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- Convenors:
-
Ben Eyre
(University of East Anglia)
Oiara Bonilla (University of Bologna)
Marc Brightman (Università di Bologna)
Aneil Tripathy (University of Bologna)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 26 October, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel addresses the overlap and tension between different conceptions of conservation and development revealed by ethnographic attention to 'green' mega projects. Drawing on multiple perspectives it critically explores entanglements between global finance and green promises
Long Abstract:
Green finance has grown enormously in the past thirty years through an array of global experiments including REDD+, green bonds, and insurance-based derivatives. Translating environmental emergency to amenable concepts and instruments created by or for financialisation and financial institutions, such as risk, and built on competing systems of accounting, climate change and environmental management has become core to global finance and its moral turn. Part of this movement has seen a move to 'mega projects' built on green (and blue) promises. Many of these projects work in and expand protected areas and impact communities that have very different attitudes to 'development'. In these projects, there is often overlap and tension between conceptions of conservation and development that are not always compatible. In particular, local and indigenous perspectives are frequently sidelined. This panel reflects on the complex relationships that such initiatives rely upon, bringing together different perspectives for a critical reflection on how global finance is entangled in 'green' mega projects. These entanglements could be approached in a variety of ways including (but not limited to):
• Infrastructure
• Conceptions of scale
• Accounting for impact
• Innovation and experimentation
• Divestment movements, and activism
• Local and indigenous perspectives
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 26 October, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the exchange relations that shape innovative finance as it relates to 'One Health' governance in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic recovery while considering how these relations privilege certain futures in which only some life forms and forms of life have value.
Paper long abstract:
The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in unprecedented economic, social, and governmental repercussions, prompting questions about how the world can best prepare for and respond to emerging disease threats. The damage caused by recent zoonotic outbreaks of MERS, SARS, the 2009 H1N1 epidemics, HIV/AIDS, Ebola, and now the 2019 SARS-CoV-2 pandemic have blurred the lines between sustainability and global health and has demanded attention from a diverse set of global stakeholders.
This paper explores the exchange relations that shape innovative finance as it relates to One Health governance in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic recovery while considering how these relations privilege certain futures in which only some life forms and forms of life have value. The use of markets to drive incentives for pandemic risk reduction in low-and-middle-income countries in the midst of evolving relationships and perspectives amongst various stakeholders in finance and ‘One Health’ creates multiple orders in global health and sustainability. Rather than exploring pandemic preparedness and finance as separate entities, this paper reimagines boundaries between economic, legal, social, cultural and political realms by approaching finance through a multicultural and multispecies lens to introduce new approaches for understanding the marketization of global health to promote sustainability and mitigate risks for future pandemic outbreak.
Paper short abstract:
Anthropological problematization of ‘scale’ (Latour 1983; Tsing 2000) runs into several complications in a symmetrical approach to the case of a ‘forest bond’ in East Africa.
Paper long abstract:
Anthropological problematization of ‘scale’ (Latour 1983; Tsing 2000) runs into several complications in a symmetrical approach to the case of a ‘forest bond’ in East Africa. Are the scale-making activities of those who have financed and designed the bond (merely) spectacular? Should anthropologists wield an anti-zoom lens on such activities? The use of scale here requires further consideration of theoretical and methodological issues surrounding ethnographic analysis of financial elites and their relationships with others. Taking seriously the perspectives of multiple actors associated by the bond, focussed around the concept of scale, calls into question liberatory impulses of a critical expose of scale by elite financiers.