Too Green to Be True? Forging a Climate Consensus at the European Central Bank

In its strategy review, the European Central Bank's Governing Council unanimously decided to make climate change one of its priorities for the coming years. In this article, we try to understand how this change was achieved, and to what extent it represents a break from central banking as usual. To do so, we rely on mixed methods, studying ECB policies, speeches, and exchanges with the European Parliament, as well as conducting semi-structured interviews. We show that the integration of climate change is largely due to the replacement of half the Executive Board within a year, which enabled climate change to be moved up the agenda. However, this shift should not be confused with the achievement of a consensus for climate activism. Indeed, after some timid attempts to push ECB towards explicit support for the transition, such a promotional agenda has been abandoned after the strategy review. While this choice has allowed the ECB to overcome its internal gridlock, it also has important drawbacks, increasing its technocratisation, tensions over the ECB's legitimacy and reducing the range of possible policies.