Copy of ‘Green’ Finance 2026: Promises, Practicalities and Performance

Join a focused discussion on the structures & governance shaping green finance

Part of London Climate Week 2026

Workshop · London · Friday, 26 June 2026, 10:00 - 15:30

Institute for Advanced Legal Studies (IALS), LondonLink opens in a new window

Workshop Overview

Why this Matters

Green financial instruments are rapidly expanding as central tools for climate action. Their growth reflects not only technical innovation, but shifting global priorities around how climate risk, responsibility, and capital are organised across jurisdictions.

Framing the Problem

While widely promoted as solutions, these instruments raise unresolved questions about how they are designed, governed, and implemented in practice. In particular, they embed assumptions about value, risk, and legitimacy, with uneven implications across different national and institutional contexts.

Critical Lines of Inquiry

This workshop examines how green finance operates within the broader international financial architecture, focusing on the legal, political, and economic structures that shape its deployment. It asks how these instruments are legitimised, who they serve, and how they may reproduce or reconfigure existing global inequalities.

Full Workshop Framing

Green financial instruments, from green and blue bonds to debt-for-climate swaps to carbon credits to catastrophe insurance, are proliferating rapidly and are being framed as key solutions to the climate crisis. These instruments are seen as a vital toolkit in securing much needed financing for climate action, including decarbonisation, climate resilience and natural disaster reconstruction.

Yet key questions remain about how green financial instruments are structured, regulated, and operationalised. There is a need to examine the technicalities of these instruments but also to interrogate the power and politics of climate finance that underpin their design and delivery.

How do these instruments actually work?
Who designs and supports them?
What assumptions underpin their legitimacy?
And how do they work in real-life settings?

This interactive workshop is aimed at critically examining the international architecture of climate finance and unpacking how green finance instruments perform in practice. We will consider how green finance is being designed, governed, and operationalised in context of national and global pathways to just and equitable transitions and explore what their expansion and deployment means for global climate justice. Through a combination of plenary and breakout sessions, we aim to peel away the layers of ‘green’ packaging that legitimise and promote climate finance and examine the underpinning political, financial and institutional logics that structure the global green finance architecture.

Moving away from a purely technical approach to climate finance, our workshop will situate green financial instruments within the regulatory framework and political economy of the international financial system, followed by breakout sessions on special areas, such as debt swaps, green and blue bonds, climate risk mitigation instruments and carbon markets. Together, participants will work at deconstructing the financialised solutions to the climate crises and interrogate how climate became the latest frontier of global accumulation and extraction.

The workshop is designed for early-career and established researchers, policy analysts, civil society practitioners, and movement-builders, as well as artists and cultural workers engaging critically with climate finance, who are interested in bridging conceptual, empirical, and policy debates.

Agenda Overview

This may be updated as event preparation evolves.

10:00–10:15 | Introductions, Opening and Framing

Welcome, purpose of the workshop and unpacking the ‘innovative’ in climate finance.
Quick audience pulse check: What comes to mind when you hear ‘climate finance’?

10:15–11:15 | Plenary Panel: The International Financial Architecture

Dr Yannis Dafermos, SOAS London
Dr Amiera Sawas, Fossil Fuel Treaty Initiative
Dr Farwa Sial, IDEAs / SOAS London (TBC)
Professor Celine Tan, Warwick Law School

11:15–11:30 | Break

11:30–12:30 | Breakout 1: Political Economy of ‘Green’ Finance

Participants will be allocated to one of three breakout sessions based on their indicated interest.

Session A1: Debt and Climate Dynamics
Session B1: Carbon and Nature Markets
Session C1: Climate Risk Management

12:30–13:30 | Lunch

13:45–14:45 | Breakout 2: Technicalities of ‘Green’ Finance

Session A2: Debt-for-climate and debt-for-nature swaps, blue, green and thematic bonds, and debt cancellation
Session B2: Carbon and nature markets, offsets and credits
Session C2: Catastrophe bonds and disaster risk insurance

14:45–15:30 | Synthesis and Collective Reflection

Name

Surname

Institution/Organisation

Postgraduate Student

Early Career Researcher

Mid-career/Senior Academic

Policy/Government

Civil Society/NGO

Private Sector

Other

Briefly describe your interest in this area and any relevant work or experience.

Yes

Accesibility Requirements

Dietary Requirements

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