Unsustainable planetary financialization. Economic specialization, capital markets and environmental degradation in the production of space in France and Brazil (FinPlanet)

• Grant number: 24/04684-6
• Support Opportunities: Regular Research Grants
• Start date: January 01, 2025
• End date: December 31, 2028
• Field of knowledge: Applied Social Sciences - Architecture and Town Planning - Fundamentals of Architecture and Urbanism
• Agreement: ANR
• Principal Investigator: Lucia Zanin Shimbo
• Grantee: Lucia Zanin Shimbo
• Principal researcher abroad: Ludovic Halbert
• Institution abroad: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, France
• Host Institution: Instituto de Arquitetura e Urbanismo de São Carlos (IAU). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Carlos , SP, Brazil
• Associated researchers: Daniel de Mello Sanfelici ; Luciana Nicolau Ferrara ; Maria Beatriz Cruz Rufino ; Mariana Traldi ; Thais Tartalha Do Nascimento Lombardi ; Vanessa Lucena Empinotti
• Associated scholarship(s): 24/11026-5 - The financialization of tourism and real estate production and the instrumentalization of nature in Brazil, BP.MS

Abstract

At the intersection of economic geography, urban planning, and political ecology, this research aims to clarify the links between territorial development trajectories and the environmental crisis in a conjuncture of financialized capitalism. The economic specializations of territories determine diverse forms of production of space and the resulting environmental transitions. This is evidenced with the exploitation of extensive, biodiversity-depleted land holdings by the agri-business, or with logistic platforms supported by environmentally costly energy and transportation systems. Various economic sectors at the root of these specializations are experiencing financialization as capital market actors direct their investments towards them. From wind farms in Burgundy to coastal hotels in the Brazilian Nordeste, signs of planetary financialization are proliferating. While public and scientific debate emphasizes the sustainability of "green finance," we shift the focus to this planetary financialization of environmental resource exploitation, based on the assumption that such a process amplifies the production of ecologically unsustainable spaces. To transcend the division of scientific labor between the Global North and South, this hypothesis is explored through paired comparisons associating France and Brazil. Based on the idea that factors, processes, and effects differ across sectors, these comparisons focus on the production of space and financing of agribusiness, mining, logistics, tourism, and wind energy and their impacts at various scales. Specialists involved in this project will collaborate through a unified research protocol that links the study of financing circuits (flows, actors, instruments) to the analysis of spatial, political, social, and environmental effects resulting from their anchoring. (AU)