Interpellating Finance – a dramaturgical model for green bond pricing

Alessandro Maresca; Giulia Dal Maso; Aneil Tripathy

doi:10.3384/VS.2001-5992.2023.10.1.90-117

Authors

Alessandro Maresca University of Bologna https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4407-5672
Giulia Dal Maso Ca’ Foscari University of Venice and at the National University of Singapore https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9255-0613
Aneil Tripathy Massachusetts Institute of Technology https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9441-8421

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.3384/VS.2001-5992.2023.10.1.90-117

Keywords:

Green bonds, labels, interpellation, Althusser, Laclau, Butler

Abstract

Global financial governance is turning green. Attempting to tackle climate change, financial elites seem to swing confusingly between hesitant and action aimed at relieving the contradictions that led to the crisis, and opportunistic co-optation of critical discourse. Drawing on the work of Althusser, Laclau and Butler, we describe the historical emergence of this green financial apparatus and the related proliferation of green labels and signifiers. Green labels serve as the malleable ground on which a diversity of meanings and positions are articulated and temporarily fixed. Labels are the names through which financiers are interpellated and constituted as green ideological subjects. Through an analysis of the mechanisms of green bonds pricing, and of the actors involved in a green bond boot camp, we contend that the added value of green financial instruments, called the greenium, cannot merely be attributed to the performativity of models and formulas for risk engineering. Rather, it is the material effect of a subjectivation apparatus attuned to the existing relations of production. Ultimately, the greenness which becomes encrypted in the greenium is a process of translation of language of capital valorisation, performed through the tendency of capital to reproduce relations of exploitation in transitional time.

Author Biographies

Alessandro Maresca, University of Bologna

Alessandro Maresca is Research Fellow at the University of Bologna. He has recently completed his PhD in anthropology at the University of Bologna in the project ImpactHau, researching sustainable finance.

Giulia Dal Maso, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice and at the National University of Singapore

Giulia Dal Maso is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the Department of Asian and North African Studies, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice (Italy) and the Asia Research Institute (ARI), National University of Singapore. She has worked on processes of financialization in post-socialist contexts, in China and Eastern Europe. She has published in South Atlantic Quarterly; Journal of Cultural Economy; Historical Materialism; Social and Cultural Geography; Finance and Society and she is the author of Risky Expertise in Chinese Financialisation: Financial Labor within the Chinese State-Finance Nexus).

Aneil Tripathy, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Aneil Tripathy is an Impact Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Climate and Sustainability Consortium. He holds a PhD in anthropology from Brandeis University. He was a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Bologna on the European Research Council funded Impact Hau project. He is a core member of the Energy and Climate Finance Network (ECFN) at the University of St Andrew's Centre for Energy Ethics and has been a visiting researcher at Bayes Business School, Lancaster University, and an associate of University College London’s Centre for an Anthropology of Sustainability (CAOS). He has published in Economic Anthropology, Journal of Environmental Investing and Focaal and has a chapter on climate change responses in People before Markets: An Alternative Casebook published by Cambridge University Press.

References

Agliardi, Elettra, and Rossella Agliardi. 2019. “Financing Environmentally-Sustainable Projects with Green Bonds.” Environment and Development Economics 24(6): 608–623.

Aglietta, Michel, and Étienne Espagne. 2016. Climate and Finance Systemic Risks, More than an Analogy? The Climate Fragility Hypothesis. Paris: CEPII (Centre d’etudes prospectives et d’informations internationales).

Althusser, Louis. 2014. On the Reproduction of Capitalism: Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses. London: Verso.

Appadurai, Arjun. 2016. Banking on Words: The Failure of Language in the Age of Derivative Finance. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Austin, John Langshaw. 1962. How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Balibar, Étienne. 2015. “Althusser’s Dramaturgy and the Critique of Ideology.” Differences 26(3): 1–22.

Bargu, Banu. 2015. “Althusser’s Materialist Theater: Ideology and Its Aporias.” Differences 26(3): 81–106.

Bargu, Banu. 2019. “Police Power: The Biopolitical State Apparatus and Differential Interpellations.” Rethinking Marxism 31(3): 291–317.

Baud, Céline, and Eve Chiapello. 2017. “Understanding the Disciplinary Aspects of Neoliberal Regulations: The Case of Credit-Risk Regulation under the Basel Accords.” Critical Perspectives on Accounting 46: 3–23.

Beckert, Jens. 2016. Imagined Futures. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Bengtsson, Elias. 2008. “A History of Scandinavian Socially Responsible Investing.” Journal of Business Ethics 82(4): 969–983.

BIS (Bank for International Settlements). 2020. The Green Swan. Central Banking and Financial Stability in the Age of Climate Change. Basel: BIS. https://www.bis.org/publ/othp31.pdf.

BMF (German Ministry of Finance). 2020. “Press Release Germany to Issue Green German Federal Securities from 2020.” https://www.deutschefinanzagentur. de/fileadmin/user_upload/institutionelle-investoren/pdf/

Green_Bond_Investor_Presentation_2020.pdf, accessed 29 April 2021.

Bracking, Sarah. 2015. “Performativity in the Green Economy: How Far Does Climate Finance Create a Fictive Economy?” Third World Quarterly 36(12): 2337–257.

Bracking, Sarah. 2019. “Financialisation, Climate Finance, and the Calculative Challenges of Managing Environmental Change.” Antipode 51(3): 709–729.

Brightman, Marc, and Jerome Lewis. 2017. “Introduction: The Anthropology of Sustainability: Beyond Development and Progress.” In The Anthropology of Sustainability, edited by Marc Brightman and Jerome Lewis, 1–34. New York: Palgrave MacMillan.

Bruckner, Benedikt, Klaus Hubacek, Yuli Shan, Honglin Zhong, and Kuishuang Feng. 2022. “Impacts of Poverty Alleviation on National and Global Carbon Emissions.” Nature Sustainability 5(4): 311–320.

Burgio, Alberto. 2020. “Gramsci, Historian of Modernity.” In Gramsci in the World, edited by Fredric Jameson and Roberto M. Dainotto, 38–58. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. New York: Routledge.

Butler, Judith.1997. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. New York: Routledge.

Butler, Judith. 2010. “Performative Agency.” Journal of Cultural Economy 3(2): 147–161.

Butler, Judith. 2015. “Theatrical Machines.” Differences 26(3): 23–42.

Butler, Judith, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Zizek. 2000. Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left. London: Verso.

Callison, Candis. 2015. How Climate Change Comes to Matter: The Communal Life of Facts. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Carney, Mark. 2015. “Breaking the Tragedy of the Horizon – Climate Change and Financial Stability.” Speech Given at Lloyd's of London, 29 September.

Carney, Mark. 2021. Value(s): Building a Better World for All. Toronto, ON: Penguin Random House.

CBI. 2015. Bonds and Climate Change. The State of the Market 2015. https://www.climatebonds.net/files/files/CBI-HSBC%20report%207July%20JG01.pdf, accessed 4 October 2023.

Chancel, Lucas, and Thomas Piketty. 2015. “Carbon and Inequality: From Kyoto to Paris Trends in the Global Inequality of Carbon Emissions (1998-2013) & prospects for an equitable adaptation. Fund World Inequality Lab”. HAL (halshs-0265526).

Christophers, Brett. 2017. “The Performativity of the Yield Curve.” Journal of Cultural Economy 10(1): 63–80.

Dal Maso, Giulia. 2020. Risky Expertise in Chinese Financialisation: Returned Labour and the State-Finance Nexus. Singapore: Palgrave MacMillan.

Dal Maso, Giulia.2022. Bridging “green” Asymmetries through Crises: How a Chinese Green Bond has Landed in Portugal. Focaal (93): 46–59.

Dal Maso, Giulia, Aneil Tripathy, and Marc Brightman. 2022. “A Moral Turn in Finance? Labeling, Purpose, and the Morality of Markets.” Focaal (93): 1–17.

De Ípola, Emilio. 2018. Althusser, the Infinite Farewell. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

EIB (European Investment Bank). 2007. The “Climate Awareness Bond” EIB promotes climate protection via pan-EU public offering. European Investment Bank Press Release. https://www.unicreditgroup.eu/content/dam/unicreditgroup/documents/inc/press-and-media/FOR_DISTRIBUTION_MAY_22_2007_EPOSeng.pdf, accessed 30 April 2021.

EIB (European Investment Bank). n.d. “Green Bond Market Development and EIB”. https://www.eib.org/attachments/green-bond-marketdevelopment-and-eib.pdf, accessed 5 October 2023.

ENEL (National Electricity Board [Italy]). 2020. “Base Prospectus Dated 9 January 2020.” https://www.enel.com/content/dam/enel-com/documenti/investitori/investire-in-enel/programmi-principali/medium-term-notes/base-prospectus_9jan2020.pdf, accessed 30 April 2021.

Gabor, Daniela. 2021. “The Wall Street Consensus.” Development and Change 52 (3): 429–59.

Gabor, Daniela, and Jakob Vestergaard. 2016. “Towards a Theory of Shadow Money.” Institute for New Economic Thinking, INET Working Paper 24: 41.

Goetzmann, William N. 2016. Money Changes Everything: How Finance Made Civilization Possible. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Gramsci, Antonio. 1975. Quaderni Dal Carcere. Edizione Critica Dell’Istituto Gramsci. Edited by Valentino Gerratana. Turin: Einaudi.

Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2019. “Empire, Twenty Years On.” New Left Review 120: 67–92.

Harrison, Caroline, Candace Partridge, and Aneil Tripathy. 2020. “What’s in a Greenium: An Analysis of Pricing Methodologies and Discourse in the Green Bond Market.” Journal of Environmental Investing 10(1): 64–76.

Hofstadter, Douglas R. 1979. Gödel, Escher, Bach. London: Harvester Press.

Hollywood, Amy. 2002. “Performativity, Citationality, Ritualization.” History of Religions 42(2): 93–115.

ICMA (International Capital Markets Association). 2021. “Introduction to Green, Social and Sustainability (GSS ) Bonds .” https://www.icmagroup.org/executive-education/courses/introduction-to-greensocial-and-sustainability-gss-bonds/, accessed 30 April

Igoe, Jim. 2021. The Nature of the Spectacle: On Images, Money, and Conserving Capitalism. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press.

Jameson, Fredric. 1998. Brecht and Method. London: Verso.

Jameson, Fredric. 2020. Allegory and Ideology. London: Verso.

Kockelman, Paul. 2013. Agent, Person, Subject, Self: A Theory of Ontology, Interaction, and Infrastructure. Oxford. Oxford University Press.

Konings, Martijn. 2015. The Emotional Logic of Capitalism. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Laclau, Ernesto. 2014. The Rhetorical Foundations of Society. London: Verso.

Laclau, Ernesto, and Chantal Mouffe. 2001. Hegemony and Socialist

Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. London: Verso.

Leins, Stefan. 2020. “Narrative Authority: Rethinking Speculation and the Construction of Economic Expertise.” Ethnos 87(3): 1–18.

Levidow, Les. 2020. “Turning Nature into an Asset: Corporate Strategies for Rent-Seeking.” In Assetization: Turning Things into Assets in Technoscientific Capitalism, edited by Fabian Muniesa and Kean Birch, 225–257. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Mann, Geoff. 2018. Climate Leviathan: A Political Theory of Our Planetary Future. London: Verso.

Mann, Geoff, and Joel Wainwright. 2019. “Political Scenarios for Climate Disaster.” Dissent 66(3): 65–72.

Martines, Lauro. 1988. Power and Imagination: City-States in Renaissance Italy. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Mezzadra, Sandro. 2010. “Living in Transition. Toward a Heterolingual Theory of the Multitude.” In The Politics of Culture: Around the Work of Naoki Sakai, edited by Richard Calichman and John Namjun Kim, 121–137. New York: Routledge.

Montag, Warren. 2013. Althusser and His Contemporaries. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Moor, Liz, and Celia Lury. 2011. “Making and Measuring Value.” Journal of Cultural Economy 4(4): 349–454.

Moor, Liz, and Celia Lury. 2018. “Price and the Person: Markets, Discrimination, and Personhood.” Journal of Cultural Economy 11(6): 501–513.

Mouffe, Chantal. 2022. Towards a Green Democratic Revolution: Left Populism and the Power of Affects. London: Verso.

Muniesa, Fabian, Liliana Doganova, Horacio Ortiz, Álvaro Pina-Stranger, Florence Paterson, Alaric Bourgoin, Véra Ehrenstein, Pierre-André Juven, David Pontille, and Basak Saraç-Lesavre. 2017. Capitalization: A Cultural Guide. Paris: Presses des Mines.

Nakassis, Constantine V. 2012. “Brand, Citationality, Performativity.” American Anthropologist 114(4): 624–638.

Ortiz, Horacio. 2014 “The Limits of Financial Imagination: Free Investors, Efficient Markets, and Crisis.” American Anthropologist 116(1): 38–50.

Ortiz, Horacio. 2020. “Liquidity.” In The Routledge Handbook of Critical Finance Studies, edited by Christian Borch, and Robert Wosnitzer, 29–45. London: Routledge.

Ortiz, Horacio. 2021. The Everyday Practice of Valuation and Investment: Political Imaginaries of Shareholder Value. NY: Columbia University Press.

Ortiz, Horacio, and Fabian Muniesa. 2018. “Business Schools, the Anxiety of Finance, and the Order of the ‘Middle Tier.’” Journal of Cultural Economy 11(1): 1–19.

Ortner, Sherry. 2005. “Subjectivity and Cultural Critique.” Anthropological Theory 5(1) 31–52.

Pearse, Rebecca. 2021. “Theorising the Political Economy of Energy Transformations: Agency, Structure, Space, Process.” New Political Economy 26(6): 951–963.

Pezzolo, Luciano. 2007. “Government Debts and Credit Markets in Renaissance Italy.” University Ca’Foscari of Venice, Dept. of Economics Research Paper Series, no. 05–07.

Reckwitz, Andreas. 2012. Subjekt (3rd edn.). Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag.

Richardson, Benjamin J. 2013. Fiduciary Law and Responsible Investing: In Nature’s Trust. London: Routledge.

Sato, Yoshiyuki. 2022. Power and Resistance: Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida, Althusser. London: Verso.

Schumacher, Kim. 2020. “‘Competence Greenwashing’ Could Be the next Risk for the ESG Industry.” Responsible Investor. https://www.responsible-investor.com/articles/competence-greenwashing-couldbe-the-next-risk-for-the-esg-industry, accessed 5 December 2020.

Semieniuk, Gregor, and Victor M. Yakovenko. 2020. “Historical Evolution of Global Inequality in Carbon Emissions and Footprints versus Redistributive Scenarios.” Journal of Cleaner Production 264(2020) Article 121420: 1–11.

Sullivan, Sian. 2013. “Banking Nature? The Spectacular Financialisation of Environmental Conservation.” Antipode 45(1): 198–217.

Sustainable Finance Institute. 2021. “The Sustainable Finance Institute (SFI).” Sustainable Finance Institute. https://sfini.org/csfa-standard, accessed 1 December 2021.

Swedish Government Official Reports. 2009. “Ethics, Environment and Pensions.” https://www.regeringen.se/contentassets/8ee57c72d0184f7ea465166750c46876/ethics-environment-and-pensions-sou-2008107/, accessed 26 January 2022.

Swyngedouw, Erik. 2010. “Apocalypse Forever?” Theory, Culture & Society 27(2–3): 213–232.

Taleb, Nassim Nicholas. 2007. The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. New York: Random House.

Tomasi di Lampedusa, Giuseppe. [1957] 1969. Il Gattopardo. Milan: Feltrinelli.

Tripathy, Aneil. 2017. “Translating to Risk: The Legibility of Climate Change and Nature in the Green Bond Market.” Economic Anthropology 4(2): 239–250.

Tripathy, Aneil. 2022a. “Careers and Climates: Becoming and Being a Climate Finance Practitioner.” Focaal (93): 32–45.

Tripathy, Aneil. 2022b. “How Should We Deal with Climate Change?” In People before Markets: An Alternative Casebook, edited by Daniel Scott Souleles, Johan Gersel, and Morten Sørensen Thaning, 184–203. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

UNEP. 2016. Towards a Performance Framework for a Sustainable Financial System. Inquiry Working Paper 16/14

WCED (World Commission on Environment and Government). 1987. Our Common Future. Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development. https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/content/documents/5987our-common-future.pdf.

Zaloom, Caitlin. 2009. “How to Read the Future: The Yield Curve, Affect, and Financial Prediction.” Public Culture 21(2): 245–268.

Zerbib, Olivier David. 2016. “Is There a Green Bond Premium? The Yield Differential between Green and Conventional Bonds.” Published in the Journal of Banking and Finance 98: 39–60.

Žižek, Slavoj. 1989. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso.

Žižek, Slavoj. 2019. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso.