Registration: to receive further information on the program and a Zoom link to the event, please write to camila.moreno@hu.berlin.de before April 5th, 18:00.
This workshop proposes a critical reflection over the current critical junctures in international environmental policy frameworks. Exploring the convergence of green governance and the bioeconomy, contributions from presenters aim to problematize and foster a critical discussion of the bioeconomy in the context of the current policy agenda, exploring the rationale and mechanisms embedded in green recovery plans, green deals and how these interface with the broader global environmental governance regime. Key topics to be addressed include the financialization of nature, inequality and social inclusion, regulation, and the role of nation states in this process. The workshop is hosted by BioMaterialities Research Group at Humboldt- Universität zu Berlin and the Socio-Environmental Platform of the BRICS Policy Center (Brazil).
Program Overview
14:00-14:10_Welcome and Introduction – Dr. Sarah Hackfort, Project Leader, BioMaterialities
(Part 1)
How and to what extent is the bioeconomy bounded by the meta-framework of global environmental governance?
14:10-14:20_ Scenario Note: Green Deals and the mandate of ‘integrate to deliver’: into the critical decade 2021-2030 – Dr. Camila Moreno, Post-doctoral researcher, BioMaterialites
14:20-14:50_ Key Note: Value Chains in Amazonian Frontiers. Green Bonds and (Co)Modification of Nature (s) through Global – Prof. Dr. Marcela Vecchione, Professor at the Federal University of Pará (UFPA), Centre of Advanced Amazonian Studies (NAEA). Post-doctoral researcher at the Institute of Development Policy (IOB), at the University of Antwerpen (Belgium); member of the Biodiversa funded project Environmental Policy Instruments Across Commodity Chains (EPICC)
Locking values for the future: Green Bonds and (Co)Modification of Nature (s) through Global Value Chains in Amazonian Frontiers Green finance in general, and green bonds in specific, are a cornerstone for the Green Transition policies and are increasingly acknowledged as a key mechanism to bring about the Bioeconomy.
If in the past, green bonds had little accreditation and consequently less “value-added” in financial markets, recently, green bonds have been burgeoning capital mobilization for the purpose of expanding and deep territorialization of various extractive industries segments. The way such movement works is twofold. At the same time land, biodiversity and traditional knowledge are locked in an investment through which a future of conservation is projected, their degradation is meticulously allowed in a form of zoning so that the additionality of the investment can be designed through land use management in the present. As an empirical example of how the bioeconomy materializes over lands and territories, this presentation intends to dialogue about the nature of green bonds as an investment and as a tool for zoning territories by looking at two specific cases in Brazilian Amazonian frontiers, both in the state of Pará – one for soya, and the other for eucalyptus. In this sense, the aim here is not just to show patterns of nature appropriation and commodification, but to reflect on patterns of how nature is being defined, enclosed, and modified to input value in the spheres of circulation turning it into an asset within the larger circuits of the bioeocomy. Such modification is not just discursive – it comprises territorialized and materialized global value chain practices and varied actors in multiple scales that are inscribed over territories of life(ways) producing a secure, stable, and highly controlled value reserve while taking advantage of a conservation chain that is only possible because of local and collective communities’ ways of existing.
We can draw from these questions to spark discussion:
1. In the context of a global bioeconomy in the making, what is the nature of Green Bonds and what is the nature they want to project (or keep in place) so that production, circulation (including trading, although not exclusively) and consumption can be allegedly sustainable?
2. How could a territorialized and materialized critique of the Green Bonds could bring more elements to critical stands on assetization overcoming limits of either global or national level political economy analysis?
3.How the process of financialization of nature and the agenda of moving forward a global bioeconomy intersect/converge?
14:50-15:00_Commentary – Prof. Dr. Maria Backhouse, BioInequalities, Jena University (Tbc)
15:00-15:10_ Break
(Part 2)
A critical perspective on the embedded assumptions of integrating this “meta” framework (such as the financialization of nature) and its consequences, presenting and problematizing its impacts and contested narratives.
15:10-15:20_ Structural Inequalities: Net Zero and Nature-Based Solutions – Maureen Santos, Coordinator of the Socio-Environmental Platform of BRICS Policy Center.
- Maureen Santos is the coordinator of the socio-environmental platform of the BRICS policy center and teaches at the international relations graduate program of PUC-RJ University. Previously, she wasprogram coordinator for environmental and social justice in the office of the Heinrich Böll Foundation in Brazil. She holds a Master’s degree in Political Sciences by IFCS/UFRJ and a Bachelor’s degree in International Relations by Universidade Estácio de Sá. Shemonitors the negotiations of the UN Conference on Climate Change (UNFCCC), in particular the issues of Adaptation and Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD). She organized research groups on the High Level Panel of Food Security of FAO, that recently produced a study on climate change and food security.
15:20-15:35_ Social Inclusion in Bioeconomy Solutions – Prof. Dr. Deborah Delgado, Associate Professor and Researcher at the Pontificia Universidad Catolica del Peru
- Dr. Delgado is an Associate Professor and Researcher at the Pontificia Universidad Catolica del Peru where she directs the MA on Water Management. She has extensive experience in environmental governance and climate policy, particularly regarding Indigenous Peoples and Tropical Forests. She has conducted interdisciplinary research and extended fieldwork following indigenous social movements, human and environmental rights, natural resources management. During the last 10 years, she has followed the UNFCCC process as a multiscaled agenda; as a policy expert, she has worked as an advisor to the Peruvian negotiators on REDD policy and IP rights issues.
15:35-15:45_Questions and Answers
15:45-16:00_Commentary – Contours of Historical-Materialist Policy Analysis – Prof. Dr. Ulrich Brand. Prof. Brand will comment on the prior presentations will sum up key questions and ideas to debate further, as well as links to his historical-materialist policy analysis framework.
- Prof. Brand is Professor of International Politics at the Faculty of Social Sciences. His main research interests are the crisis of liberal globalisation, (global) social- ecological topics like resource politics and Green Economy, critical state and governance studies and Latin America. Together with Markus Wissen, he introduced the concept of the “imperial mode of living”; his research on “degrowth” is linked to emerging debates on “post-growth cities”. Recently, he led two research projects on trade unions and social-ecological transformation. Moreover, Brand is scientific coordinator of the Research Network on Latin America at the University of Vienna.
Historical-materialist policy analysis (HMPA) aims at analyzing how specific policies are formulated against the background of essentially competing and contradictory interests of different social forces. It examines how, if at all, these policies contribute to societal reproduction and the regulation of social contradictions and crisis tendencies. This article provides a concise introduction to HMPA as well as to the key theoretical concepts and perspectives underpinning its policy concept. Against this background, it further elaborates on how to operationalize HMPA for empirical research, drawing on but also going beyond the three-step process of context-, actors- and process-analysis suggested by the Research Group ‘State Project Europe’. In this way, we seek to enhance the analytical and methodological repertoire of historical materialist political science, and at the same time open up new analytical perspectives within the comprehensive field of critical policy analysis.
Full reference article available at: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19460171.2021.1947864
16:00-16:15_ Reaction from presenters
(Part 3)
Regarding the alignment with the meta-framework, its impacts and contested narratives discussed above (part 1 and 2), what is the role of Nation States in moving forward a Green Deal/Bioeconomy and what can we explore out of its contradictions? What would be alternative paths for bioeconomy policy making?
16:15-16:55_Debate with all participants of the workshop: questions, answers, comments
16:55-17:00_Wrap-up and end of the event
[source of picture: pexels.com]