Module description
This module aims to enable students to understand how money and finance, and processes of global political economy more broadly, enable, shape and condition the way development, environmental governance and conservation are practiced in sub-Saharan Africa. The module will draw on economic geography, but also social, financial and cultural geography, anthropology, development studies and work on society and environment relations. Although the module will have a major reference to sub-Saharan Africa - including Uganda, Kenya, Madagascar, Zimbabwe and South Africa - it will also include examples of financialization, conservation and eco-system services from the UK, the Caribbean and Asia. In your essay assessment you will be able to specialise in a domain of financialisation such as infrastructure, conservation, environment or climate.
This module invites students to consider the opportunities and challenges that money and finance contribute to human endeavours aimed at improving the lives of other humans, adapting to and mitigating the effects of environmental and climate change, and to conserving Nature and wildlife. Students will draw on the knowledge and experience gained over the course of their undergraduate degree to more specifically study the economic and financial contexts of human interventions aimed at public goods in the domains of development, environment and conservation. Students will become familiar with a wide and exacting range of geographical theory and concepts from contemporary relational ontologies, including work from performative economics and economic sociology, actor network theory, financial and cultural geography and from a wide range of key contemporary thinkers in the society and environment fields. The focus on finance, money and value-making will bring these elements together in an examination of the material practices, technologies, value-making and framing devices that condition whether humans, environments and more-than-human geographies can ‘pay-to-stay’ in our disciplining global political economy. The module will also encourage students to develop their communication skills in the areas of oral presentation, written argument, and group-work. Most, but not all, of the examples and case studies used to illustrate and substantiate the theoretical material will be from sub-Saharan Africa, but within the context of global texts on finance and political economy.
The course will draw on international development, economic sociology, political economy and political ecology and draw these together for a human geography framing of current economy-culture and society-environment relations important to human development and environmental conservation. The first block of lectures, weeks 1 to 3, will be theoretical and introduce the global political economy, financialization, and discrete domains of development, climate and environmental finance.
Lectures 4 to 8 will then become more specifically engaged with value-making and the financialisation of Nature using some examples and case studies. These include payments for ecosystem services and derivatives from land and standing forests, biodiversity offsetting, habitat banking, species bonds, green bonds and the financialisation of water. We will also cover some more cultural concerns such as the valuation of landscape and ‘being by the sea’. Maud Borie, Alex Loftus and Andrew Brooks will bring in their wealth of theoretical and empirical experience to add to the cases we consider.
The final two weeks, 9 and 10, will return more broadly to the geography of modern finance, territorial governance and the implications of the emerging infrastructure of finance on future spatial geographies. This will also cover the material infrastructure of finance, such as colocation facilities, high frequency trading, and the increasingly complex cybernetic interface of geography and finance, with geographic algorithms and weather and disaster modelling joining the informational feeds of computer trading ‘ecosystems’. The last lecture will engage with the contemporary debate over geographic materialities, more-than-human geographies and relational ontologies.
Assessment details
Presentation summary (15%); Coursework (85%)
Educational aims & objectives
The specific aims of the module are:
- To provide students with a more advanced understanding of the development and conservation domains, and how these are theorised within human geography, economic geography and more-than-human geographies
- To provide students with an advanced technical understanding of global financialisation processes, climate and development finance and value and valuation in development, environment and conservation interventions
- To provide students with an understanding of selected, advanced concepts from within relational ontologies, including affect, assemblages, animism, actor network theory and performativity
- To enhance students' ability to work in groups and make persuasive oral and written presentations
Learning outcomes
By the end of the module students will be able to:
- Demonstrate knowledge of financialisation, development finance, climate finance and conservation finance in respect of development, environment and conservation
- Understand affect, calculative devices, assemblages and socio-technical arrangements in the context of value-making in environment and species conservation
- Apply their knowledge of finance, value, technologies and socio-technical arrangements to the contemporary practices of human development and Nature and wildlife conservation
- Work cooperatively with others to developing and present ideas in development and conservation
Teaching pattern
10 hrs lectures; 10 hrs seminars