“Everyone wants this market to grow”: The affective post-politics of municipal green bonds

Abstract

As more cities seek to address environmental and climate change woes, the issuance of municipal green bonds to finance such initiatives is growing. But how do issuers and investors conceptualise and enact green bonds in relation to building a more sustainable society? What socionatures are produced with these bonds, and for whom? Based on fieldwork in Gothenburg, the first municipality in the world to issue green bonds, we bring together the literature on green finance, post-politics and affect through an urban political ecology lens to unpack the processes, practices and discourses underlying green bonds. We argue that green bonds ultimately serve as a new path to attract and circulate capital within the consensual, non-antagonistic sustainable order, where claims of doing good and building a good conscience are affective mechanisms that play an important, yet underexplored, role. In the conclusion, we reflect on the broader role of green finance and the possibility of harnessing affect and the political towards building more transformative and emancipatory urban socio-environments.

Keywords

Affect green finance post-politics Sweden urban political ecology

Introduction

Governments and companies have long used bonds to finance infrastructure and projects for which they lack upfront capital. Bonds, simply speaking, act as debt investments to raise capital, and their low fixed interest rates make them a safe investment for the likes of pension funds and other investors oriented towards long-term and stable investments. Many “regular” bonds, furthermore, have been and continue to be used to fund environmental projects, in the case of cities to create, fund and maintain parks and playgrounds, for land conservation or flooding infrastructure. With the ability to fund projects through regular bond issuances, why are increasing numbers of municipalities in particular across the Global North and increasingly the Global South (Bigger and Millington, 2020; Hilbrandt and Grubbauer, 2020) issuing green bonds? Why create this new financial product, which generates additional reporting and portfolio management work?

Drawing out the emblematic case of Gothenburg, the first municipality in the world to issue green bonds, we argue that green bonds serve as a new path to mobilise and extend the circulation of capital through generating multiple win situations (for issuers–urban green projects–investors) and affective feelings of “doing good” within a harmonious, sustainable order. These win-win-win situations illustrate how green bonds often operate as technical cogs in the post-political wheel, what Japhy Wilson and Erik Swyngedouw (2014: 3) frame as “consensual forms of techno-managerial negotiation”. This technical cog harnesses an affective, perhaps even fantastical, feeling of one’s investment directly creating a greener and more sustainable future, when the investment’s material manifestation in practice might not.

In this light, our article deepens the emerging literature that takes a critical urban political ecology approach to green finance, looking at municipal green bonds more specifically (Bigger and Millington, 2020; Christophers, 2018), by honing in on the role of post-politics and affect. On the one hand, the post-political framework has been used to explore a broad range of topics, including asylum seekers (Darling, 2014), the urban (Beveridge and Koch, 2017), megaprojects (Tarazona Vento, 2017) and tolerance (Gill et al., 2012). Closer to the topic under scrutiny, the post-political dimensions of supposed action to address environmental ills, sustainability or climate change have been extensively unpacked (Catney and Doyle, 2011; Goeminne, 2012; Kenis and Mathijs, 2014; Kythreotis, 2012; Raco and Lin, 2012; Swyngedouw, 2007, 2009; Williams and Booth, 2013). Yet within this literature, considerations of the post-political dynamics and mechanisms of green finance are missing. On the other hand, explorations of affect – referring to sensations and feelings that occur beyond rationality – have exploded in recent decades, emerging most prominently in cultural theory (Massumi, 2002), Italian autonomous political philosophy (Hardt, 2010; Hardt and Negri 2009) and more recently political ecology (Singh, 2018). While there are multiple strands of affect theory, deployed from cultural studies to social psychology (Gregg and Seigworth, 2010; Wetherell, 2012), affective engagements have not yet considered the role of (green) finance and its contribution to theory and to the political project of generating emancipatory socio-ecological futures.

We follow Chantal Mouffe’s approach to post-politics as the repression of antagonism within a broader consensus-based governing order, an approach that resonates with Swedish and many other countries’ or cities’ approaches to institutional politics' and especially sustainability (Allmendinger and Haughton, 2012; Brorström, 2015; Raco and Lin, 2012; Thörn, 2011; Williams and Booth, 2013). This approach represses any possible antagonism and ideological struggle in relation to the globalised status quo model of speculative finance-driven (green) growth with a virtually universally accepted consensus that both finance and greening are inherently good for all. In other words, there is no problematisation of the broader financial system and the multiplication of spheres where financialisation is playing out, or how cities or regions are greened, by whom and to what end. Rather, green bonds as post-politics suggests that merely labelling and tweaking existing financial tools and using them to invest in – often already existing or to be otherwise funded – (urban) green projects is a new inherently positive path to raise capital towards building a more sustainable city and world. This assumption, however, shuts down other ways of thinking and acting on what a truly green, equitable and egalitarian society would be outside of finance-led (green) growth. In this light, the status quo green finance approach risks colonising the imaginary and foreclosing other paths to a truly (non-capitalist) sustainable future. Our findings build on existing research highlighting how conflicts related to sustainability and planning have by no means been removed but are instead more carefully choreographed, displaced or otherwise residualised (Allmendinger and Houghton, 2012).

Additionally, we bring together emerging writing on affective capitalism (Karppi et al., 2016) and critical approaches to affect (Pile, 2010; Tolia-Kelly, 2006) to explore their role in this post-political dynamic. We find that affect plays an important and understudied role in green finance, as not only does the “green” label fuse moral individuality with being a rational economic actor (Lemke, 2001; Mouffe, 2005) but positive and pragmatic affects furthermore eclipses and even annuls the structural dimensions of investment capital and the logic it follows. Focusing on Gothenburg as the pioneer of municipal green bonds, our work provides deeper insights into how green capitalism drives into cities and other second natures (Knuth, 2016), and the socio-ecological futures generated by municipal green bonds, also considering their critical potential.

The article draws on empirical research conducted in Gothenburg during December 2018, including a series of 11 semi-structured interviews with 14 key actors involved in the issuing, verification, use, evaluation and purchase of green bonds. These actors include city officials at different municipal entities as well as private and public investors, such as pension companies, insurance companies and the Swedish Church. The interviews lasted between 30 minutes and 1 hour and were transcribed verbatim in their entirety. A prepared interview guide with open-ended questions was used to structure the interviews and to make sure specifically relevant themes and questions were covered, such as the motivations underlying the creation of green bonds, their operation and the forms of collaboration surrounding their use. The guide was used in a way that allowed discussion and spontaneous exploration of topics brought up by the interviewees. To account for more recent changes in the green bond process, we complement interview material with key documents contextualising Gothenburg’s green bonds, such as the recently updated green bond framework (City of Gothenburg, 2019a), and the most recent green bond impact report (City of Gothenburg, 2019b). In addition, phone calls were made in June 2020 to follow up on specific details regarding one of the green bond project categories (green buildings), including a phone interview with Hyresgästföreningen (the Swedish Union of Tenants).

The article is structured as follows. The next section brings together the literature on green finance, post-politics and affective theory from an urban political ecology lens, in order to situate our research questions and approach. The subsequent one presents our empirical findings from Gothenburg in three subsections, considering the socionatures produced by green bonds, the details of their post-political dimensions and the affective dynamics at play, placing each in dialogue with relevant literature. The conclusions reflect on the theoretical, conceptual and practical insights of our findings, as well as the possibilities of (municipal) green bonds to contribute to deeper socio-ecological transformation and of issuers to harness the affective power that these bonds instil towards this end.

Green finance, post-politics and affect: A perfect storm?

Green bonds are widely viewed as a foundational financial tool to reverse ecological deficit and enable climate change mitigation and adaptation (Jones et al., 2020). Perhaps unsurprisingly, it was multilateral institutions like the World Bank and Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) who, in the early 2010s, began promoting green bonds as an instrument “for tapping private finance in support of urban greening and aligning private investment with policy priorities.” (Merk et al., 2012: 9). The use of green bonds by different actors has grown exponentially over the past decade, from less than 11 billion USD in 2013 to 257 billion USD in 2019 (Climate Bonds Initiative, 2020; Kidney, 2014). Even the Covid-19 pandemic appears to be “supercharging” the green bond market globally (FORESIGHT Climate & Energy, 2020).

As the use of green bonds has expanded, so too has research on the topic. The majority of inquiries consider elements like returns on green vs. conventional bonds (Karpf and Mandel, 2018; Zerbib, 2019) or green premiums (Partridge and Medda, 2018). These studies often assume that green finance is a path to build sustainable futures, with little to no problematisation of what a sustainable future means within the existing system. Green finance, in other words, ultimately operates in a fashion similar to Emily Rosenman’s (2019: 142) analysis of social finance: it “attempts to resolve the unequal and often unjust results of capitalism with the application, albeit re-tooled, of more capitalism.”

Without foreclosing the possibility of some positive impacts, research that questions entrenched and problematic socio-ecological relationships underlying green or climate finance is beginning to grow. Castree and Christophers (2015) consider how finance capital can operate as an “ecological fix” by shifting capital into new climate friendly socioeconomic and socio-ecological infrastructures. Bracking (2015) looks at the political economy of value and questions of performativity and spectacle in the South African Clean Development Mechanism and the global private green bond market. Christophers et al. (2020) consider shifts in how risk is being constituted in sovereign catastrophe insurance pools and green (climate) bonds. Bigger and Millington (2020) and Christophers (2018) specifically home in to critically unpack municipal green bonds. Christophers (2018) examines how finance and environmental risk co-constitute each other in the context of Washington DC’s water provider. Looking at green climate adaptation bonds through lenses of the financialisation of nature, racial capitalism and austerity, Bigger and Millington (2020) find that green debt ultimately (re)inscribes existing inequality in New York City and Cape Town. In other words, despite being framed as a path to build more resilient cities, their work suggests that green climate bonds do not make existing geographies more equitable nor contribute to transformative municipal change, but rather threaten to deepen racialised geographies of financial and environmental risk.

This notion of a discourse of transformation that, in reality, ultimately does not change the structural operating logic of a system harkens the concept of post-politics. Post-politics refers to the changing character of democracy under neoliberalism towards a “Third Way” centrality that seems to have transcended class-based left and right divisions. Through consensus-building, good governance and collaboration, this new and increasingly popular form of politics reasons, all political differences can be solved. And as ideological conflicts underlying policy interventions are obscured, any remaining discourse and action is relegated to managerial, procedural and/or technical detail (Mouffe, 2005; Swyngedouw, 2007). The rise of the (urban) sustainability agenda is case in point: it is impossible, as Swyngedouw (2007) notes, to find anyone against sustainability, although “the clear and present danger posed by the environmental question is obviously not dramatic enough to be taken seriously in terms of embarking on a different socio-environmental trajectory” (20). From institutional climate change politics and climate activism to urban sustainable development agendas, a range of literature unpacks the post-political realities and challenges that bar the way towards a truly transformative and egalitarian socio-ecological future (Kenis and Mathijs, 2014; Kythreotis, 2012; Raco and Lin, 2012; Swyngedouw, 2007, 2009). It must be said that in recent years the hegemony of this “Third way” centrality regarding sustainability and climate change is being questioned by right-wing governments who articulate “alternative facts” and truths (e.g. Escobar, 2019; Hempel, 2018). Post-political explorations of green finance nonetheless are absent in this literature, pointing to a lack of understanding of their technical operation towards supposedly creating (or not creating) more sustainable urban socio-environments.

Recognising the different positions on the notion of post-politics from key thinkers such as Chantal Mouffe, Jacques Rancière and Slavoj Žižek (see Wilson and Swyngedouw, 2014), we follow Mouffe’s concern in considering the post-political dimensions of green bonds. Mouffe equates the denial of the political to the denial of antagonism and conflict (Mouffe, 2005). Rather than acknowledging an adversarial and conflicting reality, Mouffe (2005) underlines that what is supposed to be the political is nowadays played out on the moral register; in other words, the struggle is not between “right and left” but between “right and wrong” (5). Politics, then, operates as the set of practices through which an order is created, aligning with Rancière’s (2001) notion of the distribution of the sensible, where the police, institutions and existing structures play a key role in maintaining the status quo. “Properly political questions”, in contrast to politics, involve decisions that “require us to make a choice between conflicting alternatives” (Mouffe, 2005: 10) and actions that spur dissensus and make visible difference and conflict (Swyngedouw, 2009).

Mouffe’s understanding of politics, the political and post-politics is relevant for our exploration of the Swedish context in particular, as an analysis of discourses and organising principles of Sweden’s sustainable regional development policy goals found that it consolidates a post-political condition through equilibrium, holism, collaboration and consensus (Hilding-Rydevik et al., 2011). In other words, there are, apparently, no conflicting alternatives within the Swedish sustainability agenda. Furthermore, as we explore further in subsequent sections, Gothenburg’s green bond programme deeply aligns with the nature of Swedish consensus and in particular “the Gothenburg spirit”, which is rooted precisely in repressing antagonism through “consensus-building mechanisms” based on city, private sector and civil society partnerships (Holgersson et al., 2010: 12).

While Mouffe examines the role of passions, “the affective forces at the origin of collective forms of identifications” as one of the main moving forces in politics (Mouffe, 2005: 24) and several authors delve into the political through Lacan’s concept of jouissance or enjoyment (Stavrakakis, 2007; Wilson, 2014; Žižek, 1999), explorations of the role of affect are lacking in studies of the post-political dimensions of sustainability. The “affective turn” has swept cultural studies and related fields in recent decades, attempting to go deeper into or beyond concepts like positionality to consider sensations, feelings and movement of body(ies) (Gregg and Seigworth, 2010; Massumi, 2002; Wetherell, 2012). Affect flows not in a personal or interpersonal way like emotions, but is transpersonal, occurring within and between bodies, in this way connecting bodies (Pile, 2010). Building principally upon Spinoza, Deleuze and Bergson, of key interest in our work is how Massumi has sparked thinking about the role of affect in capitalism: “the ability of affect to produce an economic effect more swiftly and surely than economics itself means that affect is a real condition, an intrinsic variable of the late capitalist system, as infrastructural as a factory” (Massumi, 2002: 45). Karppi et al. (2016) point out that capitalising on affect requires capturing, structuring and modulating the structures in which it moves. Affective capitalism, as they term this process, is “a broad infrastructure in which the emotional culture and its classed and gendered history merge with value production and everyday life” (Karppi et al., 2016: 5).

Aware of the risk of a singular focus on affect has in provoking a retreat to identity-related debates rather than material political questions (Fraser, 1997), in this article we are interested in furthering analyses of affect in desires to create a more sustainable world through (green) investment, in this case green bonds. Armed with the force of affect entangled in their positively spun “progressive” discourse, it is possible that green bond issuers and investors can overlook negative social – and possibly even environmental – investment impacts. In other words, the positive affects transpersonally generated through green investment clouds potential negative dimensions of “green” actions and interventions, a reality that may ultimately end up making green bonds socially or even environmentally regressive. In our approach to affect, we recognise the importance of power and power geometries (Tolia-Kelly, 2006) which are often absent, pointing to the need to unpack the kinds of (racialised and gendered) socio-ecological projects funded through green bonds. Beyond their contribution to already existing city processes of green branding (García-Lamarca et al., 2019), in this article we ask, how do the creation and purchase of municipal green bonds enact a non-antagonistic sustainable order? And furthermore, what role does affect play in this process? We now turn to unpack these questions in the next section.

The affective post-politics of Gothenburg’s green bonds

As an old harbour and shipyard city, Gothenburg has undergone several transformations in recent decades and was one of the first Swedish cities to experience post-industrial structural change (Holgersson et al., 2010). More recently, the city has been governed based on a vision to create a sustainable future city at the forefront of urban innovation, captured by the slogan “Sustainable city – Open to the world” (Tahvilzadeh et al., 2017). Reaching consensus and agreement between different stakeholders is at the core of Gothenburg’s sustainability agenda (Brorström, 2015), reflecting the city’s long-lived culture of collaboration between the public and private sector known as “the Gothenburg spirit” (Falkemark, 2010). While the Gothenburg spirit has shifted from over the years (Thörn and Holgersson, 2016), the desire for consensus not only as a means to an end but as a goal in itself remains (Brorström, 2015). Sustainability in particular has become a hegemonic and consensual discourse with the capability to attract positive affect and mobilise contentious actors around a shared vision of future development (Tahvilzadeh et al., 2017) which – in line with what Swyngedouw (2007) highlights – nobody can disagree upon.

To finance sustainability projects, Gothenburg became the first city in the world to issue a municipal green bond in 2013, and has since issued at least one new green bond each year, raising a total of SEK 7,060 million (672 million euros) by 2018 (City of Gothenburg, 2019b). In official city documentation, it is reported that the green bond instrument has become an important tool to help reach Gothenburg’s climate and environmental goals through the (re)financing of “Green Projects” (City of Gothenburg, 2019a). The ability to not only finance new projects but also refinance projects completed before the Green Bond Committee’s approval (City of Gothenburg, 2019a)¹ means that there is a possible retrospective “greening” of past investments. Projects are selected based on a number of eligibility criteria in eight predefined categories: (1) renewable energy, (2) green buildings, (3) energy efficiency, (4) clean transportation, (5) waste management, (6) water & wastewater management, (7) sustainable land use & environmental management and (8) climate change adaptation – and evaluated based on their potential environmental and climate benefits. Upon approval by the Green Bond Committee, projects are registered in the pool of approved projects (City of Gothenburg, 2019a). By the end of 2018, more than two-thirds (71%) of total green bond funds were invested in the “sustainable building” category (City of Gothenburg, 2019b), now renamed “green buildings”. Aside from the majority of funding allocated to green buildings, other green bond-funded projects include Sweden’s largest solar park “Nya Solevi”, the new sewage pump station “Kodammarna”, and a city of Gothenburg electric car pool system (City of Gothenburg, 2019b).

In dialogue with the relevant literature, the following subsections unpack in further detail the socio-natural, post-political and affective dimensions of Gothenburg’s green bonds.

What socionatures do green bonds create, and for whom?

The green building category – where the majority of the funds are allocated and thus the focus of our analysis – finances, or refinances, the establishment, acquisition, expansion and upgrading of energy efficient commercial, public or residential buildings (City of Gothenburg, 2019a), with buildings obliged to fulfil relevant energy performance requirements. By the end of 2018, 45% of green building funds were allocated to the municipal public rental housing developer Framtiden Byggutveckling (City of Gothenburg, 2019b) who, with or without green bond funds, is obliged to comply with energy performance requirements. Framtiden Byggutveckling reports everything they build, with a few exceptions, to the city of Gothenburg urban development officer in charge of coordinating the green bond portfolio.²

Since green buildings were included as a green bond project category in 2015, a total of 27 public housing developments – either planned, under construction or completed – have been financed or refinanced with green bonds, totalling SEK 3,822 million or 364 million euros by 2019 (City of Gothenburg, personal communication, 2020). Most of the housing units are flats located in Gothenburg’s suburbs, with a few exceptions in the outskirts of the inner city. When developing new public rental municipally-owned housing, a tenure category that constitutes 26% of Gothenburg’s total housing stock (SCB, 2020), priority is given to half a dozen peripheral areas of Gothenburg defined by the police as especially vulnerable, where crime and safety are going in the “wrong direction” (Framtiden Byggutveckling, personal communication, 2018). In terms of addressing rent levels and affordability, however, we were told that “it is difficult today to build new public housing for reasonable prices”, but that Framtiden Byggutveckling “works hard to get as much good quality housing as possible for our money”.

It is important here to briefly contextualise public housing in Sweden. In contrast with most other European countries, Swedish public housing is not needs tested or selective (Grander, 2017). Public housing should instead be accessible to everyone regardless of income, and the municipal housing companies are obliged to provide housing for all. This was explained to us in an interview as “we build for everyone in Gothenburg”. But Sweden’s universal public housing approach has been put under increasing pressure due to gradual market adaptation in recent decades (Grander, 2019). Notably, new legislation adopted in 2011 requires municipal housing companies to calculate their investments to yield, positioning them as market actors with the ambiguous mission of striving simultaneously for profit and societal benefit (Grander, 2017). This reality is often incompatible with building affordable public housing.

In terms of creating more transformative, emancipatory socionatures through green bond-funded housing, we identify two problematic dimensions. First, it goes without saying that building new housing – energy efficient or not – requires a huge urban metabolism (Castán Broto et al., 2012), resulting in an inherent contradiction between material throughput and sustainability. Second, residential buildings financed through green bonds are solely subject to energy performance requirements, with no consideration of who can live in them. Compared with the average rent of a two-bedroom flat in Gothenburg’s public housing stock, the monthly rent of an equivalent new energy efficient flat is approximately 40–85% higher.³ In an interview with the Swedish Union of Tenants, Hyresgästföreningen, we were told that this has to do with the rent levels being negotiated based on the costs for constructing the flats. Interestingly, the queuing time for newly constructed flats tend to be short compared to other public housing, meaning that these flats often are easier to acquire – if one is willing and able to pay for it (Hyresgästföreningen, personal communication, 2020). Most low-income households, defined as households with a disposable income below 60% of the national median value (e.g. 24,100 SEK per month, or 2300 euros, for a single-parent household with two children; SCB, 2019a: 45) cannot afford this housing. When we inquired about how the energy performance requirements affect rents and ability to pay, we were told by Framtiden Byggutveckling that they have tried to find a reasonable level “without making it too expensive for the consumer, or tenant, who in the end needs to be able to pay the rent”. In the green bond process, however, rent affordability is not taken into consideration. Instead we were told that it is addressed “politically” through balancing tenure types and creating a mixed city. This response in essence sidesteps the underlying properly political question of socio-spatial inequality related to class, ethnicity or other forms of difference. Ultimately, there remains an unanswered question of who, exactly, this Gothenburg public housing consumer or tenant is, although numerous studies have pointed to the creation of mixed communities as a process of “gentrification by stealth” (Butler et al., 2012).

Furthermore, when asked if green bond funding has enabled Framtiden Byggutveckling to carry out more public housing projects, we were told no, “we do not really get any benefit from [being funded by] green bonds in particular.” Indeed, all city employees we interviewed underlined that Gothenburg would have carried out the same projects with or without green bonds. This is clearly illustrated by the following quotes from two municipal employees: “this [green bonds] is not what drives the ecological transition in the city, that would have happened anyway” and “in the municipal process it is not [emphasis] the green bonds that drive the green.” This stands in stark contrast to the green bond reporting framework which states that “the instrument has become an important tool to reach the City’s climate and environmental goals” (City of Gothenburg, 2019a: 3) and statements in an international green finance forum by Gothenburg’s mayor in 2015 saying that green bonds play a major role in Gothenburg’s sustainability transition (Kotas, 2015). Similarly, it rubs uncomfortably against statements from investors we interviewed who told us that they buy green bonds to help contribute to environmental change, e.g. “[green bonds] can be a tool for moving capital in order to do this transition that needs to be made”. In other words, investors see green bonds as inherently different from conventional bonds in terms of impact and, ultimately, their ability to contribute to urban environmental transformation.

The green bond framework focuses solely on the environmental questions, with proceeds used to fully or partially (re)finance city investments that “promote the transition towards a low-carbon, climate change-resilient and ecologically sustainable society (‘Green Projects’)” (City of Gothenburg, 2019a: 5). Addressing social and especially equity concerns head on through green bonds was side-lined by interviewees in one of four ways: (1) too political, (2) too complex/difficult to define, (3) not a priority or (4) a de facto part of existing projects (e.g. “our green bonds build schools, preschools, rental houses, supportive housing, we build trees, we build cycle paths, we have the pedestrian city, there are social dimensions in all that”). In other words, the social does not consider urban inequality but is understood as automatically benefiting a wide range of residents and city uses, with no possibility of potential co-harms. The only project documented in Gothenburg's 2018 green bonds impact report deemed to address social sustainability is a town hall, a “natural meeting place in the community” housing various uses that promote “creative environment with opportunities for interesting and inspiring meetings between people with different backgrounds” (City of Gothenburg, 2019b: 5). Critical equity, class, race, gender and related social dimensions are absent, with terms such as community, creative and culture standing in for the social. Community, creativity and culture are part of universally liked post political terms and framings, non-confrontational and “easy” to achieve. Ultimately, far from attempting to articulate and contribute to new socionatures or socio-ecological futures, our findings show that green bond-funded projects reinforce status quo sustainability approaches. Next, we turn to look more deeply at these status quo dimensions of green bonds.

Not a left or right nor private or public issue: The universal appeal of green bonds

Our interviews with city of Gothenburg employees visibilised how the technocratic, post-political nature of green bonds emerged from their very inception. In the city’s role as trustee of a one billion SEK (95 million euros) investment foundation holding donations from established wealthy Gothenburg families, the Swedish bank SEB and the World Bank invited Gothenburg municipal officials in early 2013 to a meeting to discuss the municipality’s investment in a green bond project. After the meeting, municipal employees reflected on issuing a municipal green bond linked to Gothenburg’s sustainability work. The idea was positively received by the SEB and World Bank, who shared their way of working with green bonds. The City then elaborated a more complete framework in collaboration with the Oslo-based organisation CICERO.

While Gothenburg was initially driven to create green bonds more out of curiosity, and was furthermore uncertain there would be investor demand for a municipal green bond, the first bond issued for 500 million SEK in September 2013 attracted 1.3 billion SEK in 30 minutes. In other words, almost three times the amount required to issue the bond, similar to the oversubscription rates seen for green bonds globally in recent years (Nauman, 2020). Despite the fact that investment incentives were not very strong because the municipality has a very high rating and thus a low interest rate – coupled with the broader low-interest rate environment characterising 2013 – there was a lot of interest, attracting both more and new investors. The consensus-based post-political dimensions underlying the process are clear in the following quote, where during an interview two municipal employees explained to us the success factors underlying the city’s green bonds:

I think one of the success factors is to not get stuck in any political debate or debate about public and private. This never became a left-right issue or public-private issue. Gothenburg was by then governed by parties from the left side, while other municipalities had right-wing governance, and quickly private actors jumped on the train. So it was a question around which everyone could meet, it was never any debate around the question as such. I think that was one of the success factors enabling this market to jump off.

Everyone thought it was a good idea, no matter the political colour.

The decision on how green bond funds will be invested is a managerial question, removed from any deliberative and possibly conflictual or antagonistic debate. Everyone we interviewed in the city – those directly involved in issuing, managing and overseeing green bond investments and reporting – noted that they do not make any decisions about what green projects to fund. Rather, “we finance what the politicians want us to finance” and “we verify what they give to us”. A team of experts and technicians thus plays a key role in monitoring and ratifying the green bond process, making it secure and legible for investors, while any “political” decision making is removed from the realm of contestation. In the case that politicians decide not to fund an activity anymore – as was the case with the GoBiGas project – one of the managers of the green bond portfolio told us that “we are … an issuer large enough to say that ok, we take these millions, it was several hundred million, and we have other projects that meet the requirements but in another way.” Similarly, while all green buildings in the portfolio should comply with funding criteria, there have been cases when a completed building does not meet energy performance requirements. In such situations, the project is excluded from green bond impact reporting and funds are reallocated to other eligible green projects. These examples show how conflict around the interplay between urban development, finance and sustainability has not been removed, but it is instead more carefully choreographed, displaced or otherwise residualised (Allmendinger and Houghton, 2012).

Transparency is a key element that was touted by all actors we interviewed: impact reports state how green bonds are being invested and what specific environmental benefits result from funded projects. We were even told by a senior sustainability analyst at a Swedish pension system buffer fund that transparency is “important for its own sake but it’s also driving progress” and that reporting actively drives the sustainability agenda. Yet despite the experts, managers and technicians who drive impact reporting, what appears to be transparency masks the deeper more fundamental – and potentially transformative – socio-ecological and political dimensions of investments. As discussed in the previous section, the new sustainable housing being built is “green”, but how much does it cost? Who is able to access it? When we asked a city employee these questions, we were told “that is something the municipal public housing company [Framtiden], who builds it, it is in their investment decisions, and their investment decision guidelines state that rent levels and so on have to be considered.” There is no acknowledgement of the properly political reality of increased rental costs that the broader profit-driven transformations to the Swedish public housing framework (see Grander, 2017) have had on new-build “green” housing, which in practice nullifies the statement that “we build for all in Gothenburg”. In this sense, the deeper way that public “green” housing operates is outside the possibility of change by green bonds, thus entrenching the (im)possibility of bonds to generate deeper socio-ecological transformations.

In recent years, investor demand for green bonds has outgrown supply (Nauman, 2020), and it is clear that green bonds fit neatly into existing market incentives and logic. An employee of one of five buffer funds in the Swedish pension system we interviewed qualified the statement that green bonds are “positive” by noting that they have a mandate from Swedish Parliament to not “sacrifice returns”. In other words, if green bonds do not provide the same or better returns as regular bonds, they would not invest in them. Similarly, the Swedish Church told us they want to have a green and sustainable investment portfolio, which they want to grow. Investors are thus the sine qua non condition of the instrument working, the ultimate holders of capital who, albeit at a stable and secure level, seek rent out of the instrument. When we asked the city of Gothenburg if there was any negative feedback about the bonds, the immediate response was that overall the response has been very positive, and that “everyone wants this market to grow”. This positive, feel good dimension of green bonds is what we turn to explore next.

“The foundation is that we want to do good”: The affective dimensions of green bonds

While virtually all actors we interviewed spoke in some form or fashion of green bonds “doing good,” there were two specific types of affect that emerged during interviews with investors. Many investors appeared to experience positive affect through buying green bonds because “we know that they are contributing to something positive to society”; “we truly want to do something important … the foundation is that we want to do good” or “we really want to make a difference with our investments.” This affective dimension parallels what Japhy Wilson (2014: 114) describes in the context of philanthrocapitalism as the “warm glow” that supposedly accompanies charitable acts. The second type we distinguished was a pragmatic type of affect, where investors feel that green bonds tick the right boxes in terms of attracting clients as well as the branding and return they bring. This was most clearly articulated by a pension fund investor who noted that sustainable investment is “sort of like a hygiene factory in Sweden … if you say you don’t care about sustainable issues, you can’t sell your product in Sweden.” These affective dimensions illustrate how greening operates as a veil: it is not the green nature of the bonds per se but rather the affective feeling that the idea of doing good and attracting clients via green bonds provides, supposedly generating a win–win–win situation and making a more sustainable city and world.

The label of “green” is, furthermore, a subtle but effective way to put the affective onus on the green bond investor, as they now appear to be enablers of green projects. This generates a sensation of investors contributing to positive change through (the sum of) individual investor behaviour and through becoming a conscious consumer. Green bond investment thus operates as a “technology of the self”, fusing moral individuality and being a rational economic actor (Lemke, 2001). Yet green bonds as a form of ethical consumption is clearly not just about rational calculation (Newholm and Shaw, 2007) but is also about “what is sensed rather than known” (Wetherell, 2013: 349) in relation to creating a more sustainable city/world. Buying green bonds, in other words, spawns a type of moral selfhood based on free will, knowledge and voluntary action (Barnett et al., 2005) as well as positive affect, eclipsing and even annulling the structural dimensions of investment capital and the logic it follows. This turn to the moral register, as Mouffe (2005) notes, is a post-political characteristic that evacuates the properly political because it moves the focus away from class divisions and other deep-seated conflictual inequalities towards simplified notions of right and wrong. Fitting hand in glove with “roll out” neoliberalism rationality (Peck and Tickell, 2002), an apparent multiple win situation is generated: feel good through buying green bonds because you are contributing to a sustainable world, plus get a stable and positive return on your investment. The following quote from a city of Gothenburg employee illustrates how these affective and post-political dimensions fuse together and are deeply intertwined in the green bond process:

I think that green bonds are one of the tools on the financial market that have contributed in driving green financing, that leads to other effects and a range of new green products and all of a sudden you can go to your bank and buy green funds which you couldn't do before. So all of a sudden you can also as an individual become a conscious consumer which you might not have been able to earlier to the same extent … To show that there are tools [to approach the question about how to create a green financial market], a product that feels as a win for both investors and issuers. Or at least no one feels that they lose. Both come with enthusiasm and a will to create something, a change, another direction. To be that platform for conversation between these two actors, these two sides, I think that is very important and not the least a platform where green and finance can meet and sit down to share knowledge, understanding, and then there are innovative people who can take this further and further and further.

Green bonds have thus clearly become an effective form of affective capitalism. Our findings made clear how green bonds work at multiple levels to capture, structure and modulate the structures through which affect moves (Karppi et al., 2016). First, green bonds restructure already existing financial infrastructure, in this case municipal bonds. Rather than a standard array of municipal projects, the capital raised is invested in green projects which supposedly “contribute to the transition to a low-carbon, climate change-resilient, and ecologically sustainable society” (City of Gothenburg, 2019a: 5). Second, broader city and national feelings of “doing good” through green – both morally and economically – that have already been captured by green branding (Anderberg and Clark, 2013) are captured into green bond infrastructures. As one investor underlined: “of course there is also a branding aspect in this. You look good if you are doing good things for the world. And both us and Gothenburg are doing that. Being able to do something good with two interest rate points, it's absolutely worth it.” This merges with the widespread idea of Sweden as a role model for working towards sustainable development (Hilding-Rydevik et al., 2011). In explaining the appeal of green bonds, an investor elaborated, “Sweden is like the world champion in sustainability … we have reached the furthest down, getting the closest to even being able to deliver the Paris Agreement … So it isn’t really strange that Swedish investors pay such a great interest in green bonds.” Third, the existing financial infrastructure is modulated through impact reporting. While impact reports apparently give investments and capital a face, as one investor noted, and convey the positive (feel good) dimensions of green bond funding, details are lacking on who exactly is benefiting from the some of the investments being made. This is particularly true for the case of green buildings, which receive the most significant proportion of Gothenburg’s green bond funding.

Green bonds: Possibilities for harnessing affect and socio-ecological transformation

In our article, we show how green bonds operate as a financial tool to further a consensual post-political order that becomes completely, and purposefully, absent from ideological struggle. We illustrate the critical role that affect plays in deepening post-political processes through helping construct a discursive fantasy of green bonds contributing to a sustainability transition, but where, in reality, the broader unequal, inegalitarian order remains fundamentally unaddressed. This occurs despite the fact that city of Gothenburg employees issuing bonds and overseeing projects directly recognise that bonds do not push any ecological transition, despite their reports saying they do, and investors thriving on this belief. Ultimately, we illustrate how green bonds serve as a new path to mobilise and extend the circulation of capital through creating multiple win situations (for issuers–urban “green” projects–investors) and rousing affect by generating feelings of “doing good” within a sustainable order that does not address deeper systemic inequalities. Municipal green bonds, in this light, serve to reinforce consensus-based politics and the socio-ecological status quo rather than truly contributing to deeper socio-ecological transformation which, if it were to occur, would signal the irruption of the political.

The exploration of (municipal) green bonds through the combined lenses of urban political ecology, post-politics and affect brings three noteworthy conceptual, theoretical and practical insights to the table. First, the details of the techno-managerial (post-political) operation of green bonds were made clear: politicians decide projects to be funded outside the realm of contestation, with the green bond process then monitored, made legible and ratified by municipal experts and technicians. Problematic projects can be dropped from the portfolio and money reallocated elsewhere. There is even a possibility of financing already completed green projects retrospectively. These examples illustrate how any possible antagonism and conflict is removed and the smooth operation of finance is ensured, while the properly political question of the deeper socio-ecological relations engendered through funds and what socionatures are created for whom are absent. At the same time, in light of the rise of right-wing politics that in some cases are upsetting the post-political sustainability consensus (Escobar, 2019; Hempel, 2018), more research is needed to unpack these processes at different scales and contexts.

Second, the findings point to the critical role that affect and affective capitalism play in municipal green bond investment, and arguably in green investments more broadly. This topic requires deeper investigation. Positive and pragmatic affect, connected both to morality and the need/desire for positive returns on investment, cloud the potential negative dimensions of green interventions funded by green bonds, with no consideration that projects funded could possibly be socially or even environmentally regressive. The example of green municipal public housing is case in point: aside from increasing the urban metabolism, low income populations – arguably the people who truly need access to affordable housing – are unable to afford these higher rents. Further exploration is warranted on how the affective desire for sustainable futures, morally and economically, is captured, structured and modulated into existing socio-natural structures through considering not only at green bond issuers and investors but other network actors, for example international technical organisations like the Climate Bond Initiative or CICERO.

Finally, the denial of a deep consideration of the properly political social dimensions of green bond funding – considering for example urban inequalities, race, class, gender and other forms of difference – is another key aspect of the possible socially or environmentally regressive nature of green bond funding allocation. The reasons we were given by municipal bond issuers for not including an evaluation of the social dimension of green bonds – that the social is either too political, too complex, not relevant or already included – ultimately reinforce a comfortable, non-confrontational funding deployment. Aside from raising conflict, the open recognition of possible negative social impacts emerging from green bond-funded projects may furthermore cloud positive affect, an important “feel good” element especially for investors. Either way, the denial of the “properly political social” dimension of municipal green bonds further evacuates their possibility to contribute to deeper socio-ecological transformation.

We believe it is urgent to problematise the broadly accepted consensus that both finance and greening are inherently good for all, a reality that exists within the larger status quo model of speculative finance-driven (green) growth. Merely tweaking existing financial tools (e.g. bonds) and using them to invest in green projects cannot be assumed to be an innately positive way to build a more sustainable city and world. With supply seen as one of the main challenges of the green bond market, and the CEO of the Climate Bond Initiative and champion of green bonds stating that “we need governments to fast track their green infrastructure investments to give us something to finance!” (Environmental Finance, 2016), this is a serious and real concern.

At the same time, we propose that green bonds do have the potential to contribute to a more sustainable and egalitarian system, if they are reconfigured to consider transforming (urban) inequality, especially considering the possibility to mobilise the positive affect they generate. What, we ask, if green bond frameworks were to think through and act upon the possibility of contributing to green, equitable and egalitarian places? By this we refer to both process and outcome, the former through creating a public sphere of contestation where proposed environmental projects can confront each other (Mouffe, 2005) and the latter by funding projects that create or reinforce deeper socio-ecological transitions and new socionatures. These could include, for example, grassroots food production and distribution systems, or cooperative small-scale energy production systems. While these ultimately would still be small-scale projects, which likely will face challenges and contradictions of their own, they at least have the possibility to contribute to generating new sustainable socio-natural relations. It however remains to be seen what this would mean for risk and return on investment, since such projects would likely be outside the realm of “acceptable” finance-led (green) growth. Nonetheless, if there is a role for green finance to contribute to a transformative emancipatory sustainability shift, both its political and affective dimensions need to be considered and acted upon.

Highlights

Officially, municipal green bonds are communicated as an important instrument for sustainability. But issuers acknowledge that they do not drive ecological transition.

Municipal green bonds mobilise affect to extend the circulation of capital through the harmonious sustainable order.

Despite good intentions of creating a more sustainable city, the socio-ecological transformative impact of municipal green bonds is questionable.

We highlight how municipal green bonds can possibly contribute to true socio-ecological transformation through harnessing their affective potential.

Footnotes

Author note

Sara Ullström is now affiliated to Lund University Centre for Sustainability Studies, Sweden.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the BCNUEJ team for feedback on an early draft of this paper presented in June 2020. We are grateful for thought-provoking exchanges with Erik Swyngedouw, and for insights shared by Catharina Thörn into public housing in Gothenburg. Thanks also to the interviewees in Gothenburg, and to the editors and two anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments. All shortcomings remain our own.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 678034) and through a Juan de la Cierva Formación postdoctoral fellowship awarded by the Spanish government (Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad). It also contributes to the “María de Maeztu” Programme for Units of Excellence of the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (CEX2019-000940-M).

ORCID iDs

Melissa García-Lamarca

Sara Ullström

Notes

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