Introduction: The international political economy of green finance

From IPCC reports to global asset managers and governments, calls for more green finance to fuel the sustainability transition are ubiquitous. Concurrently, the critiques of a benign embrace of financial techniques, products, and flows as solutions to the climate crisis are growing louder. As a field of inquiry, IPE has the right tools to address such controversies productively. Yet, we diagnose a lack of what we call a deep engagement of IPE with epistemic and practical questions of what green finance is, how it operates, and its outcomes. The ambition of this special issue is to develop a research agenda that examines the contemporary global and concrete forms of green finance and its governance in order to better understand the following dynamics: first, how political and economic power relations within global finance shape environmental governance outcomes, and second, how the climate crisis itself influences the governance of global finance. To facilitate such thinking, we propose to understand green finance as an evolving ecosystem in the broader web of global finance instead of a specific instrument, asset class or concept. We hold this to be a fruitful approach to engage questions of green finance in both a global and concrete manner across different sectors, geographies, actors, and structures. By acknowledging the global nature and implications of green financial flows, we can push forward thinking not only on climate change and environmental governance in IPE, but also turn attention to the ongoing contestations, contingencies, and crises of finance in the global political economy.