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Financialisation of the environment: A literature review

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Author

Summary, in English

This paper provides a review of research into financialisation of the environment, focusing on the role of financialisation in the interface between social and natural dimensions of sustainability, the geographical penetration of finance into environmental sectors, and its increasing control over the production of nature and environmental governance through regulating flows of capital and consequently material flows. Financialisation is conceptualised as a profoundly spatial process, forging financial ecologies with consequences crucial to conditions for sustainability of social-ecological systems. The paper introduces the theme by framing financialisation in historical contexts. Financialisation of the environment is then related to processes of commodification, privatisation, neoliberalisation and accumulation by dispossession within the broader context of intersections between political economy and political ecology, highlighting the distinction between use-value/object-oriented investments and exchange-value/’investor’- oriented investments, the right to inhabit place, and the shift from control and command to economic incentives, drawing out implications for sustainability. Research on financialisation of agriculture and land resources, and on financialisation in relation to economic and social dimensions, is reviewed, and current moves towards re-regulation are considered from the perspective of a Polanyian countermovement. Conclusions reconsider the nature of the relationship between financialisation and sustainability and the challenges of bringing financial systems into the service of achieving social and natural sustainability.

Publishing year

2013

Language

English

Publication/Series

FESSUD Papers

Document type

Report

Publisher

FESSUD

Topic

  • Human Geography
  • Social Sciences

Keywords

  • financialisation
  • sustainability
  • commodification
  • political ecology
  • land

Status

Published

Report number

17

ISBN/ISSN/Other

  • ISSN: 2052-8035