The political economy of climate-related financial policies: creating new paradigms or reinforcing old ones?

Abstract This article classifies climate-related financial policymaking in 118 countries (2000–2024) using Peter Hall’s orders of change. It estimates event-time deviations around five milestones: Kyoto Protocol, Copenhagen Accord, Paris Agreement, Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) and the Launch of the Network for Greening the Financial System (NGFS), and the EU Sustainable Finance Action Plan. Policy issuance accelerates after 2015, with sizeable, although not uniformly statistically significant, increases in counts. Shifts in ambition are modest and heterogeneous, with isolated pre-event signals. First-order instruments dominate, and voluntary tools remain prevalent. Ambition concentrates in advanced and high-emission economies and among central banks and supervisors, while earlier milestones correspond to incremental adjustments. Overall, the evidence indicates institutional layering and technical convergence rather than rapid paradigm change. The study provides a replicable baseline linking international initiatives to both the volume and ambition of climate-financial policies and identifies conditions under which deeper reforms emerge.