The mobilisers: private climate finance, legal expertise, and the limits of innovation

Abstract

This article explores the emerging field of private climate finance mobilised through public resources. These mechanisms aim to leverage financial resources to close the ‘finance gap’ between needed and available funds for climate adaptation and mitigation. Innovative forms of climate finance require new contracts and legal frameworks to govern transactions in a manner satisfactory to both the public and private actors involved. This article examines the knowledge practices at the technical and bureaucratic ‘back end’ of this type of climate finance. Drawing on narrative interviews and participant observation, I show that the public efforts to mobilise private resources have been accompanied by three points of tension within financial legal practice: (1) Differences between the legal work of ‘innovative’ climate finance and its more conventional counterpart, such as grants and loans to sovereigns; (2) ‘boundary work’ undertaken internally between legal experts, and (3) externally between legal and non-legal experts, as actors seek to create and lay claim to expertise and authority over novel practices. These tensions constitute a social space in flux, and challenge the confident rhetoric of ‘closing the finance gap’.