a #WallStreetConsensus global elite solution predicated on idea that we need to 'value' nature if we want to protect it.
The Paulson Institute report will shape incoming 15th UN Convention on Biological Diversity
endorsements: UN Undersecretary, Mark Carney, Mario Draghi (!!!), Kristalina Georgieva (IMF), Tom Lovejoy (Amazon Biodiversity Centre), Luis Alberto Moreno (IADB), Robert Zoellick
How to construct Nature as an Asset Class into a hegemonic climate narrative 1. Establish a biodiversity financing gap: between total annual capital flows into biodiversity conservation and funds needed to manage biodiversity.
Estimated at between USD500bn to USD 800 bn a year.
2. Set out policy responses, fundamentally relying on state derisking private investments in nature asset classes
Securitise nature.
and, as with Infrastructure as an Asset Class, change financial systems everywhere towards market-based finance that can accommodate portfolio flows.
there is a paradigm shift underway - I call it Wall Street COnsensus - it's forged behind closed doors in negotiations between governments and private finance, with environmental CSOs a (willing) participant that fails to ask critical questions
and here is the political power of the Paulson Report on Nature as an Asset Class: Leaders' Pledge today to put wildlife and climate at heart of post-Covid recovery plans
#WallStreetConsensus & its failure to mobilise trillions in @FT
4 things missing:
a) hegemonic dominance of 'mobilising private finance' in development/climate
b) asking why hegemony
c) mushrooming scaling up initiatives
d) do we want success?
a) Mobilising private finance remains global game - (Bridgetown, Biodiversity COP16, 4th Financing for Development conf) & national game (UK Labour gov, Brazil/Colombia/Chile decarbonisation).
*The world's most powerful political narrative that doesnt deliver
b) hegemonic not (just) because Big Finance is powerful, but postneoliberal, transformative state cant get rid of neoliberal macro - independent central bank dominating fiscal.
without macroinstitutional change- How do we pay for transformation- only one answer: private finance
when Big Finance occupies the state and takes over the social contract, nurses struggle, grandparents struggle, parents struggle, renters struggle, private equity flourishes.
no punches pulled on the Commission's Net Zero Industrial Act, the 2022 attempt to respond to Biden's Inflation Reduction Act with a lot of derisking talk but no money (ahem, European Sovereignty Fund)
Climate policy is industrial policy, and the other way around.
An important reminder that EU's climate policy was once ambitious, state-driven decarbonisation.
the Clean Energy Finance Authority would subsidize foreign demand for US cleantech - or derisk BlackRock renewable assets in say, Kenya with subsidies/guarantees.
nothing in this proposal from a top Kamala Harris advisor suggests US should enable technology transfers to countries wishing to pursue their own domestic cleantech capabilities.
in #WallStreetConsensus, Global South are consumers of American cleantech, with American dollars.
Two amazing Global South progressives and a Nobel prize winner walk into an Oxfam panel on post-neoliberalism
Stiglitz: w neoliberalism, the growth of financial markets changed the political game tremendously
Lula 's special advisor @AAbdenur - clear mismatch - Global North openly exposing industrial policy but pushing IMF/World Bank to continue with austerity and partnerships for hyper-financialisation
missing from this @FT account of the rapid rise of infrastructure as an asset class is the sustained effort that G20 governments have put into derisking infrastructure assets for institutional capital - this is the derisking state in action #WallStreetConsensus
@FT with @BJMbraun we've termed this a weak derisking macrofinancial regime - a set of policies (as in the G20 Infrastructure as an Asset Class agenda, or World Bank Maximising Finance for Development) that seeks to mobilise private capital into infrastructure osf.io/preprints/soca…
BlackRock 's recent acquisition of GIP is a bet that governments - under ideological or real constraints on fiscal space - will not pursue public infrastrucuture projects but instead continue to derisk private capital