Resumen de Bonos verdes en la ecología-mundo: capital, naturaleza y poder en la expansión financiarizada de la industria forestal en Brasil

Iagê Miola, Gabriela de Oliveira Junqueira, Flávio Marques Prol, Tomaso Ferrando, Marcela Vecchione-Gonçalves, Héctor Herrera

• español

  El presente artículo parte de un enfoque de ecología-mundo para develar y dar sentido a los bonos verdes como una herramienta en manos de las finanzas climáticas, que reproduce los patrones globales de desarrollo desigual y acumulación capitalista. A través del estudio de las emisiones de bonos verdes dirigidas a financiar el sector forestal en Brasil, se revisa cómo la dinámica ideológica, técnica y de poder detrás de dichas emisiones desencadena la acumulación de capital, y produce una construcción de la naturaleza financiarizada y subordinada. Actualmente, los bonos verdes son una de las formas más destacadas de la economía verde para intentar conciliar la “sostenibilidad ambiental” con el crecimiento dentro de los parámetros de las finanzas. Como instrumentos de deuda cuyos ingresos van destinados a financiar proyectos con supuestos beneficios ambientales, los bonos verdes ocupan ya una posición central en la narrativa y el marco político de la economía verde. El artículo reseña los bonos verdes, como uno de los temas financieros relevantes del momento, y describe las promesas y tendencias de emisiones de estos bonos, tanto en los países del Norte y del Sur, y específicamente en Brasil. Al observar las emisiones concretas en el sector forestal brasileño, el artículo muestra cómo la acumulación de capital a través de bonos verdes se asocia a coproducir la naturaleza en formas problemáticas, tanto social como ambientalmente, generando deuda no solo financiera, sino esencialmente social y ecológica. Con una combinación de enfoques micro y macro del tema, el artículo explica cómo los bonos verdes en el sector forestal exigen un arreglo institucional que combine el apoyo estatal y la gobernanza privada de la deuda en sus ámbitos financiero, social y ecológico, para que la acumulación se produzca en tales términos. Se sugiere, sin pretensión de universalidad, que el caso de los bonos verdes en el sector forestal en Brasil es un fenómeno financiero y ecológico novedoso, e ilumina el rompecabezas del capitalismo en la trama de la vida y el análisis de las nuevas fronteras de la miseria planificada.

• English

  The 2008 financial crisis opened the doors of green capitalism as a financially sound approach to saving the planet from the worst effects of the climate emergency. The emphasis on the role of finance in promoting “green growth” has permeated mainstream political, academic and business approaches to climate change adaptation and mitigation, assuming multiple forms - from the carbon markets of the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement, to the Environmental, Social and Governance taxonomy for “green” investments, to the proliferation of sustainable labels in several economic sectors. The present article offers a critical appraisal of one of the most prominent arguments that upholds the idea that it is possible and desirable to achieve sustainability and economic growth through finance: green bonds.Green bonds are debt instruments whose proceeds are earmarked to fund projects with supposedly environmental benefits. After some years in the background, they now occupy a central position in the green recovery narrative and political framework all over the world. Most of the academic literature tends to naturalize green bonds as an eminently technical solution to reconcile economic growth and environmental sustainability. Filling an epistemological gap, the present article leverages a world-ecology approach to embed the financial phenomenon of green bonds within the broader picture of the capitalist political economy and the expansion of its ecological frontier. In light of the ongoing experiences that the authors have been following in the Brazilian legal, financial and political context, the article unpacks and makes sense of green bonds as a tool in the hands of climate finance that reproduces global patterns of North-South uneven development and the shifting of ecological costs.To test the potential of the “interpretative framework” offered by a world-ecology approach, we mobilize it in the concrete case of green bonds issuances directed to fund the forestry sector in Brazil. Aware that the current phenomenon only represents a blip in comparison to the largeer temporal (the longue dureé) and spatial (the world system) scales usually deployed by world-ecology, we nonetheless discuss how the ideological, technical and power dynamics behind the issuance of green bonds unleash capital accumulation, produce a financialized and subordinated construction of nature, and entail an institutional arrangement.The article is organized around 3 main sections. After the introduction, section 1 describes green bonds as one of the most fashionable financial topics of the moment, and one that promotes a shift in discourses towards the need of actively building a “green economy”. Although from a legal standpoint green bonds embody no significant difference from regular bonds, our focus is to describe the promises around them, the current (private) governance structure, and the trends in the issuance of these debt instruments both in the Global North and South, with a specific focus on the case of Brazil.In section 2, we look at the operations of green bonds emissions on the ground, i.e. taking as an example the context of green debt underpinning the Brazilian forestry sector. The analysis reveals how the emissions, made predominantly by large multinational companies actively present on the global market, feed off great efforts deployed by both the public and the private sector in constructing an image of the sector as a key player in the emergent “bioeconomy” and in the strengthening of Brazil’s goals in the Paris Agreement. However, we describe how green bond revenues that are officially committed to the implementation of “sustainable management of forests” are associated with the expansion of the ecological frontier in the Brazilian territory, stretching the boundaries of the area dedicated to tree plantations and amplifying social and environmental tensions. The backstage of the emissions shows how capital accumulation through green bonds is associated with the co-production of nature for the purpose of accumulation, generating concerns that are often diluted or transformed into procedural requirements. Debt generated by the subscription of green bonds, we argue, is not only financial, but also social and ecological.In section 3, we put forward that for private accumulation to be successful, green bonds in the forestry sector demand an institutional arrangement that combines state support and private governance of debt in its financial, social and ecological dimensions. Rather than being the result of an idealized and spontaneous market, a set of institutional transformations have to be considered in order to comprehend the feasibility of green bonds in the Brazilian forestry sector. We thus describe the historic connection between forestry and the state, the endless public incentives to put nature to work, the functional adaptations of the Brazilian environmental legislation and the regulation concerning the demarcation, access and use of land. In this context, we argue that green bonds add yet a new institutional layer to the process of creating and validating specific forms of nature, through a governance structure that dilutes the tensions between the promise of environmental benefits and its concrete negative social and environmental impacts.We conclude the article by reassembling these findings as part of the capitalist world ecology “dialectical unity” of capital accumulation, co-production of nature and power. We suggest that the world-ecology approach allows us to grasp green bonds as a complex form that has so far been ignored in the relevant literature. As any other phenomenon of financialization, a green bond should not be understood in isolation from its material basis, since it is from that basis – and its social and environmental conditions and contradictions – that it appropriates value. As the example of the Brazilian forestry sector illuminates, the “greenness” of the financial debt inscribed in green bonds may come into existence at the expense of the social and environmental debt that underlie the forestry sector productive model.Hence, although the explicit inclusion of “environmental concerns” into financial considerations and project implementation has been praised as a step towards the recognition that finance has a material impact on the planet and that these externalities shall be accounted for, the article warns of the typical green arithmetic move put forward by green bonds. Green bonds inevitably co-produce nature and social relations, but in a very unequal way that emphasizes capital accumulation and that does not necessarily protect the environment (even when standards are introduced). Much to the contrary, green bonds may come into being at the expense of other ways of living ecologically, and by restoring injustices of the past and creating a regenerative future - in other words, by creating debt