Submit a Manuscript to the Journal
Finance and Space
For a Special Issue on
Green capital landing and the distributional effects of carbon finance
Abstract deadline: 10 January 2024
Manuscript deadline: 15 April 2024
To achieve net zero emissions by the mid-century, decision-makers have set up carbon finance policies to spur “green” investments including feed-in-tariffs, green public subsidies to companies, or local authorities and/or off-balance sheet investment policies – such as equity, loans or guarantees.
While recent studies have provided both important empirical insights into how to close the low-carbon transition funding gap, as well as critical perspectives on financial actors’ power and influence over climate governance and policies, there remain important gaps in the social studies of carbon finance. First, by and large, this heterogenous literature mostly focuses on the offer side (such as investors and financial markets) with limited consideration for the demand-side (such as investees). In addition, there remains a lack of understanding of the concrete and local implementation of carbon finance policies and green investments. Finally, the role of public actors (national and local bureaucracies, elected representatives) in carbon finance remains under-researched and often reduced to its capture by private interests.
This special issue therefore seeks to further insights into the social studies of carbon finance by focusing on the landing of carbon finance and green investments from a bottom-up perspective. By moving beyond a top-down perspective that perceives carbon finance as being imposed on localities, this SI highlights how carbon finance actors and instruments enable, or impede, capital to land in specific (green) territories. By focusing, among other things, on the mundane and everyday spaces where flows of finance are accomplished, and the instruments used to do so, this SI seeks to demonstrate the importance of considering the conditions and modalities of green capital landing for understanding the enactment of low-carbon transitions. Delineating the rationale, achievements and constraints of diverse carbon finance policies and instruments in different countries and regions, we will thus make visible the diversity of low-carbon transitions that are enabled or restricted through carbon finance. It aims at exploring this theme from three interrelated questions:
- Where does carbon finance land? How are carbon finance’s risks and returns unevenly distributed between different geographies and different group of actors? Who are the winners and the losers of the low-carbon transitions?
- Why does carbon finance land in specific socio-material configurations – and not in others? Here, contributions could, for example, pay specific attention to 1) the resources and organisation of carbon finance’s managers or intermediaries, and 2) the local institutional arrangements to highlight elective affinities between carbon finance policies and socio-material qualities.
- What are the outcomes of carbon finance landing in specific socio-material configurations? Carbon finance landing processes go beyond standardised objects of investment, i.e. the landing strip. Indeed, (green) capital constrains and colonises local political economies and ecologies. What does the potential range of outcomes look like, from frontal struggles among actors, to alignment mechanisms with already existing instruments and coalitions?
We welcome contributions from different environmental social sciences perspectives (geography, political ecology and political economy) that are empirical, theoretical, and/or comparative in nature. We particularly welcome contributions with an empirical focus on emerging and developing economies.
Submission Instructions
An abstract of 500 words max. (including key references) must be submitted by e-mail to the Guest Editors by January 10th 2024. The Guest Editors’ contact information is listed above. Contact details and affiliations of the corresponding author – and any co-authors – should be clearly stated in the cover letter/e-mail.
Selected authors will be invited to submit full papers for peer review based on abstract submission. Full submissions will be subject to the journal’s usual peer review process.