Banking Spatially on the Future: Capital Switching, Infrastructure, and the Ecological Fix

By N. Castree, Brett Christophers. 2015

151 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Since the onset of the global economic crisis, financiers and the institutions regulating their behavior have been subject to far-reaching criticism. At the same time, leading geo-scientists have been insisting that future environmental change might be far more profound than previously anticipated. Finance capital has long been a crucial mechanism for melting present solidities into air to create different futures. This article asks what the prospects are for the switching of credit money into green infrastructures—a switching increasingly recognized as necessary for climate change mitigation and (especially) adaptation. Most research into geographies of finance has ignored ecological questions and few contemporary society–nature researchers examine major fixed-capital investments. Unlike those geographers who criticize capitalism without offering feasible alternatives, we take a pragmatic view underpinned by democratic socioenvironmental values and attempt to identify leverage points for meaningful change. This programmatic article identifies reasons and examples to be cautiously hopeful that liquidity can be fixed in less ecologically harmful future infrastructures, thereby addressing crucial extraeconomic challenges for the century ahead.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Finance, Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b6a93f4ecf3de57213edc620e29a89e907d5fa06

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Economics and Econometrics

1. J. Mccarthy
2. S. Prudham
3. Brett Christophers
4. Jathan Sadowski
5. Madeleine Fairbairn

In Finance

1. J. Mccarthy
2. S. Prudham
3. Brett Christophers
4. M. Ekers
5. Jathan Sadowski
6. Madeleine Fairbairn
7. Desiree Fields
8. M. Aalbers

In Global and Planetary Change

1. J. Mccarthy
2. S. Prudham
3. Brett Christophers

Citations in the corpus

• A socioecological fix to capitalist crisis and climate change? The possibilities and limits of renewable energy (2015, background): “Finally, as Castree and Christophers (2015) argue, much or most of the financing of such an enormous shift would be likely to come via the state, meaning that the transition could be seen as a form of “energy Keynesianism.””
• Environmental Beta or How Institutional Investors Think about Climate Change and Fossil Fuel Risk (2019, background): “A third is investment in renewable or “clean” energy (Kaminker and Stewart 2012) and in clean or “green” infrastructures (Castree and Christophers 2015).”
• The Metabolism of Socioecological Fixes: Capital Switching, Spatial Fixes, and the Production of Nature (2017, background): “Increasingly, pressure is being placed on states and firms to invest in greener infrastructure, including explicit calls to harness fixed capital investment to targeted “ecological fixes” (Castree and Christophers 2015).”