Green financial infrastructures are spaces for professionals to exert claims to issue control. What professionals want, above all else, is to determine the content of green finance to reflect their varying interests. While they may seek environmental progress or financial profits – or some combination thereof – they are primarily interested in determining how green finance works and who is permitted to work on it. This chapter reviews how issue control in green financial infrastructures generally develops. It discusses professional contestation over who is permitted to work on an issue, the formation of boundary objects that include/exclude, the forging of governance objects, and attempts at technical automaticity. The concern is with professional jurisdictional battles, trials of strength over issue content, and the establishment of technical infrastructures.

This chapter presents a fleeting history of key changes in global trade and finance in the post-war period, organised around the themes of crisis and cooperation. The first section of the chapter discusses the key themes. The second section considers the emergence of the post-World War II Bretton Woods regime. The third section outlines the rise of private capital in the 1970s through to the debt crisis of the 1980s. The fourth section considers discussions of global financial architecture in the 1990s to the 2000s. The fifth section discusses changes in the last fifteen years, focusing on how the trade regime has stalled and the financial regime has been partially rolled back. Finally, the concluding section reflects on the ever-present need to foster cooperation in the global financial and trade architecture.

This chapter explores the evolution of the governance of so-called “fragile states” as a case of change in the architecture of global governance. Reduced funding from states and broader ideational trends about managerialism and effectiveness have rendered international organizations (IOs) less important in defining policy responses and assigning roles to other actors. This change in the governance architecture has engendered more networked and market-based forms of governance, with different stripes of professional networks becoming more important. The chapter argues that this transformation helps explain substantive changes in how fragile states are governed: in the 1990s and into the early 2000s, the treatment of fragile states was dominated by a “peacebuilding” approach focused on building institutions to support the rule of law and democracy, and with IOs such as the UN and the World Bank in authoritative roles. Gradually, over the course of the 2000s and 2010s, this approach became bifurcated, which reflects the prominence of professional networks and the reduced authority of IOs to define an overarching framework: military professionals in states advanced “stabilization” and counterterrorism – focused on fighting insurgents and conducting anti-terrorism operations – while networks consisting of humanitarian and human rights professionals advanced a focus on protection of civilians.

Continuing European integration, and more broadly global economic integration, has exposed the increasing discrepancy between nationally grounded tax policy and transnational economic affairs. Economic, political and cultural integration creates competitive pressures that challenge the fiscal and political sustainability of national policies, creating winners and losers (Genschel and Schwarz, 2011). National tax policy, in a transnational context, has significant distributional implications, both intranationally and internationally. Inside the EU, the highly uneven fiscal and political effects of integration in areas such as budget policy (see Chapter 6), monetary policy (see Chapter 9) and trade policy (see Chapter 14) are clearly visible.