The Financialisation of Climate Governance: How Markets Regulate Sustainability in the Global South

DOI

10.2991/978-94-6239-795-8_14How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Climate Governance; Financialisation; Global South; Climate Finance; Epistemic Authority; Regulatory Authority; ESG

Abstract

The decades since the 1992 Earth Summit have witnessed a silent yet profound shift in the arena of climate governance. What began as a predominantly political project has gradually come to intersect with the institutions, practices, and logics of global finance. Carbon markets, green bonds, sustainability disclosures, and ESG frameworks are no longer peripheral instruments of climate action; they have become an integral part of the very architecture that shapes the way in which climate action is defined and worked towards. This paper engages with the concept of financialisation to theorise this shift. Further, the paper argues that financialisation operationalises itself through two interconnected modalities-epistemic authority and regulatory authority. Finally, by adopting an interpretive comparative political economy approach, the paper identifies three pathways along which financialisation gets institutionalised across varied contexts. The cases selected for the multi-case design include three economies of the Global South (India, Nigeria, Brazil), all of which are being increasingly integrated in global climate finance infrastructure but via varied means. Despite their institutional differences, the three cases reveal a broader convergence in which the authority to define and regulate sustainability is increasingly exercised through financial logics.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Ananya Lakhina
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/10/08
TI  - The Financialisation of Climate Governance: How Markets Regulate Sustainability in the Global South
BT  - Proceedings of the International Conference on Advancing Economics (ICAE): Redefining Growth: Integrating Economy Society and Sustainability for a Resilient Future (ICAE 2026)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 228
EP  - 239
SN  - 2352-5428
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-94-6239-795-8_14
DO  - 10.2991/978-94-6239-795-8_14
ID  - Lakhina2026
ER  -