All over the world, financial capitalism and extractivism are appropriating land as if it was nothing more than a commodity, a mere 'factor' of production that can be exploited to generate financial returns. Movements and activists are organizing, resisting, protecting and promoting life-giving visions against this continuous enclosure of living beings and paces: they use their bodies, laws, educational projects, histories and visions to regain control over territory as a political space, self-determine and create solidarities. In the act resistance, they are the target of moral, physical and legal violence. They and their ideas are criminalized, disciplined, punished and in some cases exterminated. In this contribution, activists from the Basque Country, Guatemala, Kenya and the Six Nations and a group of academics get together to learn from each other, support the ongoing search for common vocabularies and identify possible milestones of a coordinated and international strategy for a lifeenhancing future.
A note on versions:The version presented here may differ from the published version or, version of record, if you wish to cite this item you are advised to consult the publisher's version. Please see the 'permanent WRAP URL' above for details on accessing the published version and note that access may require a subscription However, the link between land, legal structures and global production is often overlooked by lawyers and non-lawyers interested in redressing crimes and exploitations that occur throughout the world. ThisArticle aims to take this connection seriously and explore its implications by reflecting on the so called 'blood sugar' chain, 2 a transnational combination of actors and institutions which is deeply rooted in land that was forcedly appropriated in the Koh Kong Province of Cambodia and that, after crossing multiple geographical and legal borders, provides sugar and bi-products to businesses and consumers all over the world. The main reason behind this selection -that would otherwise totally subjective and that does not claim any form of universal validity-is represented by the existence of a fervid debate around international law's capacity to adapt to the evolving nature of transnational production and by the author's desire to contribute to an emerging conversation around the hegemonic and counterhegemonic role that legal structures play in defining the form, content, geography and distributive implications of global value chains. 3The focus here is on the implications of considering global value chains as non-linear legal constructions that coordinate and keep together the territoriality of the enclosures and the transnationality of production and consumption. 4 When this connection becomes evident, it is possible to move beyond a theoretically fragmented approach to global value chains and realize that these are the dynamic outcome of legal and quasi-legal structures that belong to different geographies and different times. The case of Cambodia was thus selected because it lucidly exposes the links between the localism of violence and the globalism of capital accumulation. As a matter of fact, the 'blood sugar
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Green bonds represent an increasingly popular way to match “environmental sustainability,” growth, and the aspirations of global financial capital. In this article, we leverage a world-ecology approach to unpack and make sense of green bonds as public/private constructions that shape and subordinate the complex ecologies of territories to the needs of finance and reproduce the global patterns of uneven development and capitalist accumulation. Through the study of recent green bond issuances realized by private companies active in the forestry sector in Brazil, we discuss how green bonds as a “new” form of “green” debt put nature at work and transform the territories and natural elements in the global south into “temporal and spatial fixes” for the needs of global financial capital.
Inspired by the principles of sustainable finance and Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) reporting, the European Union Directive 95/2014 on non-financial disclosure recognized that metrics and more transparency would foster internal debates, ensuring proper governance and helping to promote dialogue between management, the board and stakeholders, including civil society and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Although significant academic attention has been paid to the -limited- space that the third sector had in the definition of the content of the Directive, not enough has been said on the way in which the Directive and ESG reporting can be leveraged by non-financial actors and what are the consequences of embracing accounting, non-financial reporting and corporate governance as tools for campaigning. This paper tries to fill the gap and asks some direct questions: are the Directive and the EU approach to sustainable finance opening spaces of engagement and confrontation that contribute to a true transition into a socially and environmentally sustainable future? Is the encounter between the financial realm and civil society a real win-win in the best interest of future generations and the planet? After presenting the background of the Directive and the three main opportunities that the ESG framework presents for civil society engagement, we conclude with a critical reflection on what is lost when civil society sits around the same table as financial institutions, uses their vocabulary and accepts that the conversation can only happen around those social and environmental causes that are financially material.
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