In August 2010 Brazil decided to limit foreign direct investments (FDIs) in land, and attracted the attention of politicians as much as the fears of businessmen. However, few months before, in ...September 2009, it had concluded a trilateral agreement with Japan and Mozambique to implement agribusiness and contract farming on an area of ten million hectares in the Mozambican region of Nacala. In light of that, the paper analyses the apparent duality of the Brazilian politics, and concludes that, exactly like in the case of the novel by Robert Louis Stevenson, it is not a matter of pathology, but a voluntarily induced double personality which is strategic in positioning Brazil at the core of the global capitalist system.
Em agosto de 2010 o Brasil decidiu limitar os investimentos diretos estrangeiros (IDE) em terra, e atraiu a atenção de políticos, tanto quanto os temores de empresários. No entanto, alguns meses antes, em setembro de 2009, havia sido concluído um acordo trilateral com o Japão e Moçambique para implementar o agronegócio e um contrato de produção agrícola em uma área de dez milhões de hectares na região de Nacala. À luz disso, o artigo analisa a aparente dualidade da política brasileira, e conclui que, exatamente como no caso do romance de Robert Louis Stevenson, não é uma questão de patologia, mas uma dupla personalidade induzida voluntariamente que é estratégica para posicionar o Brasil no centro do sistema capitalista global.
Corporate social responsibility is a dynamic area that cuts across a multitude of disciplines. This paper combines the notion of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) with the theory of legal ...transplant, and claims that Codes of Conduct can be interpreted as proxies of unilateral legal dissemination throughout the entrepreneurial network. By using as example four European extractive Multinational Enterprises (MNEs) (ENI SpA., Total S.A., Repsol YPF, British Petroleum), the article analyses the content of the Codes, the mechanisms and spaces of circulation, and asks questions like whether they are stretching European Union law beyond its traditional boundaries. Exposed to the legal and political relevance of MNEs, the reader is confronted with a global framework characterised by increased complexity, the continuous redefinition of internal and external spaces, deep inconsistencies and unexpressed potential. Therefore, the recognition of the current theoretical weaknesses becomes a fundamental step to critically engage with the production of new legal territories.
This paper combines direct observation of the COP26 and the analysis of the official documents to conclude that, despite the limited attention that food systems received in the official statements, ...food systems and food systems governance were key. Large scale food corporations were among the main sponsors of the Conference, few events were organised where techno-optimism and private-public partnerships were proposed as silver bullets for both the food and climate agendas, and pledges were made that may have a significant impact on the future of food. Food was not missing. What was missing was the engagement with the root causes of the problems, the recognition of the socio-ecological complexity of food systems, and the commitment to address power imbalances and capitalism as part of the problem. In light of this convergence and the intensification of the food and climate crises, will environmental and food activists join forces and be capable of reclaiming spaces and narratives that have been co-opted by corporate actors and their reformist agendas?
The 2008 financial crisis opened the doors of green capitalism as a financially sound approach to saving the planet from the worst effects of the climate emergency. The emphasis on the role of ...finance in promoting “green growth” has permeated mainstream political, academic and business approaches to climate change adaptation and mitigation, assuming multiple forms - from the carbon markets of the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement, to the Environmental, Social and Governance taxonomy for “green” investments, to the proliferation of sustainable labels in several economic sectors. The present article offers a critical appraisal of one of the most prominent arguments that upholds the idea that it is possible and desirable to achieve sustainability and economic growth through finance: green bonds. Green bonds are debt instruments whose proceeds are earmarked to fund projects with supposedly environmental benefits. After some years in the background, they now occupy a central position in the green recovery narrative and political framework all over the world. Most of the academic literature tends to naturalize green bonds as an eminently technical solution to reconcile economic growth and environmental sustainability. Filling an epistemological gap, the present article leverages a world-ecology approach to embed the financial phenomenon of green bonds within the broader picture of the capitalist political economy and the expansion of its ecological frontier. In light of the ongoing experiences that the authors have been following in the Brazilian legal, financial and political context, the article unpacks and makes sense of green bonds as a tool in the hands of climate finance that reproduces global patterns of North-South uneven development and the shifting of ecological costs. To test the potential of the “interpretative framework” offered by a world-ecology approach, we mobilize it in the concrete case of green bonds issuances directed to fund the forestry sector in Brazil. Aware that the current phenomenon only represents a blip in comparison to the largeer temporal (the longue dureé) and spatial (the world system) scales usually deployed by world-ecology, we nonetheless discuss how the ideological, technical and power dynamics behind the issuance of green bonds unleash capital accumulation, produce a financialized and subordinated construction of nature, and entail an institutional arrangement. The article is organized around 3 main sections. After the introduction, section 1 describes green bonds as one of the most fashionable financial topics of the moment, and one that promotes a shift in discourses towards the need of actively building a “green economy”. Although from a legal standpoint green bonds embody no significant difference from regular bonds, our focus is to describe the promises around them, the current (private) governance structure, and the trends in the issuance of these debt instruments both in the Global North and South, with a specific focus on the case of Brazil. In section 2, we look at the operations of green bonds emissions on the ground, i.e. taking as an example the context of green debt underpinning the Brazilian forestry sector. The analysis reveals how the emissions, made predominantly by large multinational companies actively present on the global market, feed off great efforts deployed by both the public and the private sector in constructing an image of the sector as a key player in the emergent “bioeconomy” and in the strengthening of Brazil’s goals in the Paris Agreement. However, we describe how green bond revenues that are officially committed to the implementation of “sustainable management of forests” are associated with the expansion of the ecological frontier in the Brazilian territory, stretching the boundaries of the area dedicated to tree plantations and amplifying social and environmental tensions. The backstage of the emissions shows how capital accumulation through green bonds is associated with the co-production of nature for the purpose of accumulation, generating concerns that are often diluted or transformed into procedural requirements. Debt generated by the subscription of green bonds, we argue, is not only financial, but also social and ecological. In section 3, we put forward that for private accumulation to be successful, green bonds in the forestry sector demand an institutional arrangement that combines state support and private governance of debt in its financial, social and ecological dimensions. Rather than being the result of an idealized and spontaneous market, a set of institutional transformations have to be considered in order to comprehend the feasibility of green bonds in the Brazilian forestry sector. We thus describe the historic connection between forestry and the state, the endless public incentives to put nature to work, the functional adaptations of the Brazilian environmental legislation and the regulation concerning the demarcation, access and use of land. In this context, we argue that green bonds add yet a new institutional layer to the process of creating and validating specific forms of nature, through a governance structure that dilutes the tensions between the promise of environmental benefits and its concrete negative social and environmental impacts. We conclude the article by reassembling these findings as part of the capitalist world ecology “dialectical unity” of capital accumulation, co-production of nature and power. We suggest that the world-ecology approach allows us to grasp green bonds as a complex form that has so far been ignored in the relevant literature. As any other phenomenon of financialization, a green bond should not be understood in isolation from its material basis, since it is from that basis – and its social and environmental conditions and contradictions – that it appropriates value. As the example of the Brazilian forestry sector illuminates, the “greenness” of the financial debt inscribed in green bonds may come into existence at the expense of the social and environmental debt that underlie the forestry sector productive model. Hence, although the explicit inclusion of “environmental concerns” into financial considerations and project implementation has been praised as a step towards the recognition that finance has a material impact on the planet and that these externalities shall be accounted for, the article warns of the typical green arithmetic move put forward by green bonds. Green bonds inevitably co-produce nature and social relations, but in a very unequal way that emphasizes capital accumulation and that does not necessarily protect the environment (even when standards are introduced). Much to the contrary, green bonds may come into being at the expense of other ways of living ecologically, and by restoring injustices of the past and creating a regenerative future - in other words, by creating debt.
Abstract As sustainable finance has entered the mainstream, it has become an area of contestation among civil society, political and business. In response, policy makers seek to resolve stalemates ...and enhance legitimacy by utilising multistakeholder, consensus-driven approaches to policymaking. In this paper, we examine these emergent ‘cooperative’ structures from a network analytic perspective. Our structural analysis is based on six national and three EU policy spaces. We conduct compositional analyses to explore the makeup of the network(s) and use a range of centrality measures to capture emerging elites. We find an increase in civil society participation in these policy spaces over time; however, financial firms and pro-business voices remain dominant players. We also find a small cluster of elite actors from a range of stakeholder groups. We conclude that the increasing structural balance of stakeholder interests, however, does not translate into power for civil society to alter the direction of policymaking, but appears to serve enhancing the legitimacy of a policy process that departs from the priority and aspirations of civil society organisations.
The 2008-2009 spike in food prices brought to the forefront the link between the transnational food system and the mechanisms of finance. However, the interconnections between food and finance go far ...beyond trading in futures and buying indexes and is redefining the chain from farm to fork. Having identified the main implications of a financialised food system, the article identifies two categories of legal and quasi-legal reaction that differ in objectives and processes: the approach of those who prefer engaging from within the financial paradigm and that of those who call for more stringent regulations. With the use of examples, it then reflects on the potential and limits demonstrated by each approach in engaging with the financialisation of food and suggests that complexity and interconnections of finance may become allies against unsustainable practices. The tactical use of EU Directive 95/2015 on non-financial disclosure is analysed with particular care.
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