Green Finance and the Hidden Hand of Algorithmic Planning: Debunking Market Rhetoric in the Age of Climate Governance

Green finance is widely hailed as the solution to environmental and capitalist crises, promising to address climate change and secure future returns. Yet, rather than being market-driven, it increasingly relies on data-intensive forecasting models and scenarios that resemble economic planning. Drawing on case studies of sustainability-linked bonds within the International Capital Market Association (ICMA), climate stress tests by central banks, and asset managers' green portfolio strategies, we reveal how big data and algorithmic tools produced outside the market are pivotal to green finance. Although these practices expose contradictions, they also hold transformative potential. Through a financially led undemocratic form of planning, green finance wields powerful instruments we cannot leave solely to elite control. If finance is abandoning its neoliberal market addiction, then we must likewise transcend our inability to envision alternative futures. In acknowledging that planning is already happening, we can reclaim and redirect these tools towards more democratic ends.