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Paper short abstract

The paper examines World Bank’s iCRAFT policy-based crediting initiative in Uzbekistan, exemplifying market-driven green transition governance, and shows how conflicting 'green' narratives and state’s strategic ambivalence produce hidden politics of agency, negotiation space and power asymmetries.

Paper long abstract

The paper examines the politics of the green energy transition through conflicting narratives surrounding the Innovative Carbon Resource Application for Energy Transition Project (iCRAFT)- the World Bank’s flagship “policy-based crediting” initiative in Uzbekistan and an attempt to operationalise the Paris Agreement’s Article 6.2 framework for trading ‘mitigation outcomes’. Designed to incentivise fossil fuel subsidy reforms and accelerate clean energy transitions, iCRAFT epitomises the rise of market-driven climate governance. Yet its implementation exposes tensions between global sustainability imperatives and the socio-political realities of a post-Soviet, natural resource rich state.

The paper analyses how iCRAFT’s hegemonic discourse - rooted in neoliberal developmentalism and technocratic climate rationalities - universalises particular notions of “green” and “equitable” transition. Far from being a passive recipient, Uzbekistan engages with iCRAFT through strategic ambivalence, appropriating its logics to reconcile international expectations with national priorities. It shows how resource-rich states can strategically leverage green finance to diversify geopolitical dependencies – generating new dependencies in the process. Focusing on the political economy of state subjectivity, the paper shows how the seemingly inclusive green transition paradigm reproduces power asymmetries while creating new spaces for negotiation and geopolitical repositioning. By tracing how instruments such as policy-based crediting become arenas of power struggle, the study contributes to debates on globalised legal pluralism, exposing how corporatised hybrid governance reconfigures socio-ecological relations under a “green” veneer.