Matthew Schneider

MATTHEW SCHNEIDER, then a graduate student at the University of California, Los Angeles, California, was approved funding in September 2023 to aid research on “Signs of Change and the Business of Climate Transition,” supervised by Dr. Hannah Appel. Over 12 months of fieldwork based in London, United Kingdom, this dissertation research examined how a constellation of efforts to address climate changes already here and still-to-come have taken finance as their arena of intervention, ethnographically mapping a network of finance practitioners, scientific researchers, and climate activists who interact in knotty ways and whose life trajectories blur the boundaries of these categories. In considering the “how” of several climate/finance interventions — what techniques, what rationales, what obstacles — this project highlighted theories of change that actors formulate as guides for their interventions and draw upon to evaluate the signs of effectiveness of their own and others’ efforts. Beyond the scope of this grant, additional research for the dissertation was conducted in Tokyo, Japan, tracking transnational efforts between the UK and Japan to establish a paradigm and market of transition finance and facilitate the phase-out of coal-fired power plants across Asia.