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- Bertilsson, Jonas
(författare)
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The Governance of Global Climate Finance – The Management of Contradictions, Ambiguities and Conflicts in the Green Climate Fund
- 2022
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Global climate governance struggles with many contentious issues, often made visible in the annual climate meetings arranged by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). When these issues are delegated to climate organizations within the UNFCCC system and operationalized into climate practices they are often translated. Climate organizations often take on a technical role, making the contentiousness of climate issues invisible. The thesis investigates one of the major organizations within the UNFCCC, the Green Climate Fund (GCF). The aim of the thesis is to make the contradictions, ambiguities and conflicts around the operationalization of different issues in the GCF visible with the help of immanent critique, and to analyse how the GCF management of these contradictions, ambiguities and conflicts influence the aspects of global climate finance governance issues that become emphasized or subordinated. The thesis consists of four studies examining the operationalization of different issues in the GCF. Study 1 focuses on what factors influence the design of the GCF stakeholder arrangement and how it affects the possibility of different stakeholders to engage actively in the GCF. The GCF makes a clear commitment to support the active engagement of diverse stakeholders. It is argued that the arrangement actually privileges private sector stakeholders. Study 2 examines conflicts around the interpretation of the GCF governing principle transformational change. Some actors in the GCF try to connect transformational change to a financialization of the GCF, while others oppose such development. It is argued that financialization might contradict country ownership, another important principle in the GCF. Study 3 investigates the GCF understanding of climate vulnerability. The analysis shows how the GCF emphasis on dominant logics such as science and market logics reduce the aspects of climate vulnerability that become visible in the GCF, and how the principle of transformational change is implicated in this. The aspects of vulnerability that become visible in the GCF are those that can be managed through calculative logics, while moral and political dimensions become invisible. Study 4 explores the inclusion of indigenous peoples in GCF through an analysis of the development of the GCF Indigenous Peoples Policy. GCF embraces the ‘traditional knowledge’ of indigenous peoples but indigenous peoples find it difficult to introduce a more holistic view of nature, while western science dominates knowledge production. The analysis also shows that the use of this policy in the GCF is limited, despite protests from indigenous peoples’ representatives. Altogether, the studies show that the dominant logics discussed in previous research such as science and market logics play a big role in the GCF. What these dominant logics bring forward are aspects of climate finance issues that are manageable through calculative logics, while perspectives and interests that are not easily compatible with these logics become subordinated – often the political dimensions of climate finance governance. This goes against the GCF portrayal of itself as an inclusive organization that is responsive to a variety of perspectives and interests.
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| 2. |
- Pettersson, Jane, 1973
(författare)
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Governing citizens in the age of financialization: A study of Swedish financial education
- 2022
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- In contemporary Western capitalist societies, the state has increasingly withdrawn from its role as welfare provider, while financial institutions, actors, products, and narratives play an increasingly important part not only in global and national economies, but also in everyday life and thus for societies as a whole. This development is described by scholars as financialization and the financialization of everyday life. Contributing to this scholarly field, this dissertation examines Swedish financial education and the case of the Gilla din ekonomi (Like your personal finance) financial education network and its attempt to create financial subjects who embrace this development and its rationale. The overall aim of this dissertation is to describe and understand the different levels of problematization and practices of financial education, on a policy implementation level, by the study of educational practices, and through the study of how financial education occurs in the everyday lives of the people such initiatives are intended to govern. I do this by investigating financial education from several angles. First, I situate financial education and the problematization of Swedish consumers in the local context of time and place, i.e., in relation to contemporary and historical political discourse and practice. Second, I investigate the translation from policy to practice, showing how consumers are problematized by categorization, and by examining what role emotions play in fostering responsible and rational financial subjects. Through the theoretical lens of governmentality and sociology of emotions, I thus explore how the practices of financial education rely on emotions as a governing technique. Finally, I explore the subjects’ reactions to such governing attempts and their different problematizations, and strategies of resistance in encounters with financial education. In this way, this thesis contributes to and builds on previous research that understands financial education as governmentality in the age of financialization, i.e., the three aspects considered above constitute different methods of influencing the conduct of subjects—by conveying certain ideas, norms, and emotions—to align with and counter conduct, prevailing discourses of what constitutes “good” financial behavior. In summary, I argue that Swedish state-led financial education is a case of financialization of everyday life. Governing citizens’ financial knowledge and behavior has been a political issue since financialization took off in the 1980s. The results of the three studies in this dissertation show that the purpose of financial education is to guide and educate citizens into active, responsible financial subjects. Financial education does this by teaching course participants how to both think and emotionally relate to financial markets and products. Course attendees are taught to take care of, and take responsibility for, their financial well-being through activities such as planning for their future retirement and saving money by investing, while avoiding “bad” financial products and thus avoiding over-indebtedness. Nevertheless, the analysis showed that course attendees (re)acted by problematization, and conducted themselves counter to the encouragement to become financially savvy as they related the teachings to other life concerns that were inconsistent with the financial subjectivity they were encouraged to perform.
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| 3. |
- Wilén, Carl, 1986
(författare)
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Interpreting the Haitian Revolution: From the Rights of Man to Human Rights
- 2022
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- In recent decades, a ‘Haitian Turn’ has emerged as both academic and public readerships in the anglophone sphere have been flooded by a wave of essays, articles, and monographs on the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804). At the epicentre of the present study is one of the major interpretations of the Haitian Revolution in the Haitian Turn, which I call the ‘universality paradigm’. The universality paradigm highlights that while the three great revolutions towards the end of the eighteenth century – the American Revolution (1776), the French Revolution (1789), and the Haitian Revolution (1791) – all mobilised the political categories of freedom and equality against old-regime privilege and naturalised inequality, only the Haitian Revolution achieved the long-term abolition of slavery. Therefore, insofar as we are interested in the history and origins of human rights and universalism, the adherents of the universality paradigm assert, we need to attend to the Haitian Revolution in particular, which more fully realised universalist ideals. However, severe objections have been raised against the way in which the Haitian Revolution is connected to universality and human rights in our own time. The major ‘sceptical responses’ interpret the revolution in terms of authoritarianism instead of universalism and human rights, or they focus on continuities between old-regime labour conditions and inequality on the one hand and post-revolutionary conditions on the other. Other critics emphasise that contemporary human rights differ radically from rights in the late eighteenth century. The study takes advantage of arguments made in the sceptical oeuvre against the universality paradigm together with the critical resources found in the Marxist critique of right to offer a minimal defence of the universality paradigm. I defend the conclusion that the abolition of slavery in the Haitian Revolution adjusted the imbalance between the dominance of the commodity form and the absence of the legal form in pre-revolutionary Saint-Domingue, and that the revolutionary results therefore appertain more to the age of the legal form of equality and freedom in capitalism than to the age of privilege and self- evident inequality. However, to settle with inclusion, universalism and human rights according to the premises of the universality paradigm implies that the legal form is accepted uncritically, that historical continuities of inequality are underrated, and that the difference between political equality and social inequality becomes concealed. Moreover, differences between the revolutionary rights of man in the time of the Haitian Revolution and contemporary human rights matters, not least since the former event was anchored in a class of enslaved workers. Then again, to cling to inequality and concrete differences between past and present rights in the sceptical vintage entails that the legal form is sidestepped altogether, alongside an underestimation of revolutionary change and of the split of the absolute inequality of slavery into legal equality and socio-economic inequality. Thus, against the universality paradigm and the sceptical turn alike, I stress that both the rights of man and human rights nonetheless relate to the legal form of equality and freedom as two of its major politico- legal contents in the era of capital. In this constellation, universalism and rights on the one hand and socio-economic inequality on the other hand are not so much theorised in terms of paradoxes, tensions and contradictions but rather as compatible. Lastly, I argue that our comprehension of human rights today becomes sharper if we have a clear idea of our assumptions about where human rights come from, how they have been utilised, and what effects and functions they have had. In this respect, the radically different interpretations of universal human rights offered by the Haitian Turn represents a significant limit as regards the historical case and indeed much the same can be said of discussions about human rights today. Ultimately, therefore, through the minimal defence of the universality paradigm, this study adds a small piece to the much broader puzzle of the status and politics of human rights in general.
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