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This piece is part of a collection of Anthropology News articles on Climate Governance. Click here to read other articles in the collection.

In early October 2023, I arrived in Tokyo for the first time, as a financial professional and a graduate student in anthropology studying sustainable finance. Somewhere along my fieldwork journey, my attempts at breaking into the exclusive circles of finance paid off, and I got a job as a sustainability communications advisor at a well-known sustainable finance institution in Norway, FjordFuture (pseudonym). On this trip, I would represent my employer as part of a three-person delegation at the sustainable finance industry’s flagship conference, Principles for Responsible Investment in Person, also known as PRI in Person .

PRI was launched in 2006 as a United Nations body to unite and guide financial institutions in their pursuit of ethics and sustainability within investment practices.…