Authorising green finance with claims to science: research avenues to move beyond sciencewashing

There is considerable ambiguity surrounding the relationship between ‘science’, as a provider of environmental knowledge, and green finance. International environmental agreements, their science-policy advisory bodies, and international voluntary fora on science-based targets, standards, and disclosures have all conferred authority and legitimacy on financial actors, as they have taken increasingly important roles in environmental governance. These actors mobilise environmental knowledge and expertise in multiple ways, but ways which often produce narratives that align ecological and economic relationships, using scientific authority to legitimate investment strategies. We suggest, counter-intuitively to proponents of scientific methods, that the materiality and measurability of scientific criteria appears less important than the use of science language as a non-material signifier of worth, value and authority. We draw attention to sciencewashing, a concept we deploy to facilitate examination of the specific instances where scientific authority is abused. In a broader acceptation, sciencewashing can serve to examine the institutional assemblages making it possible for environmental research and expert institutions to produce conforming kinds of knowledge. Building on assemblage theory and science and technology studies (STS), we propose new research avenues to improve both the material and normative contributions of environmental science in green finance, in the service of transformative change.