Preface

Abstract

Climate change is no longer an environmental issue but an issue of resource allocation. Therefore, it is a topic not for environment ministries but for finance ministries and their international institutions.-Senior official of Nordic finance ministry, February 2009Economic institutions addressing climate issues. This is not the most common topic in the climate politics literature, although its importance has been steadily growing over the past couple of decades. Yet, it is a topic which I have been watching from the sidelines since 2007, when I started working at the Danish Ministry of Finance. My job was in the division for international political cooperation. I was part of the team preparing the ill-fated 2009 Fifteenth Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Conference on Climate Change (COP15) in Copenhagen. My work was not restricted to the COP preparations but covered all sorts of international climate issues of interest to a finance ministry, from the EU Emissions Trading System over climate finance to fossil fuel subsidies, the latter explicitly not being a topic for United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) negotiations. The emphasis was less on saving expenditure (which nonetheless was an important objective too) but rather on promoting what was seen as economically rational solutions to climate change. Notably, my work also covered interaction with other economic institutions, both finance ministries in other countries and international economic institutions including the Group of 20 (G20), the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). It was at a meeting arranged by the Danish Ministry of Finance that a colleague from another Nordic country made the statement quoted at the beginning. The experience of being a finance ministry official ignited my interest in how economic institutions address climate issues as economic issues.Whereas the role of finance ministries has been covered elsewhere (Skovgaard, 2012(Skovgaard, , 2013(Skovgaard, , 2014(Skovgaard, , 2015(Skovgaard, , 2017a(Skovgaard, , 2017b, in this book the focus is on the role of international economic institutions. Here, the economisation of climate issues is xi https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.