Open thematic sessions > Coding the green economy: taxonomies in the financing of the EU’s ecological transition

Contact pour soumission de communication

Clément Fontan : clement.fontan@uclouvain.be

Norman Vander Putten : norman.vanderputten@uclouvain.be

Cadrage et objectif de la session

The European Union and its member states have recently adopted multiple instruments aimed at classifying and coding socio-economic activities depending on whether they contribute or not to a transition towards a sustainable economy. Examples include the taxonomy for sustainable investments, the European green bonds framework, national green budgets methodologies or the definition of activities contributing to the green transition within the Recovery and resilience facility.

Behind their seemingly technical appearance, these classification grids embody key political choices and are the locus of scientific and political struggles. The spread of these partially overlapping mechanisms raise important questions regarding the sufficiently sustainable character of the green tagging methodologies they establish, on the one hand, and the adequate level of democratic control on their elaboration and use, on the other.

In this context, this session aims at studying these current taxonomizing efforts on the basis of interdisciplinary analytical frameworks that have studied similar technical mechanisms that are “coding” the economy (Pistor 2020; Scott 1999; Porter 1995). Three elements are investigated to examine the degree of democratic control and (green) transformative potential of these emerging taxonomies: their construction (who are the dominant players in definitional work?), their content (what does the tagging methodology reveal on the type of transition that is being pursued?) and their implementation (to what extent is this coding backed by binding control mechanisms? What are the impacts of these informational tools?).

Bibliography:

Pistor, Katharina. 2020. The Code of Capital. How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality. Princeton - Oxford: Princeton University Press.

Porter, Theodore. 1995. Trust in Numbers. The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Scott, James. 1999. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition have Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press.