Conference Agenda

Achieving global climate and biodiversity goals requires unprecedented levels of green investment, yet the financing conditions facing public and private actors remain deeply unequal. This paper develops a heuristic, dynamic framework to explain how financing conditions for green assets and actions emerge, evolve, and interact with macroeconomic structures. Combining insights from ecological macroeconomics, neo-Schumpeterian theory, and balance-sheet approaches, we conceptualise the green finance gap not as a static shortfall, but as a dynamic misalignment between needed actions, the agents capable of implementing them, and the funding sources they can effectively access. We demonstrate how heterogeneous costs, risks, expected returns, and context-specific constraints shape a path-dependent selection of green investments, thereby influencing their distributive and economic effects. Our approach clarifies how different green-finance mechanisms — including cost-reducing instruments, resource-enabling tools, and risk-mitigation schemes — can reshape the investment environment and alter agents’ financing conditions to reach ecological targets. These insights provide a foundation for more context-specific policy design and call for future empirical work linking project-level dynamics, institutional arrangements, and macro-financial vulnerabilities across diverse national settings.