Search results
March 2022 ). IFC ( 2021 ), Barriers and Opportunities to Refugee Women Engaging in the Digital Economy in Jordan and Lebanon ( Washington, DC : International Finance Corporation ), www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://data2.unhcr.org/en/documents/download/87874&ved=2ahUKEwj5zIrhtKv2AhUJTcAKHbZvCp0QFnoECBsQAQ&usg=AOvVaw0
Nature is being destroyed at an unprecedented rate. Despite countless pledges and summits, we remain on course for a catastrophic 3 degrees Celsius of warming. In a world of immense wealth, billions still live below the poverty line and on the frontlines of environmental breakdown. Increasingly, the world is waking up to this reality, but are the ‘solutions’ being proposed really solutions? In this searing and insightful critique, Adrienne Buller examines the escalating plunder of the natural world under financial capitalism, and exposes the fatal biases that have shaped climate and environmental policymaking. Tracing the intricate connections between financial power, vested interests and environmental governance, she exposes the myopic economism and market-centric thinking presently undermining a future where all life can flourish. The book explains what is wrong with carbon pricing, off-setting and asset management’s recent interest in all things environmental. Both honest and optimistic, The value of a whale asks us – in the face of crisis – what we really value.
) banking in chapter 3 and the extent of international equities trading through London in chapter 7 . In this chapter we examine the eurosecurities markets which have developed out of the eurocurrency markets and then discuss some of the wider developments in international financing. The eurosecurities markets we consider, in sections 11.2 to 11.4 , are those of eurobonds, euronotes and euro
devoted to examining the impact of the ‘greening’ process on the World Bank and two of its affiliates: the International Finance Corporation (IFC) and the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA). To date, neither of these institutions has been examined in any detail. IFC is concerned with private sector lending and MIGA political risk insurance. Transnational environmental advocacy networks (TEANs) have been increasingly vocal in criticising their activities as private sources of capital grow and environmental protection over private sector development lags (on
. To unpack these arguments the book examined the three organisations within the World Bank Group: the World Bank, constituted by the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the International Development Association (IBRD/IDA); the International Finance Corporation (IFC); and the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA). These three IOs were all given development mandates but they have separate identities. As discussed below, all initially resisted but then were influenced, to some degree, by norms of sustainable development. Recall that an
Ombudsman Office, the IFC, dated 14 September 2001. 67 Confidential interview with Conservation International activist, dated 18 October 2001; confidential interview with Friends of the Earth activist, dated 26 September 2001. 68 Interview with a CAO Officer, 9 February 2006. 69 Confidential interview with NGO Liaison Officer, the International Finance Corporation, dated 19 September 2001. 70 Thunell, like Woicke, is concerned with environmental issues although his leadership had little to do with the establishment of the performance standards set in motion under Woicke.
Chapter 7 Finance and crime As noted in chapter 1, one of the big changes in international finance in recent years has been the greatly increased use of the system by organised crime. It would have hardly been possible to design a ‘non-regime’ that was better suited than the global banking system to the needs of drug dealers and other illicit traders who want to conceal from the police the origin of their large illegal profits. The business of money laundering could not have so prospered and grown without the facilities for swift and relatively invisible
The fourth chapter delves into the increasingly central role of the asset management industry in policymaking and in practice, namely within an essential new site of green capitalist effort: the booming ‘sustainable finance’ industry. If the focus of the book is skewed toward actors in the Global North, it is because, unjust as this reality is, the sites of power shaping green capitalism remain primarily within Northern governments, firms, non-governmental organisations, and Northern-dominated international institutions like the International Monetary Fund and World Trade Organization. Moreover, most international finance and exchange is governed by the legal systems of just two jurisdictions, New York State and England, whose respective capitols play host to most of the world’s powerful financial and legal firms. It is, therefore, to a large extent within these two sites that the programme of green capitalism is being defined and legally encoded, and where efforts to contest it should, at least for the time being, be directed.
No struggle for social justice that lacks a grounded understanding of how wealth is accumulated within society, and by whom, is ever likely to make more than a marginal dent in the status quo. Much work has been done over the years by academics and activists to illuminate the broad processes of wealth extraction. But a constantly watchful eye is essential if new forms of financial extraction are to be blocked, short-circuited, deflected or unsettled. So when the World Bank and other well-known enablers of wealth extraction start to organise to promote greater private-sector involvement in ‘infrastructure’, for example through Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs), alarm bells should start to ring. How are roads, bridges, hospitals, ports and railways being eyed up by finance? What bevels and polishes the lens through which they are viewed? How is infrastructure being transformed into an ‘asset class’ that will yield the returns now demanded by investors? Why now? What does the reconfiguration of infrastructure tell us about the vulnerabilities of capital? The challenge is not only to understand the mechanisms through which infrastructure is being reconfigured to extract wealth: equally important is to think through how activists might best respond. What oppositional strategies genuinely unsettle elite power instead of making it stronger?
Karl Polanyi (1886–1964) returned to public discourse in the 1990s, when the Soviet Union imploded and globalization erupted. Best known for The Great Transformation, Polanyi’s wide-ranging thought anticipated twenty-first-century civilizational challenges of ecological collapse, social disintegration and international conflict, and warned that the unbridled domination of market capitalism would engender nationalist protective counter-movements. In Karl Polanyi and Twenty-First-Century Capitalism, Radhika Desai and Kari Polanyi Levitt bring together prominent and new thinkers in the field to extend the boundaries of our understanding of Polanyi's life and work. Kari Polanyi Levitt's opening essay situates Polanyi in the past century shaped by Keynes and Hayek, and explores how and why his ideas may shape the twenty-first century. Her analysis of his Bennington Lectures, which pre-dated and anticipated The Great Transformation, demonstrates how Central European his thought and chief concerns were. The next several contributions clarify, for the first time in Polanyi scholarship, the meaning of money as a fictitious commodity. Other contributions resolve difficulties in understanding the building blocks of Polanyi's thought: fictitious commodities, the double movement, the United States' exceptional development, the reality of society and socialism as freedom in a complex society. The volume culminates in explorations of how Polanyi has influenced, and can be used to develop, ideas in a number of fields, whether income inequality, world-systems theory or comparative political economy. Contributors: Fred Block, Michael Brie, Radhika Desai, Michael Hudson, Hannes Lacher, Kari Polanyi Levitt, Chikako Nakayama, Jamie Peck, Abraham Rotstein, Margaret Somers, Claus Thomasberger, Oscar Ugarteche Galarza.