Hallsworth Conference on Financialisation and Environment: The Implications for Environmental Governance of the Global Financial Crisis
15-16 April, 2010, University of Manchester
Conference announcement
This international conference aims to open up an important new agenda of research on the implication of the financial crisis for financialised modes of governance of environmental goods. Finance capital has always, to some degree, played a role in environmental management. However, over the last quarter century that role has altered: finance has played a much more direct role in the delivery of environmental policy in a range of issue-areas. That is, there has been an intensification and extensification of the linkages between the financial sector and the provision of environmental goods and services. Whether it is the de-regulation of energy, the provision of urban services such as water and sewerage, or the restoration of wetland habitats, the rate, extent and conditions under which environmental goods and services are made available have been increasingly tied to the circulation and expansion of money capital in its various forms. Marketised modes of governance in areas such as CO2 emissions have been increasingly linked to financial markets. The environment, in short, has been one of the primary arenas through which ‘financialisation’ – that is, the expansion of financial products and services into whole new domains – has played out in the last decade or so.
The current financial crisis has brought these new modes of governance into question. The finance sector is currently under close scrutiny, within and without, heralding a period of regulatory reform within the sector as we look ahead. We are currently experiencing a moment of profound questioning about the financial sector, a questioning that has both an empirical component – how does it work, how can it be reformed – and a normative one – who should the finance sector be for? Those questions have particular relevance for a variety of different sectors and services.
The conference will examine the promiscuity of finance (its capacity to enter a whole range of areas of environmental governance), and also the variable extent to which finance dominates over other concerns. In other words, we have a range of natural experiments in leaving the provision of environmental goods and services to the ‘logics’ money capital. The conference will open up a new research agenda that has been under-explored. To date, ecological modernisation has focused on production processes and, to a lesser extent, on consumption: it has not thematised finance capital. At the same time the literature on finance and financialisation has not paid much attention to environment, except perhaps in regard to thinking about the blockages/obstacles to financialisation. The questions the conference will address include the following:
- How, to what extent and in what ways has money capital has come to drive environmental outcomes in different economic and social sectors?
- What are the implications of financial crisis for these modes of market-led environmental governance?
- What role can and should the financial sector play in the provision of environmental goods?
- What are the implications for global justice and environmental sustainability of different financial regimes in environmental governance?
Confirmed speakers at the conference include: Ulrich Brand (University of Vienna), Patrick Bond (Centre for Civil Society, Durban), Larry Lohmann (Cornerhouse), Joan Martínez Alier (Autonomous University of Barcelona), Sam Randalls (University College London), Leonardo Sakamoto (Member of Brazilian Comission for the Eradication of Slave Labour and NGO Repórter Brasil), Christian Zeller (University of Salzburg)
The conference is hosted by the Political Economy Institute and Society and Environment Research Group at Manchester University
Conference convenors
John O’Neill and Erik Swyngedouw
Conference administration
Noémie Rouault
Conference Administrator & TL
School Support Office
School of Social Sciences
2nd floor, Arthur Lewis Building
University of Manchester
M13 9PL
Tel: 0161 275 7058 (ext 57058)
noemie.rouault@manchester.ac.uk
The Hallsworth conference has been planned to coincide with another major interenational conference at Manchester on the related theme Finance In Question/Finance In Crisis. This conference has been organised by the ESRC Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change (CRESC) and will take place between 12-14 April 2010. Details of this conference can be found on the CRESC website