partner in a mainstream infrastructure consulting firm. Another Climate Bonds analyst ended up going home to China for a while before moving to work in a larger financial institution.

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My interlocutors who experienced burnout often contributed their experience to overwork as well as to the impact of learning about continually escalating climate change impacts and mass extinction around the world. In February 2014, Dipesh Chakrabarty, the historian whose work on theorizing the importance of time in our comprehension in climate change in

Chapter 3 of this dissertation, came to Harvard University’s Mahindra Center to present on his climate change theories. I asked him what good his sorting through the different timescales of climate change would do, “how do you think we can make sure that anxieties about these problems are channeled effectively?” if this knowledge just ended up exacerbating burnout amongst those working on or trying to respond productively in some way to climate change.68

His response was that he is not a psychologist, but that for more inspiring answers to this question we should listen to the words of Bill McKibben or other activist climate change figures such as Jim Hansen, both of whom were popular sources of inspiration and strategy for many of my interlocutors. However, their words did not seem to fully support those working even in their own organizations such as 350.org’s UK branch, which shared office space with Climate Bonds in the Climate Hub. For many of the activists in these organizations, being able to work on climate change meant tenuously balancing personal financial needs and work stress.

In his book Predictably Irrational, behavioral economist Daniel Ariely argues that when people see their work being dismantled in front of them, there is an emotional effect that leads to both less work productivity and satisfaction (Ariely 2008). In many of his discussions with people in the office, Sean would quote Daniel Ariely to support methods to produce social change

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and action on climate change. This dynamic, as well as the increasing inability of many of my interlocutors to remove themselves from their work and take breaks once they got engrossed in work at Climate Bonds, exacerbated symptoms of burnout. In part, this could be due to a biopower extraction from their daily lives as NGO workers (Fleming 2014: 8). The responses to these burnouts occasionally led people to found organizations that framed themselves as work to overcome the burnout of climate finance practitioners. During one of these retreats, practitioners brainstormed the concept of a Just Transition, focusing a low carbon transition on making sure that all people were supported economically by a green new deal approach.

Similarly, the Interhelp Network that grew out of Joanna Macy’s experience of anti-nuclear activist burnout in the 1960s has the motto “Work that Reconnects”. The movement between organizations, forms of work, and time off that burnout influences amongst climate finance practitioners impacts the development of the sector.

David Graeber’s reflection on burnout amongst anarchist activists captures this dynamic.

He argues that burnout limits political possibility because anarchists are unable to return to the work that they are doing (Graeber 2009: 251, 533). In climate finance, I see some room for people to return to this space with renewed ideas and focus, such as the concept of a Just Transition that highlights human concerns that were earlier absent from mainstream environmental activist discourse. This absence has been linked to environmental racism and unequal power dynamics that now have space in sustainable finance and impact investing (Keucheyan 2016).

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New Markets, New People

Within the formative space produced by climate finance and the green bond market, climate finance practitioners are determining what it means to be a climate finance person and this development influences the formation and transmission of knowledge in climate finance.

Green bond campaigners, analysts, and policymakers involved in the technical work of sorting and evaluating green bond issuances and the total size and financial characteristics of the market, form their expertise between sustainability, management, and finance and in the process solidify themselves as climate finance people.

Through the careers of my interlocutors and by analyzing the development of the green bond market, I find that being a climate finance person is multifaceted in this space as well as that expertise can be constructed creatively. The framings of identity and expertise that I encounter in climate finance demonstrate the need to understand this interplay, particularly in the development of new forms of expertise spearheaded by figures composed as entrepreneurs and others. Climate finance practitioners argue that within finance, one must be an ethical investor, a responsible investor to be a moral human being. This work connects one’s selfhood with the large system of finance. Identity in climate finance, and the justifications of one’s actions are predicated on systems that are outside of oneself. How can a person be sustainable and ethical while attached to financial products that have not been thoroughly vetted?

My dialogue with interlocutors on their experiences of being, becoming and staying climate finance practitioners reveals that this is also an important and thought-provoking topic for them. At the leaving drinks for Paula Chiappini, a Senior Policy Researcher at Climate Bonds moving to Systemiq, a climate finance consultancy, she concluded her farewell speech saying: 239

“Aneil is writing a paper on climate finance people, and it is definitely at Climate Bonds that I became a climate finance person.”

In this chapter, I have argued that as they work my interlocutors become climate finance practitioners. Driven by a do-good narrative, their assessment of the meaning and impact of their white-collar work continually threatens/constructs their perception of the good life. In the development of the green bond market and climate finance more broadly, there has been a generational shift with the increased professionalization of the space. I have presented and analyzed life and work history interviews to understand how careers and types of people are interpellated in climate finance. Understanding how people working in climate finance and the green bond market develop as climate finance practitioners and the tension they navigate in living a good life while making a meaningful impact against climate change highlights the ethical field that this sector and market open up in financial markets.

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Conclusion: Green Bonds and Beyond

Assembling A Changing Market

In this dissertation, I have presented my findings from six years of fieldwork in the green bond market and climate finance. I began my research in 2014 with the questions: what makes a green bond and what makes a green bond market? I utilized these questions to inquire into the green bond market as a total social fact. Examining these questions through the lens of a total social fact, led me to breakdown the green bond market into the components of data, narrative, time, work, and people. I have found the answer to what makes green bonds and the green bond market to be the constituting components of data, narrative, time, work, and people. Through these components, the green bond market and climate finance at large exists as a contested ethical field produced by the external pressures of environmental degradation and climate change but shaped by financiers and activists grappling with the time of climate change. The green bond market and climate finance is a changing and expanding field, one that has only existed for slightly over a decade – less than a blink in terms of climate change’s geologic time.

In this dissertation, I have charted the history of this market’s development, tracking its impact on the physical environments and lived experiences of people that I interacted with as a participant observer at green bond forums and as a climate finance practitioner.

Early on in my research, I followed an early interlocutor’s advice seriously. He suggested that I not go directly to infrastructure sites financed by green bonds, but rather start my research with a focused analysis of the discourse and work that constitute the daily practice and careers of climate finance practitioners, as well as those driving the idea of green bonds in financial

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centers around the world. I centered my study on green bonds at the Climate Bonds Initiative, a particularly vocal nonprofit based in London, to participate in and observe both their work and the green bond market at large from their perspective.

In a time where finance and financial markets have social legitimacy that provides a powerful license to operate, understanding the growth of direct governance elements of financial markets as they develop is more important now than ever (Martin 2002). Neither I nor my interlocutors in the green bond market can say whether the growth of this market will be part of the solution or part of the problem to climate change. However, through my research I have been able to identify data, narrative, time, work, and people as key components that compose the green bond market, components that both drive its growth and are its byproduct. These make up other financial markets too, but the inclusion of climate change and the environment as the onus for the growth and development of the green bond market produces a particularly transformative praxis for this market.

Similarly to Cymene Howe, Gökçe Günel, Dominic Boyer, and other climate anthropologists researching climate change responses and transition projects to a low carbon economy, my analysis of the green bond market highlights the aspirations of market participants and the effects thus far of this aspiration on their lives and the work that they do (Günel 2019;

Boyer 2019; Howe 2019; O'Reilly et al. 2020). Günel argues that in analyzing low carbon transition utopian projects, “rather than taking failure versus success as a given” we can explore “what each comes to mean in the context of various renewable energy and clean technology projects” (Günel

2019: 26). In this dissertation, I have also attempted to look beyond a black and white assessment of the green bond market to get closer at the empirical ramifications of this market thus far. 242

In this dissertation, I began by outlining debates around what a green bond is, and the resultant pricing and green infrastructure assessments associated with this data. Market narratives construct and influence green bond market infrastructure, and create the future, which continues to transform narratives. Whether or not green bonds will be effective at tackling climate change is dependent on the themes and normative narratives that enter and shape the market. These narratives are continually re-evaluated by market participants. The green bond market exists as a nexus of different narratives of value and value creation in financial markets, as well as an entry point for the calculation of climate change as risk and uncertainty. Through my fieldwork I have found an open and undecided field of value-making, involving contests between institutions over how difference between green bonds and regular bonds is meaningful and thus valuable, which play out in the thoughts and actions of climate finance people.

Climate finance practitioners construct climate finance through reframing the finance industry and its preexisting temporal relations to the temporal geological processes of climate change (Chakrabarty 2009). These temporalities are distinct from those already in finance, and climate finance emerges as a contradictory synthesis between the two. This repositioning produces a new asset class and type of expertise and subjectivity within the financial industry, challenging an industry accustomed to operating on milliseconds for financial return to account for geological timescales. I argue that it is through distinct forms of work in the green bond market that the time of climate change is made legible in financial markets. Understanding how climate finance practitioners perform their work shows how climate finance produces climate change in financial markets. My experiences of the work that makes up the green bond market not only consisted of database and other forms of office work, but also included participating in 243

informal coffee shop meetings, office sports events, after hours drinks, and formal/informal functions. All of these activities are integral to the work of making green bonds.

My focus on the materiality of this work reveals tensions that practitioners experience in connecting their daily tasks to the changes they hope work will have in the world. Examining these tasks and activities through the multiple meanings and implications that practitioners assign to them shows how people define what constitutes important and valuable work in the midst of emerging market narratives. Driven by a do-good narrative, their assessment of the meaning of their white-collar work both constructs and threatens their perception of what constitutes a good life. These tensions do not affect all climate finance practitioners equally: as the green bond market and climate finance have developed and professionalized, there has been a generational shift.

While I wrote up my dissertation over 2018-2020, an increasing amount of academic inquiry has emerged on this space. Academics in economics and management, have built careers through analyzing pricing differences between green and vanilla bonds over the last few years.

However, as I note in Chapter 1, the value of economic objects of study in the green bond market such as a greenium has to be placed in the wider context of green bond market dynamics if its study is to have any relevant meaning beyond academic embroiling. The greenium’s production is a consequence of market activity and subsequent academic analysis impacting these market dynamics (MacKenzie 2008; Zaloom 2009). Neither a greenium nor the green bond market is static and as an increasing amount of academic study focuses on green bonds, this reality must be taken into account.

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Exponential Graphs and Scaling up Sustainable Finance in the Wake of COVID-19

As I completed this dissertation in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the EU

Sustainable Finance Taxonomy was launched and used for the European Union’s Just Transition

Fund.69 This taxonomy arose from the debate around what constitutes green infrastructure in the green bond market discussed in Chapter 1, and its use by the European Union will guide public financing. The concept of a taxonomy to guide sustainable finance investments was developed and spearheaded by the Climate Bonds Initiative.

Figure 40: “Statistically Insignificant” (Schoenmaekers 2020) The spread of COVID-19 around the world in 2020, demonstrates the impact exponential change can have on our lives. This experience may reframe how we address other threats such as climate change that impact livelihoods in all countries around the globe. As the exponential curved graph of COVID-19 has entered the collective imagination, so have a number of other exponential graphs such as that for greenhouse gas emissions. With the surge of COVID-19 cases,

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there has also been an equally exponential drop and recovery in global financial markets. Central bankers have been left grappling with how their expertise can react to issues falling under public health and epidemiology. They must communicate on a topic outside of their expertise, but with the same authority and role that they play as central bankers in financial markets (Holmes 2013).

In this dissertation, I analyze how financiers in climate finance and the green bond market make sense of the exponential processes of climate change, and how this sense-making influences their response. Amongst climate finance practitioners, COVID-19 is understood to be a problem similar to climate change in that this pandemic was already known to be a likely scenario by coronavirus scholars. However, this scientific knowledge was not adequately heeded in political circles and translated into public policy. While we benefit from the knowledge produced through specialization in expertise, this specialization also lessens the ability of collaboration and understanding across the silos produced by expertise (Tett 2015). As climate science is similarly impacted by the knowledge silos in our society, climate science has had difficulty gaining authority in both policy and financial decision-making. In spite of this, climate financiers have been working to build markets that address the exponential processes of climate change that we are experiencing. The green bond market is a product of this work. Like the exponential graph of COVID-19 cases, the green bond market has also increased dramatically since 2013 (Tripathy 2017).

The coming climate impacts that we experience may arrive with an equal intensity to our current experience of COVID-19, and we have seen the tools developed by climate financiers for climate change already being put to use to confront COVID-19. The concept of COVID-19 pandemic bonds builds off climate finance thematic bonds. Pandemic bonds that finance COVID- 246

19 measures skyrocketed in China, from zero to 399 COVID-19 pandemic bonds, totaling $34 billion issued in the first months of the pandemic. In the aftermath of COVID-19, I hope we are able to build stronger bridges across the different forms of expertise in academia and in public and private institutions that can more adequately respond to the exponential processes that shape so much of our lives. As anthropologists we can help to make the exponential comprehensible to all of us as human beings, across our many silos of expertise.

Going forward, my inquiry into the development and impact of the green bond market will involve a direct assessment of projects financed by green bonds. Currently, there are multiple initiatives within sociology and anthropology that look to be fruitful focal points for research on climate finance. The European Union’s Horizon 2020 has funded two projects focused on analysing both the dynamics of investment in fossil fuels as well as impact investing (European

Commission 2017, 2019). Based at the University of St. Andrews and the University of Bologna, two teams of anthropologists are just beginning longitudinal studies of both brown and green finance.

I will continue my research on the green bond market and attempt to conduct fieldwork directly at green bond financed infrastructure projects in collaboration with these research teams and an ever-expanding network of anthropologists in this space. Through critically and comparatively examining green bond financed projects, I hope to expand my ethnographic experience in climate finance beyond the offices of climate finance practitioners and closer to the infrastructure projects they analyze and finance through Excel spreadsheets, pdfs, and Word documents.

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Mobilizing a Rainbow

On June 16, 2020, Andrew Whiley, Climate Bonds’ Head of Communications, posted to the informal WhatsApp group Climate Bonds Connected a photo he had just taken of a rainbow over London’s Canary Wharf financial district (see Figure 37). Headlining the photograph, Andrew wrote that “It’s true. There is a pot of gold at Canary Wharf.” In response, Andrew Chen, a policy analyst, wrote “should we mobilise it towards climate action?” Andrew replied, “Looks like it’s in the JP Morgan building. Not sure they’d want to give it up for anything.” Leena Fatin, Climate

Bonds senior communications analyst urged the group “We might have to go Xtinction Rebellion style, free climb and claim it at the top.” This banter on the WhatsApp group points to the positioning of climate finance practitioners between climate activists and mainstream financiers.

Figure 41: Photograph of Canary Wharf by Andrew Whiley Those in the WhatsApp group and at Climate Bonds work with investment banks, such as

JP Morgan but at the same time profess a distrust of the financial industry and its ability to effectively act to counter the negative investments the world’s largest banks continue to bankroll into fossil fuel extraction and greenhouse gas emissions intensive industries. The WhatsApp 248

group joke about JP Morgan, a rainbow in Canary Wharf, and the Xtinction rebellion, highlights the ambiguous position of climate finance practitioners in betwixt and between climate activists and financiers (Souleles 2017a). In his conclusion to Nature is a Battlefield, philosopher Razmig

Keucheyan argues that what is required to avoid climate and environmental “catastrophism” is

“to politicize the crisis” (Keucheyan 2016: 153). He argues that this is the route by which change can and must occur.

Amongst my climate finance interlocutors were organizers, volunteers and activists involved in the social movement organizations that Keucheyan discusses such as Greenpeace and

350.org. Some, such as Ulf Ander, a Norwegian Climate Bonds policy intern in 2017, felt that their work was going in circles when they continued to petition governments directly to act on climate change as members of civil society groups. Ulf felt that through working in green bonds that they were involved in a conversation that was changing, that was shifting practice in both private and public sectors. However, as I have discussed in this dissertation, climate finance work also has many experiences of burnout that often motivate people to either take time off or work in other localized sustainability and off the grid initiatives (Graeber 2009). The experience and movement of Ulf and others highlights that social change is not a one directional and compartmentalized phenomenon.

Building on current work in climate anthropology, I have here attempted to reveal how people understand and act on climate change in their lives is vital to seeing what solutions and impacts may occur (O'Reilly et al. 2020). Günel, Choy, and Watanabe highlight how climate change and a call to act on environmental degradation shape personal and professional lives in low-carbon city projects, environmental activism, and civil society environmental development 249

initiatives (Watanabe 2019; Günel 2019; Choy 2003). Here, I have sought to unpack the tension produced by climate change in the lives of climate finance practitioners as they construct and work in financial markets to direct capital towards perceived and audited climate solutions.

In response to the WhatsApp group discussion he had started, Andrew posted another photograph. He stated “Here’s what it looks like from around the 30th floor looking back to the

City. When I first arrived from Oz [Australia] in 2013, the UK lot invited me up for a welcome ‘Cup of tea & chat… not a lot of chances to get that shot.” To avoid glare in his photograph, Andrew had pressed his iPhone up against the glass to get the clearest shot he could.

Figure 42: London from JP Morgan Canary Wharf Building, 2013 by Andrew Whiley In this dissertation, I have sought to describe the world of climate finance practitioners without glare, capturing the perspectives of my interlocutors working in and around the financial sector on climate change and sustainable finance. What the people who are driving and reacting to the growth of climate and sustainable finance markets think and experience shapes the answers and the possibilities of these markets. A blending of expertise has occurred in this space, with environmental activist and science organizations creating a common meeting field in climate 250

finance markets. The time of climate change continues to produce tension and anxiety amongst practitioners about how to evaluate the impact of the work they have done. The triptych of the state, capitalism, and nature that Keucheyan describes, is a powerful dynamic that furthers exploitation within its system, but this is not a monolith. There are rooms of possibility in- between that already exist (Gibson-Graham 2006; Keucheyan 2016).

While economists and finance practitioners studying this market look at particular technical questions of valuation and growth in isolation, as an anthropologist I provide the setting and social context in which their research in the green bond market is enmeshed. Perhaps the politization that Keucheyan calls for takes many forms. I argue that those forms are possible and already active both within as well as outside of the financial industry. There may be many ways to mobilize a rainbow.

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