Over the past 25 years, performativity has emerged as a salient focus in social sciences, yet its meta-theoretical analysis remains limited. What is performativity? How is it located empirically and treated theoretically across disciplines? Analyzing 6,741 published articles and books deploying the term performativity, this paper proposes a framework to explore performativity and reviews the transdisciplinary literature that employs the term in academic practice. Drawing on an updated version of Actor-Network Theory and studying performativity in terms of its impact on the constituents of an agencement, i.e., devices (D), actors (A), representations (R), and networks (N), we outline the term’s theoretical landscape and summarize the general threads of performativity research. The paper defines performativity as a representational intervention involving a material act of describing devices, actors, representations, or networks that affects one or more of them. The literature demonstrates that such interventions can manifest as discourses, embodied engagements, speech acts, or scientific models, among other forms.

Culture is increasingly articulated by financial actors and financial firms as a solution to the dislocations of contemporary capitalism. It therefore matters, not just how actors behave, but how they articulate culture and what importance they accord it. Drawing on pragmatist sociology, the present paper takes this injunction seriously and reports the findings of a field study involving 29 interviews with senior members of financial firms whose understanding of culture and its importance were interrogated directly. The discourse concerning purposeful culture articulated in these interviews simultaneously recognises current arrangements between finance and society as fractured while positing organisational culture initiatives as the most realistic means of repairing said fracture. The paper draws on these findings to argue that, despite masquerading as a call for change, purposeful culture discourse has the effect of protecting against calls to rethink or radically transform the roles and effects of finance in society. The paper thus contributes to sociological perspectives on finance by illustrating how existing cultural discourse in financial markets serves as a kind of conservative critique where shortcomings are conceded in a way which insulates finance from wider structural change.

What shapes fossil-fuel investment and divestment decisions? What are pension funds’ climate-related considerations? And how do conceptions of portfolio risk influence these issues? Danish pension funds constitute a rare and understudied cohort of investors who have undertaken comparatively progressive fossil-fuel investment decisions. Simultaneously, diversification and market rationality have frequently been invoked as obstacles to divestment and active ownership. Using the Danish experience, this article conducts an archaeological analysis of the concept of portfolio risk, unearthing the various ways in which it has shaped fossil-fuel investment decisions. The analysis identifies five key aspects through which the concept has hampered Danish pension funds’ active ownership and fossil-fuel divestment decisions (sector diversification, externalities, market rationality, dispersed ownership, and passive index investing). The article argues that these discursive aspects have reinforced a passive tendency within finance capitalism to bolster the status quo, thereby supporting prevailing market actors and the continued extraction of fossil fuels.

Proponents of climate and energy transition contend that productive investment in green and sustainable infrastructures can reduce global carbon emissions while at the same time unlock potential for a great surge of development. However, under the current regime of financialized capitalism, political economists and financial geographers also question whether transitioning into such a green and decarbonized world economy is actually feasible. With global profits accruing primarily through financial channels and transactions, mission-oriented investment in the real economy is lagging. Besides, global imbalances between Northern and Southern countries and continued reliance on resource use and commodity production further challenge a global and inclusive climate transition. This article addresses these challenges and presents three key avenues of green de-financialization, involving strategies to (i) re-embed finance within sustainable modes of production, (ii) reform regimes of financial governance, and (iii) restrain finance’s role in existing modes of production and consumption. Central to the analysis is that the state needs to provide regulatory frameworks and incentives to make such a change happen. However, with vested financial and corporate interests contesting the shift to global sustainability, it remains to be seen to what degree it can coordinate such a transition at the global level.

This research essay explores how US dollar centrality and strength may impede decarbonization. First, I suggest that because US dollar centrality enables higher US household consumption and imports, and US household consumption is comparatively carbon-intensive, centrality can increase per capita emissions and carbon-intensive consumption in the United States. Second, I explore how US dollar strength can compromise the monetary autonomy and capacity to finance decarbonization for dollar-exposed emerging market economies. They are negatively impacted most notably in the areas of trade, external debt, and investment. Finally, US dollar strength also has the potential to limit the competitiveness of US green manufacturing and exports. US currency overvaluation means that green technologies produced in the United States can be comparatively expensive in global markets. I conclude with a discussion of future research and policy implications.

The financial industry has become increasingly entangled with environmental matters of concern, constituting the phenomenon of ‘green’ finance. In this Forum, we approach green finance as financial climate governance to highlight its claim on finance’s role as legitimate and capable steward of the planet’s climate. This claim to govern and its promise to achieve desirable environmental conditions have made green finance a crucial object of investigation. However, we observe a growing fragmentation of green finance research along various fault lines, such as levels of analysis, normative positions, or academic structures. Calling for reassembling green finance scholarship, we posit a need for more integrative approaches, motivating this Forum’s central question: what integrative moves across socioeconomic research can enhance our understanding and judgement of green finance? The Forum gathers three contributions focused on: (1) integrating macro- and micro-approaches in green finance studies; (2) examining the politics of green finance as knowledge contestations; and (3) confronting stasis in green finance by exploring researchers’ agencies, emotions, and normativities. By reassembling green finance scholarship through integrative moves, we suggest marking green finance as a shared concern and fostering collective perspectives to bring clarity and constructive critique to what has become a dominant pursuit in facing the socioecological crisis.

The complexities and contradictions of ‘green’ finance demand multidimensional perspectives in critical socioeconomic research. Current studies often remain fragmented, focusing either on global financial structures or micro-level practices without fully integrating both. This essay advocates for a more integrated analytical approach, employing three components: constructions, cleavages, and complementarities. At the micro-level, green finance is constructed by diverse actors, influencing macro-level financial governance and capital flows. Conversely, macro-structural shifts, driven by geopolitical and institutional dynamics, shape micro-level activities forging new alliances and oppositions – cleavages. Since the responses of actors and their institutional context to green finance are diverse, new institutional and agentic complementarities emerge. How green finance alters the relationship between financial markets and political-economic institutions, and how this unfolds across national economies, shapes our understanding of capitalist varieties and the emergence of new actors and networks. The essay contends that linking these dimensions and integrating micro- and macro-approaches enables scholarship to pursue a shared understanding of green finance and its (in)capacities to confront socioecological crises under financial capitalism.

This essay argues for an integrative move in the investigation of the politics of ‘green’ finance. We suggest that approaching the politics of ‘green’ finance in the form of knowledge contestations can bring out complementarities and bridge divides between different levels of analysis and theoretical traditions. Our focus is motivated by the pivotal role of knowledge and ignorance in the organisation and governance of financial markets identified in economic sociology, political economy, and neighbouring disciplines. Drawing on this scholarship, we consider knowledge both a forum for and a means of politics. We then illustrate how this conceptualisation provides insights into the politics of ‘green’ finance on different levels of analysis and following different theoretical traditions: in the context of tracing elites in their dissemination of specific ideas shaping governance regimes; when following market devices which produce partial calculative representations of the world; in problematising how financial organisations both produce and accept certain types of knowledge to further their interests; and when examining the role of ideology and imaginative capture in stabilising financial capitalism during climate crisis. We conclude by identifying the connective tissue between these different analytical and theoretical approaches made visible by the integrative concept of politics as knowledge contestations.

The promise or intent of change is a fundamental feature of ‘green’ finance. Despite many observable and notable changes in financial discourse, disclosure practices, products, and regulatory reforms, many green finance researchers are also painfully aware of the various ways in which green finance falls short of its promise. Being confronted with stasis creates feelings of frustration and gives rise to fundamental questions about the role of researchers in conducting research in this area and their normative stances towards their research objects. To generate movement away from stasis, this article calls for a more explicit consideration of researchers’ agency, emotions, and normativities in green finance research. Drawing on the metaphor of paths and path-making – a generative tool for thinking across various disciplines – it outlines different types of agency that can help researchers in orienting themselves along different pathways of change. In reflecting on these agencies, the article advocates for fostering explicit discussions on the diverse normative stances present in green finance research. This approach aims to inspire opportunities for collective authorship on specific and pressing questions, ultimately enhancing the collective agency of socio-economic scholarship in the field of green finance.