Beyond the Contradictions of Capitalist Green Finance: Alternative Paths to Sustainability

Éditeurs invités

• Hulya Dagdeviren, University of Hertfordshire
• Sabine Dörry, LISER
• Gary Dymski, University of Leeds

Synthèse

The urgency of climate change has propelled green finance to the centre of global economic and policy debates. Governments, financial institutions, and corporations increasingly frame private capital as a key driver and enabler of sustainability transitions, positioning financial markets as indispensable to achieving net-zero economies and addressing planetary crises.

Yet, this reliance on private capital raises pressing questions about the contradictions in the financial, political, and institutional architectures that govern economic transitions and underpin green capitalism. Can green finance represent a genuine departure from financial capitalism's speculative, profit-driven logics, instead of being merely an adaptation preserving its core mechanisms? How can sustainability be reconciled with an economic system dependent on perpetual expansion, short-term financial returns, and asset-based accumulation?

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Thèmes proposés

• State, public investment, industrial policy, and financial capitalism
• How states can act as counterweights to financial capitalism in sustainability transitions, without remaining locked into market-based governance
• How green industrial policies balance public and private interests
• How public banks, sovereign wealth funds, and state-led financial institutions develop alternative models that do not simply replicate financialisation
• How regulatory, legal, and accounting frameworks shape the relationship between states, markets, and green investment
• Global inequalities, neo-colonialism, and the green transition
• How net-zero strategies and carbon offsetting can break free from extractive, neo-colonial economic structures in the Global South
• How to change patterns where financial actors from the Global North have shaped governance of green transitions in emerging economies
• What alternative, community-led, or indigenous financial models can provide economically viable pathways for sustainable and just transitions
• Asset-based accumulation, private equity, and the commodification of nature
• How asset-based accumulation intersects with green capitalism in ways that avoid pitfalls and further crises
• How legal and accounting mechanisms facilitate the financialisation of green assets and can be redesigned to avoid new forms of financial crisis
• What are the social and economic consequences of securitising nature, water, biodiversity, and public infrastructure for financial returns
• To what extent private equity's growing role in green investment undermines democratic accountability and community well-being