Centering work: toward more ‘social’ accounts of urban climate finance

In recent years, high-profile financial actors have developed a dizzying array of services and devices that promise to help cities devise ‘solutions’ to climate change. But what must happen for private finance to stand at the centre of urban climate solutionism, as these actors claim it does? This intervention suggests that placing private finance at the core of urban climate action requires a lot of work, which we refer to as centering work: the significant technical, political, and material efforts involved in making urban climate action—as a problem space, a set of technical competencies, or an emerging market—amenable to private finance intervention. Drawing on the interdisciplinary field of the Social Studies of Finance, we trace centering work through the case of the World Bank’s City Creditworthiness Initiative, and its implications for how urban officials understand, and act on, resilience around the world. We also discuss the value of centering work for future scholarship on urban climate governance and urban studies more broadly. On the one hand, following centering work enables researchers to observe how and why some urban climate pathways emerge to the exclusion of others. On the other hand, tracing centering work helps researchers to develop accounts of the politics of urban climate finance that are attuned to change.