Law, knowledge and space: Expertise across the legal geographies of green finance

Abstract

The mechanisms of green finance are structured and made enforceable through law. However, the legal geographies of green finance are not distributed evenly but are scattered across multiple sites of public and private authority and associated forms of legal expertise. This article investigates how legal technologies and knowledge practices shape the efficacy of green finance. Green finance rests on ‘asset coding’ as a socio-legal practice that is transnational yet rooted in few, salient sovereign jurisdictions and legal templates originating in the social spaces of transnational legal expertise. Through synthesizing literature from political economy, socio-legal studies and economic geography and building on a range of explorative interviews and documents, I suggest that underlying knowledge practices and legal technologies of ‘green asset coding’ contain important continuities with the way assets are coded into capital in conventional finance. This can constrain the efficacy and potential of green finance. The article outlines these continuities across three domains: Energy infrastructures, voluntary carbon markets, and ‘green’ offshore jurisdictions. Taking these continuities seriously invites for further critical international political economy (IPE) research in the nexus between law, finance, and the state, and underscores the need for transformative legal practices to achieve decarbonization at the pace needed.