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Greening Urban Development with Debt: The Emergence of Green Financialised Urban Entrepreneurialism in Sweden

7 maj 2024 09:15 till 11:00 | Seminarium

Portrait of Özlem Celik — Özlem Çelik at the Pufendorf IAS

Welcome to a lecture and seminar with Özlem Çelik, a Critical Urban Studies scholar with an interest in the political economy of housing, local governing, climate financialisation, urban activism and commons. In this seminar, we invite anyone who is interested in learning more about financialization, a term which has become popular in academic circles as well as in everyday life. Among the questions addressed in the seminar are: what is financialization? How does financialization impact urban development and housing? What are the new forms of financialization under the impact of economic and climate crises? Based on the ongoing research of Çelik, a discussion will be held regarding the use of new 'green' financialized tools, resulting in a sharp increase in municipal debt, to fund the transition of Swedish municipalities to a sustainable future.

Funding the transition towards sustainable – so-called green – urban provision poses a major challenge for local and regional authorities worldwide. Shouldering this task, Swedish regions, municipalities, and municipal companies have taken a global front-runner position to expand the volume of green urban investments by accessing capital with Green Bonds. Today, 20 municipalities and regions are engaged in Green Bond financing amounting to a total debt of SEK 134 billion (€ 1.173 billion) (Kommuninvest, 2023). Notably, over 40% of the outstanding loans from the municipal-owned bank, Kommuninvest – the holder of 59% of Sweden's total municipal debt – comprise Green Bonds. Examining the green municipal indebtedness in Sweden through secondary document analysis of selected municipalities, Çeliks research contributes to the emerging critical scholarship on green financialisation of urban environments and infrastructures at the local level. Drawing from three theoretical frameworks: capital switching, urbanistion of capital, and financialisation, she investigates the phenomenon of green municipal indebtedness in terms of:

1) how it furthers the penetration of finance capital into the production of urban space,

2) how the enabling conditions for the indebtedness are created by long-term neoliberal policy and austerity, including underinvestment in the municipal sector,

3) to what extent it creates new financial risks and pressures for the municipal sector, and

4) what are the possible sustainability outputs economically and socially.

By delving into these aspects, our argument posits that the green municipal indebtedness reflects the emergence of a new form of green financialized urban entrepreneurialism.

BIO:
Özlem Çelik is a visiting scholar at the University of Helsinki and a Senior Researcher at the Department of Social Research, University of Turku and Turku Institute for Advanced Studies (TIAS) Collegium Fellow. She is currently visiting the Pufendorf IAS as part of a newly established exchange program of Nord IAS´s Fellows.

Çelik received her Ph.D. degree from the University of Sheffield, Urban Studies and Planning Department, after she received her MA in Sociology, Middle East Technical University and her BA in Urban and Regional Planning, Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, Turkey. Previously, she held research and teaching positions in political science, human geography, sustainability science, international relations and global development studies in different universities of UK, Turkey, Sweden and Finland. She is the co-founder and co-director of NUPE and Urban and Regional Political Economy Working Group, IIPPE.

Coffee and a little something to eat will be served, please register here