From ‘green finance’ to ’woke finance’: where should sociology stand in the critique of green finance and implications for a research agenda

Green finance, once heralded as a pragmatic tool for aligning capitalism with climate action, is now accused of being ‘woke’. While the social sciences have been strong on the critique of market-based environmental policy, we argue that the current political context calls for greater scholarly attention to how social and ecological change unfolds through the implementation of green financial instruments. Following a review of key literature on green finance, we highlight the social determinism embedded in the ways we study green financial markets and propose four research agendas that environmental sociologists are well-positioned to explore: 1) the ways of knowing and the epistemic settings that govern and organise financial actions; 2) the ways of value-ing and colonial legacies that have endured in the selection of which values matter to markets; 3) Global-local market-making effects and what new market configurations have emerged in local places and 4) Genderedness in greening finance and potential (dis)empowering effects feminising ‘greenness’. We argue that the culture war waged on green finance should not deter us from critical analyses but rather energise a more defined intellectual agenda for environmental sociology.