Green financial planning: a state-capital relationship meta-governed through the Paris agreement

The political economy literature has witnessed a proliferation of ‘green’ interpretations of long-standing analytical subjects in recent years. This includes green industrial policy, green macrofinance, green economic planning, green central banking, green developmentalism, the green state, and more. We propose that viewing these subjects through the lens of ‘financialisation as planning’ can tie them together in what we term green financial planning – a state-capital relationship within which the planning of financial affairs is meta-governed through the Paris Agreement’s financial obligations. We show how this entails the combination of two approaches: First, a hands-on approach in which states vertically plan the green transition through a variety of policy tools that steer markets. Second, it entails the state taking a ‘hands-off’ approach to market intervention, leaving financial institutions to horizontally plan their economic affairs to the meta-objective, as they thereby, too, become green financial planners. In this way, the concept of green financial planning allows for the plurality of green subjects to be understood as part of the same state-capital relationship at the heart of the global political economy