Beki McElvain, UC Berkeley & Adriana DiSilvestro, UMBC
The increasing hegemony of financial markets, motives, and institutions in the operation of political economies, geographies, and natures marks a definitive shift to a more financialized global economy. This has spurred the creation of novel financial instruments to protect against risk, insure against disaster (Nelson and Bigger, 2020; Christiansen, 2021), and reorient the negative externalities of industry towards profit-making (Bracking, 2012). These instruments come in many forms, are bound to technocratic expertise and private capital, and are shaped by the neoliberal interdependencies of state governments with global markets and political economic contingencies (McElvain 2023). These novel forms of risk financialization point to a new frontier of capital accumulation (Johnson, 2013).
This session seeks contributions that examine the evolving landscape of risk financialization and the novel forms it takes in the contemporary global political economy. We invite research that scrutinizes financial instruments and interventions, which have transformed the management and transfer of risk—disaster, economic, ecological—across geographic and scalar contexts. We’re especially interested in work that explores how these mechanisms reconfigure relationships between states, markets, societies, and natures (broadly defined) and the implications of these ‘on the ground'. We invite interdisciplinary studies that bring together questions and topics of finance, political economy, economic geography, development, political ecology, and beyond.
References
Christiansen, J. (2021). Securing the sea: Ecosystem-based adaptation and the biopolitics of insuring nature’s rents. Journal of Political Ecology, 28(1). https://doi.org/10.2458/jpe.2899
Bracking, S. (2012). How do investors value environmental Harm/Care? private equity funds, development finance institutions and the partial financialization of nature-based industries. Development and Change, 43(1), 271-293. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-7660.2011.01756.x
Johnson, L. (2013). Catastrophe bonds and financial risk: Securing capital and rule through contingency. Geoforum, 45, 30–40. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2012.04.003
McElvain, B. (2023). Autorecovery and everyday disaster in Mexico City’s peripheries. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. https://doi.org/10.1177/02637758231161613
Nelson, S. H., & Bigger, P. (2022). Infrastructural nature. Progress in Human Geography, 46(1), 86-107. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132521993916
Organizers: Beki McElvain & Adriana DiSilvestro
Please submit your abstracts to Beki McElvain at bmcelvain@berkeley.edu by 15 December 2023.
Modality: In-person