Sarah Knuth

Universities and Climate Change Mitigation: Advancing Grassroots Climate Policy in the US

Abstract While US climate change mitigation policy has stalled at the national level, local and regional actors are increasingly taking progressive steps to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. Universities are poised to play a key role in this grassroots effort by targeting their own emissions and by working with other local actors to develop climate change mitigation programmes. Researchers at the Pennsylvania State University have collaborated with university administrators and personnel to inventory campus emissions and develop mitigation strategies. In addition, they have facilitated a stakeholder-driven climate change mitigation project in one Pennsylvania county and started an ongoing service-learning project aimed at reducing emissions in another county. These campus and community outreach initiatives demonstrate that university-based mitigation action may simultaneously achieve tangible local benefits and develop solutions to broader challenges facing local climate change mitigation efforts. Outcomes include improved tools and protocols for measuring and reducing local emissions, lessons learned about service-learning approaches to climate change mitigation, and methods for creating climate change governance networks involving universities, local governments and community stakeholders.

Global finance and the land grab: mapping twenty-first century strategies

Abstract Understanding global land transformations today requires greater attention to finance, and how financial institutions are making land and property into financial assets. Drawing on geographical political economy and scholarship on financialisation, I question the nature and temporality of finances new interest in land – notably, whether it is speculative and short term or an emerging longer-term strategy. I consider how different kinds of financial institutions invest in land differently, how they are mobilising value arguments and tools and how a growing scarcity of “safe“ assets may push even conservative financial players into new experiments with land and other accumulation frontiers.

Green Devaluation: Disruption, Divestment, and Decommodification for a Green Economy

ABSTRACT This paper argues that taking up questions of value can help political ecologists and economists develop a more powerful analysis of the green economy, as it introduces new urban, industrial, and technological dimensions into a self-identified green capitalism. More specifically, I maintain that processes of green devaluation, decommodification, and techno-industrial replacement are as important in understanding green economic development as new value enclosure and green growth. Twenty-first-century green economic politics have been marked by Schumpeterian ambitions and zero-sum intra-capitalist struggles, alongside a more general hardening of anti-fossil fuel industry politics from both grassroots climate justice activists and, increasingly, mainstream investors. I explore three interrelated initiatives—disruptive innovation in Silicon Valley cleantech, the U.S. fossil fuel divestment movement, and the global financial industry’s stranded assets organizing—as windows into these struggles. Themes of devaluation, obsolescence (both technological and “moral”), and (more or less absolute) decommodification carry through this discussion as activists struggle to translate quantitative advances against fossil fuels into a more profound qualitative break. Understanding these fights is essential to developing more effective engaged scholarship on climate change and a just energy transition.

Legal geographies of finance Editors' Introduction

If the global financial industry has escaped unchastened from the 2008 collapse and its aftermath, its deep entanglement with the neoliberal state is clearly part of the explanation. Crisis-era scholarship has tackled the state–finance nexus with renewed vigor and creativity (e.g., Krippner, 2011), building on previous demonstrations that states have driven and been enlisted in financialization for decades (e.g., Arrighi, 2010 [1994]; Gowan, 1999; Helleiner, 1994). However, scholars have only begun to take on the full institutional complexity of governance today, and how it is being reshaped around finance in many distinctive ways. This theme issue argues that more thoroughly engaging law and the legal is particularly crucial to developing a precise, politically powerful understanding of the state and its role in producing financial geographies. One of this collection’s contributions is empirical: the papers’ shared focus on the US legal system provides an unusually fine-grained lens into a set of domestic institutions and practices that wield global influence (Maurer, 1995; Riles, 2011). Another contribution is theoretical: the papers combat narrowly mechanistic understandings of government regulation and other legal practices as merely ‘‘restricting’’ or ‘‘unleashing’’ financial accumulation. As has been shown perhaps most dramatically in relation to so-called ‘‘offshore’’ jurisdictions (Maurer, 1997; Palan et al., 2010), there is no ‘‘outside’’ the legal in contemporary capitalism. All financial processes are constituted in and through differentiated, overlapping, often competing, and frequently contradictory geographies of legal space. Finally, the collection’s contribution is, inevitably, political. Praxis-oriented understandings of relationships among law, states, space, and finance require both situating the legal in relation to larger theories of capitalist development and excavating the role of law in particular financial practices. Notably, the precision of the papers in this issue illuminates how highly technical and place-specific legal practices have engendered financial structures that can ‘‘travel’’ and transform financial systems elsewhere. In doing so, they also suggest nodes and methods for resisting the growing power of finance.