About the project
The project starts from a series of interrelated observations: Firstly, that finance in the past few years has been given a central role in climate policy to fund the green transition. There are multiple examples of this. Notably, the 2015 Paris Agreement called on finance to “shift financial flows” in line with the transition and, since then, finance has further been denoted a central place in both the European Green Deal through the Taxonomy and at recent COP climate conferences. The stated goal is to fill the transition’s so-called “investment gap”. On their end, various financial actors have built large infrastructures for green and sustainable investing. Moreover, central banks and financial regulators have also included climate change into their mandates to manage the threat climate change is thought to pose to the stability of global financial systems.
In related ways, what this means is that climate change has become an issue for finance and thus the challenge that presents itself is to translate climate change into financial language, that is, give it financial value. As Engen shows in her thesis, the main tool used to do this is by framing climate change as a certain type of risk. This “climate risk” denotes the financial risk that financial assets may become devalued because of weather changes, so-called “physical risk”, as well as political changes related to the societal transition away from fossil fuels, so-called “transition risk”. Climate risk is however also assumed to mitigate climate change, based on the assumption that if this risk is taken into account by financial actors, it will create an economic incentive and shift capital away from high-carbon activities and in line with the societal decarbonisation.
In her thesis, Engen delineates “green finance” through focusing on the work that is done with “climate risk”. She aims to show how this notion is worked on by different financial actors in different and related ways, showcasing different aspects of what finance is itself. A key ambition of the thesis is to trace some of the consequences of the climate risk notion, building from the understanding that how issues are framed also take part in shaping the world. Engen is also interested in the question of how this financial climate risk differs from other economizations of the climate issue, and notably those linked to neoclassical economics. Finally, Engen is interested in understanding how climate risk interacts with climate policy, and more particularly, how the specific economics of climate risk is tied to the notion of the “transition” itself.
Thesis supervisors
The thesis is supervised by Professor Kristin Asdal (TIK Centre for Technology, Innovation and Culture, University of Oslo) and Associate Professor Liliana Doganova (CSI Centre de sociologie de l’innovation, École des mines, Paris) and conducted as part of the project Value threads, which investigates the valuation practices and technologies that underpin efforts to transform our economy into a "green", low-emissions economy.
Commentator
Professor Philip Roscoe (University of St Andrews Business School)
About Stine Engen
Stine Engen is a PhD candidate at TIK Centre for Technology, Innovation and Culture at the University of Oslo. Before starting her PhD she worked for several years as a journalist and holds a Master of Arts (MA) in Philosophy from the University of Copenhagen.
This seminar marks the final evaluation prior to submission of her dissertation.
How to participate
The seminar is open for everyone to join - either at TIK (Meeting room 1040) or via ZOOM. Welcome!
Meeting ID: 629 8165 5881
Passcode: 050289
The manuscript is available upon request. Please send the request to Stine Engen stine.engen@tik.uio.no.