Lukas Bogner defends his PhD thesis
Lukas Bogner defends his PhD thesis "Spaces of Green – Legal Expertise in the International Political Economy of Climate Finance".
The defense is public, and everybody is welcome; the defense is scheduled for a maximum of three hours and will be held in English.
Follow the defense online via Teams
The Doctoral School at Department of Social Sciences and Business will host a small reception afterwards.
Supervisors and assessment
Assessment committee:
- Lars Buur, tt备用网址, Department of Social Sciences and Business, Roskilde University, Denmark (chairperson)
- Celine Tan, tt备用网址, University of Warwick, England
- Katharina Pistor, tt备用网址, Columbia Law School, New York, USA
PhD Supervisors:
- Supervisor: Jakob Vestergaard, Associate tt备用网址, Department of Social Sciences and Business, Roskilde University
- Co-supervisor: Mette Fog Olwig, Associate tt备用网址, Department of Social Sciences and Business, Roskilde University
Leader of defense: Angela Bourne, tt备用网址 (MSO), Department of Social Sciences and Business, Roskilde University
Abstract
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.
The dissertation will be available for reading at the Roskilde University Library before the defense (on-site use). The dissertation will also be available at the defense.