Paper short abstract:

The paper examines the issuance of a Chinese green bonds in Europe by asking how its 'life cycle' is negotiated across differential processes of policy making. It places the growing green finance nexus at the intersection of multiple forms of political powers and forms of capital valorisation.

Paper long abstract:

Xi Jinping's call for a new ecological civilisation (shengtai wenming) and the development of Chinese green financial products along the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), display China's attempt to gain a global sustainability leadership. Chinese State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs) are pushed to issue green bonds as a strategy to penetrate Europe while gaining political legitimacy. This strategy converges with the EU efforts to harness foreign investments to bridge the 'climate-finance gap' and accelerate progress towards the 2030 targets approved in the Paris agreement (COP21). Such developments, however, raise challenges on the commensurability of green financial instruments out of China's borders.

By analysing the issuance of a Chinese green bond in Portugal by the Chinese SOE 'China Three Gorges (CTG),' the paper investigates how processes of policy making in the form of standardisation and certification define the life cycle of the first Chinese green bond issued in Europe, and how these are negotiated. As the EU is releasing a new taxonomy aimed at regulating the green financial sector at a global level, Chinese financial players have long aligned to their green financial standards and regulations under the state's umbrella. The paper conceives the CTG green bond as an ethnographic object of research to grasp asymmetries between diverse 'green' epistemological traditions, as well as discrepancies in the way green and sustainable assets are deployed at a local level. In this process, heterogeneous modes of capital valorisation define the green-finance nexus as a field of tensions and frictions.