Lukas Bogner forsvarer sin ph.d.-afhandling
Lukas Bogner forsvarer sin ph.d.-afhandling "Spaces of Green – Legal Expertise in the International Political Economy of Climate Finance".
Forsvaret er offentligt, og alle er velkomne. Forsvaret er planlagt til at vare maksimalt tre timer og vil foreg? p? engelsk.
Ph.d.-skolen ved Institut for Samfundsvidenskab og Erhverv er v?rt ved en lille reception efterf?lgende.
Vejledere og bed?mmelse
Bed?mmelsesudvalg:
- Lars Buur, Professor, Institut for Samfundsvidenskab og Erhverv, 兴发娱乐官网手机版客户端 Universitet, Denmark (forperson)
- Celine Tan, Professor, University of Warwick, England
- Katharina Pistor, Professor, Columbia Law School, New York, USA
Ph.d.-vejleder:
- Supervisor: Jakob Vestergaard, lektor, Institut for Samfundsvidenskab og Erhverv, 兴发娱乐官网手机版客户端 Universitet
Co-supervisor: Mette Fog Olwig, lektor, Institut for Samfundsvidenskab og Erhverv, 兴发娱乐官网手机版客户端 Universitet
Leder af ph.d.-forsvaret: Angela Bourne, Professor (MSO), Institut for Samfundsvidenskab og Erhverv, 兴发娱乐官网手机版客户端 Universitet
Resumé
States in the Global North have committed considerable resources to the mobilization of private finance for climate mitigation and adaptation in the Global South. Yet, despite more than fifteen years of effort, the amounts of funding generated through these mechanisms have failed to meet expectations. To improve understanding of why this is the case, this thesis studies a group of experts at the heart of these mobilization efforts, namely the lawyers who draft contracts, design financial instruments, and build legal infrastructures for these financial flows. By studying these experts’ tools (‘legal technologies’) and social processes (‘knowledge practices’), I offer a novel perspective on the international political economy of climate finance and its persistent struggles to create financial instruments conducive to private investment.
Through extensive interviews, ethnographic fieldwork, and document analysis, this thesis examines the tensions that arise as lawyers attempt to construct new climate financing instruments through legal (and spatial) innovation. I argue that, whenever lawyers seek to design such instruments or attempt to fix their shortcomings, they draw on, and construct, legal space. By anchoring contracts in jurisdictions of choice, attempting to re-cast legal systems in the Global South for ‘climate finance readiness’, and siphoning off value from the global periphery through legal abstraction, they attempt to enable the circulation of value while entrenching uneven geographies of risk and control. This helps displace the highly political questions regarding the shape of climate finance to come, from tangible to intangible assets, from public to private law, and from the messy politics of the Global South to the commercial jurisdictions of, for example, New York, London, and Singapore. In the process, the troubled nature of climate finance is not addressed, but temporally and spatially ‘fixed’.
Empirically, I develop this argument by means of two in-depth case studies of (1) the Asian Development Bank’s Energy Transition Mechanism (ETM), which attempts to decommission Indonesian coal power plants via an innovative, de-risked climate finance mechanism; and (2) a project at the International Institute for the Unification of Private Law (UNIDROIT) that is attempting to standardize the legal nature of voluntary carbon markets (VCMs) as a case of what I call marketmaking climate finance. In both cases, legal space is deployed and constructed to make new things investable, reducing the politically charged terrain of climate finance to technical questions of private law. These attempts often generate new tensions, which then require further legal innovation to be fixed, but leave the underlying issues unaddressed.
This thesis provides a comprehensive investigation of the role of lawyers in climate finance. It contributes to the literature on climate and development finance by studying the practical fallout from increasingly ubiquitous promises regarding the mobilization of private finance. It also contributes to international political-economy scholarship by linking global attempts to create investable economic value to the legal geographies of contracts and private property. Lastly, it shows how micro-practices of making and unmaking assets can help us understand macro-structures of power and change in the context of decarbonization.
Recommendations:
- Reassessing reliance on private finance and profit-based models.
- Strengthening public and sovereign roles in climate funding.
- Embedding social and environmental justice into legal frameworks, including in response to historical and present unequal ecological exchange and debt injustice.
- Prioritizing simpler, public-oriented financing and planning tools over derivatives, securitization, and voluntary carbon markets.
Afhandlingen vil v?re tilg?ngelig for l?sning p? 兴发娱乐官网手机版客户端 Universitetsbibliotek inden forsvaret (til brug p? stedet). Afhandlingen vil ogs? v?re tilg?ngelig ved forsvaret.