Professor Sarah Bracking

Professor Sarah Bracking is a political economist who researches a range of issues in international development and financial geography. Historically this has included corruption and development, illicit financial flows and the offshore economy, poverty reduction, migrant remittances, and democratisation.

A constant in this research has been the study of money and finance, beginning with development finance and, since 2011, with the emerging climate finance architecture. Her last book explored the financialisation of the current global economy, the last financial crash of 2008 and how this has affected and changed structure of power and political economy, with a particular focus on southern Africa.

It also explored the roles of financial innovations and calculative technologies at emerging new frontiers of financialisation including in human and more-than-human relations and ecology.

Sarah is currently researching climate and development finance, climate insurance and the coproduction of finance and power in market structures. She is editor of Corruption and Development (Palgrave, 2007); author of Money and Power (Pluto, 2009) and The Financialisation of Power: How Financiers Rule Africa (Routledge, 2016); and co-editor with Sian Sullivan, Philip Woodhouse, and Aurora Fredrikson of Valuing Development, Environment and Conservation: Creating Values that Matter (Routledge, 2019).

Research

• Climate finance
• Development finance
• Financialisation of power
• Political economy of development in southern Africa

Sarah’s current research focuses on the signification of green in private capital markets by means of various technologies of disclosure, taxonomy and labelling in respect of themed fixed income assets, such as green bonds, transition bonds and related climate-inflected products.

A further project is exploring the operational efficacy of climate finance and climate insurance in respect of climate change adaptation and poverty reduction co-benefits projects in southern Africa.

Teaching

• 6SSG3087 Geographies of Financialisation and Value-Making (3rd year, UG, module leader)
• 5SSG2044 Development Geographies: Livelihood and Policy Contexts (2nd year, UG)
• 5SSG2063 BA Geography Research Tutorials (2nd year, UG)
• 4SSG1016 Geography in Action (1st year, UG)
• 7SSGN106 Fundamentals of Environment, Politics and Development (MSc)
• 7SSGN002 Practising Social Research (MSc)
• 7SSG5168 Vulnerability, Development and Disasters (MSc)

PhD supervision

Sarah would be pleased to consider supervising PhD students in the areas of financialisation, climate finance, development finance, climate change adaptation and poverty reduction.

Further details

See Sarah's research profile