Session content: The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)set a game-changing agenda, which, given the US$7 trillion needed in investment by 2030, can only succeed with the support of private capital. Green funds, green bonds, and a market-enabling policy framework based on de-risking promising green economies-to-be, form part of the emerging green investment regime. Critical finance research considers these developments as a move from the ‘Washington Consensus’ towards the ‘Wall Street Consensus’, i.e. a kind of paradigm shift that mobilizes private capital in hitherto unseen ways and contributes to a financialization of development cooperation. We critically examine two transnational renewable energy projects in Zambia, drawing on the financialization literature and, particularly, the concept of de-risking. We find that new public-private partnership coalitions impose a global market and financial logic on the Zambian energy sector and its customers, which sidelines smaller Zambian businesses and leads to a financialization of daily life for Zambian citizens.

JunProf. Dr. Franziska Müller is Chair of Globalisation and Global Climate Governance at the University of Hamburg, and heads the research group “GLOCALPOWER: funds, tools & networks for an African Energy Transition” at the University of Hamburg. Her research covers global climate and energy governance, political economy of energy as well as postcolonial and poststructuralist approaches towards International Relations. Recent works are a comparison of African energy policies with regard to energy justice (Energy Research 

Social Science, 2020), a close investigation of South Africa’s energy auction instrument (Review of African Political Economy, 2021), and an analysis of de-risking and energy finance flows in Zambia (Canadian Journal of Development Studies, 2021 fc.). She has also published on decolonial social science methodology (Rowman & Littlefield 2020, together with Aram Ziai and Daniel Bendix) and on International Relations in the Anthropocene (Palgrave 2021, together with David Chandler and Delf Rothe).

Session content: Climate change presents the most fundamental transformational challenge that human societies have ever faced. It has become increasingly clear over the last decade that climate futures can be sharply divided into ones that are catastrophic, at the extreme, signalling the complete breakdown of large-scale human societies, and ones that entail the radical remaking or more or less everything about how those societies function. Either way, radical transformations beyond anything experienced in human history are almost certain over the next 50 years. How then should we understand the politics of these transformations? This presentation proposes two recurring dynamics and tensions in climate politics, whose interaction will shape how well our societies meet this challenge. The first is between de- and re-politicisation – a tension between a common instinct to want to avoid political conflict, to make climate change a technical, economic, or other question, and to ‘lock-in’ decisions for the long-term, and the conflicts of interest and power intrinsic to the nature of climate change itself. The second is one between purification and complexity – between the commonplace to reduce climate change to a simple ‘solution’ (price carbon, new technology, abolish capitalism) and the inherent complexity of the radical shifts in energy, transport, manufacturing, and food systems entailed in decarbonising the global economy.

Matthew Paterson is Professor of International Politics at the University of Manchester and Research Director of the Sustainable Consumption Institute. His research focuses on the political economy, global governance, and cultural politics of climate change. His latest work will be published during 2021 as In Search of Climate Politics (Cambridge University Press).

Session content: Is the future of a climate changing world a democratic one? Should conventional democratic institutions be bypassed or can they become more responsive to a changing climate? Does the climate crisis provoke radical political reinvention?  In this lecture I consider these questions, tracing the implications of climate change for the contemporary theories and institutions of democracy.

Amanda Machin is a researcher at the University of Witten/Herdecke and a visiting fellow at the Centre for Social Investment, Heidelberg University. Her research focuses on radical democratic politics and the political dynamics, identifications and discourses of socio-ecological transformation. Her books include Society and Climate: Transformations and Challenges (World Scientific 2019, co-authored with Nico Stehr) and Negotiating Climate Change: Radical Democracy and the Illusion of Consensus (Zed Books, 2013) and together with Marcel Wissenburg she is currently editing a collection on Green Political Theory with Edward Elgar.

Sssion content: In this lecture, the environmental historian Jason W. Moore explores the history class, civilizational crisis, and climate change in the Holocene.  Exploring great climate/class crises from the Bronze Age to the Little Ice Age, Moore shows how climate changes have been entangled with civilizational crises. Viewing civilizations as world-ecologies of power and re/production in the web of life, we can bring into focus of the unity of today’s climate crisis as one of “social formation” entwined with “earth formation.” In this planetary crisis, rising atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations are joined with the climate class divide, climate apartheid, and climate patriarchy.

Jason W. Moore teaches world-ecology and world history at Binghamton University, where he coordinates the World-Ecology Research Network. His books include Capitalism in the Web of Life and, with Raj Patel, A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things, both in German translation. Many of his essays, including translations, can be accessed on his website. He blogs regularly at https://jasonwmoore.wordpress.com/ and can be reached at jwmoore@binghamton.edu.

Session content: There are two ways to organise the macroeconomics of the low-carbon transition: through the state itself or through private finance . The “big green state” approach involves massive public investments in green infrastructure and industries. In contrast, the status-quo “big finance” approach, as for instance promoted by the COP26, wants the state – through its fiscal and central bank arms – to simply guide the private sector by changing price signals and derisking climate investments for private investors. The Big State route is hampered by political and institutional obstacles, including the (infra)structural power of private finance, while the derisking state approach hardwires systemic greenwashing into the 'low-carbon' transition.  The talk concludes by refection on the possible outcome of the political struggles between the two in the context of growing inflationary pressures.

Daniela Gabor is associate professor in economics at the University of the West of England, Bristol. She holds a PhD in banking and finance from the University of Stirling (2009). Since then, she has published on central banking in crisis, on the governance of global banks and the IMF, and on shadow banking and repo markets. Her latest publication is a co-edited book with Charles Goodhart, Jakob Vestegaard, and Ismail Erturk entitled Central Banking at Crossroads (Anthem Press, 2014).
As an expert in transnational banking and shadow banking she blogs at criticalfinance.org and on Helicopter Money.