Conjuring a cooler world? Imaginaries of Improvement in Blockchain Climate Finance Experiments

Abstract

Meeting on the second anniversary of the Paris Agreement signing, the United Nations Climate Change Secretariat founded the Climate Chain Coalition (CCC) in 2017. Backed by a number of multi-stakeholder groups like the Blockchain for Climate Foundation, the Ottawa-based CCC promotes the use of this emergent technology as a pathway to achieving the goals of the Paris Agreement. What kind of ‘cooler’ world are blockchain-based climate projects conjuring? This article scrutinizes the shared visions materializing in particular across climate finance experiments, locating them as extensions of existing imaginaries of how financial markets can address planetary concerns. The imaginaries identified underpin these ‘cool’ technological feats yet provide only incremental improvements to existing modes of market-led climate governance that are far from the scale required to actually conjure a cooler planet.