Risking the Planet. How Finance Understands the Natural Environment

Abstract

This paper employs the concept of cognitive frames to answer the question of how financial market actors understand the natural environment. It argues that financial risk serves as frame making the environment meaningful within finance. Advancing the concepts of frames and framing, the notion of nested frame structures is introduced to show how this risk frame relies on a series of subframes in instructing and shaping financial market actors’ behaviour, action and judgement. While making the natural environment more meaningful within finance, this nested frame structure decouples thinking about the planet’s climate from ideas of environmental sustainability. The paper also shows, however, how the preliminarity of this frame structure can facilitate partially emancipatory interventions into its structure and use. Thus, this paper contributes to the literature mapping the limitations of environmental risk as vehicle for ‘green’ finance.