Seminar: “Wasting CO2: The Remarkable Success of a Climate Failure. The Clean Development Mechanism as The Trojan Horse of Neoliberal Climate Finance”, by Erik Swyngedouw

Seminar: “Wasting CO2: The Remarkable Success of a Climate Failure. The Clean Development Mechanism as The Trojan Horse of Neoliberal Climate Finance”





Speaker: Erik Swyngedouw, University of Manchester





Date: Monday, November 18th 2019

Time: 11.30h

Venue: B7/1056. Sala d'actes. Facultat de Lletres

In the presentation, we examine the articulation between urban political-ecological transformations on the one hand and processes of global climate mitigation on the other. More specifically, we use the case of South-African waste-to-value projects as combined results of local processes of urban ecological modernization on the one hand and the mobilization of global climate finance through the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) on the other. Our focus is on exploring the antinomies of climate-related projects as currently constituted and on examining the implications and contradictions of the current climate mitigation architecture. While it is generally recognized that waste-related CDM projects in South Africa have been an unmitigated failure in terms of both the anticipated climate and economic benefits, we demonstrate that landfill-to-gas/energy projects have functioned effectively as geographical-discursive dispositifs through which particular knowledge systems are enrolled, specific ‘solutions’ are projected, and singular imaginaries of what is possible and desirable foregrounded, thereby crowding out alternative possibilities and more socio-ecologically just trajectories of climate mitigation. This re-enforces what Sarah Bracking called the “antipolitics of climate finance”. While the formal outcome of the CDM is a failure, its success resides in the process by which global elites have invented and created a complex set of administrative, regulatory, and technological devices articulated around solidifying and naturalizing a commoditizing neoliberal market-based approach to solve the global environmental crisis.



Erik Swyngedouw is professor of geography at the University of Manchester in the School of Environment, Education and Development. Swyngedouw has committed his studies to political economic analysis of contemporary capitalism, producing several major works on economic globalisation, regional development, finance, and urbanisation. His interests have also included political-ecological themes, and the transformation of nature, urban governance, politics of scale, notably water issues, in Ecuador, Spain, the UK, and elsewhere in Europe.His recent work focuses on the democratic politics and the strategies and tactics of new political movements, and the political ecology of desalination. He has published over 100 academic papers in leading academic journals in geography and cognate disciplines and in scholarly books.