Since the early 2000s, the public debate has gradually filled with normative proposals aimed at tackling the two-way climate finance challenge (how finance impacts climate stability and how finance can be impacted by climate change) – the “climate finance agenda”. Yet, although parts of this agenda are already discussed by the literature, scholars still lack an overview of the prescriptions that compose this agenda and of their underlying narratives. This article addresses this gap. First, we draw on historical data and semi-structured interviews to map the climate finance agenda and identify its key prescriptions. We then inductively analyze these prescriptions to unravel their underlying narratives. Our analysis reveals that normative frameworks have taken an increasingly critical stance towards the standard financial narrative as the agenda developed. While the first norms relied on the integration of climate change as a risk factor in financial value maximization processes, in recent prescriptions, climate change has evolved into a distinct goal alongside the traditional focus on value maximization. We also identified the emergence of narratives that question the pertinence of relying on market mechanisms for meeting the climate finance goals and propose alternative, prescriptive interventions aimed at incentivizing or directly controlling financial institutions’ behaviors.
