Green Finance Workshop 2026

Photo by Ardian Pranomo on Unsplash

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About the Event

This workshop critically examines the rise of green financial instruments within the international financial architecture. Join us for an interactive discussion on the regulatory frameworks and political economy shaping green finance and explore how green finance works and they mean for climate action and just transitions.

Who is this for?

This workshop is for researchers, policymakers, civil society practitioners, social movement actors, journalists, artists and cultural workers interested in interrogating the political economy of climate finance and engaging with questions of justice, power, and global inequality.

Workshop Overview

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.

Workshop Format

This workshop is a one-day event designed as an active co-learning space, with a strong emphasis on discussion, inquiry, and reflection. Participants are expected to do some preliminary reading and work before the workshop.

Spaces are limited to enable interaction and discussion. Please register by 31 May 2026. Participants will be notified of outcomes by 5 June 2026.

This workshop is organised by: