Inscription networks: finance, infrastructural power, and the governance of climate risk

The decade since the Paris Climate Agreement has seen soaring demands for climate risk information within the financial sector. While much scholarship attributes these developments to novel disclosure-oriented governance regimes, we situate them in longstanding state-market entanglements. As climate impacts intensify, markets now central to state operations – property, bond, insurance, and securities markets – are confronting new forms of destabilization. These pressures generate heightened demand for climate risk knowledge – and, elevate the profile and authority of incumbent private authorities whose risk assessments have long steered market behavior. We show how Moody’s Investor Services and its analytics arm are expanding and consolidating their authority by producing and circulating consequential inscriptions of climate risk across the markets in which it is embedded. We refer to these pathways as climate risk inscription networks, and suggest that they exercise a significant amount of power over how climate change is governed today. By supplying property, bond, insurance, and securities markets with authoritative climate risk information, these networks are fueling and reinforcing uneven geographies of (dis)investment, speculation, and decline. As importantly, these networks are shifting the terrain of climate governance toward financial practices of risk management.