Greening the international monetary system? Not without addressing the political ecology of global imbalances

Svartzman, Romain; Althouse, Jeffrey

doi:10.1080/09692290.2020.1854326

Cited by 30 publications

(21 citation statements)

References 76 publications

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“…Using the Seychelles Blue Bonds as a case of our contemporary development paradigm, this paper has analysed how an economically peripheral state like the Seychelles tries to govern expanded economic reproduction by assembling credit and environmental planning. Historically, peripheral countries have become exporters of their natural resources and have little economic wiggle room because of their position in the international monetary system (Svartzman and Althouse, 2022). As an example of Seychelles’ engagement with the international monetary system, the Blue Bonds shows Seychelles’ endeavour to mobilise capital to maintain its maritime resource economy as the other side of the coin.…”

Section: Concluding Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The difficulties associated with bond financing are symptomatic of a world economy where peripheral countries are systematically confronted with higher costs of capital despite their significant needs for investing in sustainability (Ameli et al, 2021). Peripheral countries instead find their currencies in the low end of the international monetary hierarchy and are continuously risking low liquidity and balance of payment constraints (Svartzman and Althouse, 2022). Rather than appropriately addressing the long-term fiscal issues that peripheral countries face, these countries are offered blended finance and market-based solutions (Dempsey et al, 2022).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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State capacity and the ‘value’ of sustainable finance: Understanding the state-mediated rent and value production through the Seychelles Blue Bonds

Christiansen

2023

Environ Plan A

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Financial capital is currently being heralded for its potential to provide social and environmental transformations. This paper provides an in-depth case study of the Seychelles Blue Bond, highlighting the state’s (fiscal and planning) capacities as central in mediating the future rents and value production when channelling thematic bond proceeds. Even as the Blue Bonds tapped into private capital markets and bond proceeds were intended to provide leverage for private businesses, this operation was contingent on complex economic and environmental planning by the state. Using literature on fictitious capital, rent and the role of the state in governing natural resources, this paper shows how the state needed to govern investment flows and its environmental conditions simultaneously in the case of the Seychelles Blue Bonds. By examining how the state tries to govern environments and finance in tandem, this paper contributes to geographical research on public fiscal policy, financialisation and environmental governance.

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Section: Concluding Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

State capacity and the ‘value’ of sustainable finance: Understanding the state-mediated rent and value production through the Seychelles Blue Bonds

Christiansen

2023

Environ Plan A

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“…As we have shown, however, thus far the remit has been interpreted in distinctly conservative terms. The interpretations of the mandate and its implication for Bank operations have been conditioned by the Bank’s pre-existing and higher-priority objectives, its inscribed structural logics, and the epistemological supremacy of neoclassical economics that inculcates dereference to free markets as the optimal allocators of monetary resources and precludes any major subversion of market forces (Dikau and Volz, 2021; Svartzman and Althouse, 2022); conditions which have historically been circumscribed by the structural power of vested interests in the financial sector (Gabor, 2021; Ingham, 1984; Talani, 2011). These institutional characteristics and power dynamics have engendered enduring forms of governance within the Bank historically and have swiftly subsumed ambitions of leadership on mitigating CRFR.…”

Section: The Climate Politics Of the Bank Of Englandmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘Facilitating the transition to net zero’ and institutional change in the Bank of England: Perceptions of the environmental mandate and its policy implications within the British state

Jackson

Bailey

2023

The British Journal of Politics and International Relations

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The role of central banks in perpetuating and tackling the economic patterns associated with climate change has increasingly been subject to academic and political attention. The Bank of England is no exception, having received a new mandate to ‘facilitate the transition to net zero’ in March 2021. This follows the Bank’s utilisation of its monetary tools to repeatedly stabilise the economic status quo since 2008, despite its ecological consequences. This article reveals the perceptions within the British state of the new mandate and the forms of institutional change demanded by it, based on a series of elite interviews with Treasury officials and other UK monetary policy experts, as well as a discourse analysis of Bank publications and speeches. We find that Bank actors lobbied for the new mandate to legitimise its development of climate risk assessments and licence internal dialogue on the implications of its monetary policy. But the mandate is perceived to be in immediate conflict with, and subservient to, the Bank’s primary structural objective of maintaining price and financial stability, due to the potentially destabilising effects of private capital realignment during a net zero transition. Institutional change within the Bank is thus limited to extending its pre-existing function of mitigating risks to financial stability rather than facilitating decarbonisation through market-shaping governance of the financial sector.

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“…While investment in the real economy is encouraged, non-supportive speculative financial activities are restricted. Moreover, the global monetary system and the currency hierarchy [59] as well as speculative capital movements are considered problematic. For this reason, cross-border capital controls are considered essential to protect domestic monetary policy against the threat of instable flows [8,60].…”

Section: Command and Control Policies In Green Finance And Green Monetary Policymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This means that we should abandon the mechanism of the current international financial system, which, thanks to debt relations and financial dependency, contributes to a drain of financial (and environmental) resources from the global South to the global North [61,72]. An alternative global monetary architecture should be implemented that avoids the problems of a global currency hierarchy that fosters a flow of natural resources from the global South to the global North [59,61].…”

Section: Transformative Global Monetary and Financial Architecturementioning

confidence: 99%

A Classification of Different Approaches to Green Finance and Green Monetary Policy

Dziwok

Jäger

2021

Sustainability

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In recent years, green finance has emerged as a commonly used strategy for dealing with environmental problems. However, it still remains to be seen whether green finance deals effectively with current global environmental problems. More recently, proposals regarding greening monetary policy have emerged. The goal of this paper is to provide a conceptual framework that helps to distinguish between different forms of green finance and monetary policy. We systematically analyse forms, tools and measures of green finance and monetary policy against different theoretical backgrounds. In so doing, we fill a research gap by providing an appropriate classification that is intended to facilitate future academic research. We provide different categories and distinguish, on an abstract level, between neoliberal, reformist and progressive forms of green finance. Furthermore, we provide sub-categories on a more concrete level of abstraction. With this, we focus on both financial market regulation and monetary policy strategies. Against the background of our categorisation, the different focuses on green finance and green monetary policy and the (often implicitly) underlying theoretical assumptions become transparent. The classification has significant implications for the evaluation of different perspectives and is, therefore, important for academic debate. The classification also potentially represents a basis for policy related discussions. We conclude that neoliberal forms of green finance and monetary policy that rely on the assumption of the effectiveness of markets for contributing to sustainability tend to neglect or abstract from potentially adverse distributional effects. Reformist forms of green finance and monetary policy are more skeptical of the effectiveness of market processes and, therefore, consider a greater role for government policies. In addition, reformist approaches are more concerned about the potentially adverse distributional effects of environmental policies. Finally, progressive green finance and monetary policy adopts a more global perspective on environmental issues and links the discussion intrinsically with questions of global inequality and socio-ecological transformation. Moreover, progressive approaches are skeptical of global capitalism at a systemic level and therefore demand global rules and financial and monetary regimes that allow for solutions of environmental problems based on global solidarity and a democratic economic governance.

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Greening the international monetary system? Not without addressing the political ecology of global imbalances

Cited by 30 publications

References 76 publications

State capacity and the ‘value’ of sustainable finance: Understanding the state-mediated rent and value production through the Seychelles Blue Bonds

State capacity and the ‘value’ of sustainable finance: Understanding the state-mediated rent and value production through the Seychelles Blue Bonds

‘Facilitating the transition to net zero’ and institutional change in the Bank of England: Perceptions of the environmental mandate and its policy implications within the British state

A Classification of Different Approaches to Green Finance and Green Monetary Policy

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