Join the City Political Economy Research Centre (CITYPERC) for a critical discussion of climate finance.
International climate politics is dominated by ‘gap talk’, where the central problem of climate change is the gap between current flows of climate finance and the estimated financial costs of climate mitigation and adaptation. In this seminar, based on a forthcoming book co-authored with Sophie Webber, we will seek to move beyond the climate financing gap approach and develop an account of the political economy climate finance as an indicator and mediator of climate futures.
Tracing developments such as the creation of renewable energy as an asset class, the rise of environmental, social and governance (ESG) investing, and calls for the greening of monetary policy, we explore how finance is being positioned as the solution to climate change, and how climate politics is taking place in and through financial markets. We analyse the political economy of climate finance across six ‘positions’: climate capital; climate risk; precision markets; speculative markets; big green states; and climate finance justice. Each ‘position’ is simultaneously financial, geographical, and political, and acts to configure different possible climate futures.
Presenter: Gareth Bryant, University of Sydney
Discussant: Robert Kirsch, Arizona State University
Gareth Bryant is a political economist who researches how public policy and public finance can create more sustainable, equal and democratic economies. His research has focused on issues including climate finance, renewable energy, higher education, housing, labour and Indigenous justice. Gareth is the author of Carbon Markets in a Climate-Changing Capitalism (Cambridge University Press, 2019).
Robert Kirsch is a political theorist with an interdisciplinary lens. His work focuses on multiple vectors of citizenship in advanced industrial democracies, in particular theories of sovereignty, heterodox rationalities of political economy, and Frankfurt School critical theory in its "first generation" and their integration into American Institutionalism, particularly Veblen and Mumford. He is editor of Limits to Territorial Extraction (Routledge, 2019) and co-author of Critical Leadership Theory: Integrating Transdisciplinary Perspectives (Springer, 2018).
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