St Catharine's Political Economy Seminar - -Professor Hulya Dagdeviren State - capital relations in the age of climate change: the case of blended finance for renewables

Speaker: Professor Hulya Dagdeviren, University of Hertfordshire
Series: St Catharine's Political Economy Seminar Series

Speaker: Professor Hulya Dagdeviren

Talk Title: State - capital relations in the age of climate change: the case of blended finance for renewables

Time: 18:00 -19:30

Location: Ramsden room, St Catharine's College

The seminar series is supported by the Cambridge Political Economy Society and the Economics and Policy Group at the Cambridge Judge Business School.

Talk Overview:

The blended finance approach is increasingly promoted as a catalytic model that uses public funds to mobilise private capital for sustainable development. In this seminar, I draw on experiences from blended finance projects in the renewable energy sector at both national and international levels. I argue that framing blended finance as the only viable option for financing the transition is a form of statecraft that responds to a recent conjuncture, characterised by several developments. The first concerns the changing role of the state, including its growing incapacity to plan, finance, and build large-scale infrastructure projects, which limits its ability to pursue major public policy goals through direct provision. The second concerns the transformation of financial systems towards non-bank finance, especially the growing role of institutional investors and asset managers with control over large pools of investable funds. The third concerns the experience of—and failures associated with—earlier forms of public-private partnership, and the implications of these experiences for contemporary state-capital relations. Within this conjuncture, blended finance liberates politically unwilling, technically incapacitated and/or financially conservative states to commission private finance to deliver their goals. In turn, private finance benefits from the multiple functions the state and its agencies perform as market makers, partners with skin in the game and providers of various de-risking measures.

Speaker Overview:

Hulya Dagdeviren is a Professor of Economic Development at the University of Hertfordshire. She is also the Editor-in-Chief of Competition and Change, an interdisciplinary journal that publishes high-quality research on political economy. She has led international projects funded by the EU and the UK government and served as a consultant to the United Nations Development Programme. As an interdisciplinary researcher, she draws on the theories of political economy, economic geography and social policy. Her research focuses on two main areas. The first concerns the governance of environmental resources and the green transition, with particular emphasis on energy and water services. The second examines the impacts of the 2008 financial crisis and subsequent austerity programmes, with particular attention to the challenges associated with household and local government debt