Description

This session invites presenters to consider the potential to achieve ecological repair through capital switching: moving investment from commodity production or pure speculation into projects that contribute to more desirable socioecological futures. Geographers have charted the limits, contradictions, and perverse outcomes of attempts to fund climate-safe infrastructure, decarbonization, or stem biodiversity loss through market mechanisms and private investment, demonstrating that these techniques often fail to achieve their environmental goals while dispossessing or heaping risk on those already bearing the inequitable costs of reproducing capitalism. On the whole, our collective scholarship on these questions paints a bleak picture. However, if we hope to contribute to building different, better, or just more survivable worlds, critical geographers must also contend with the realities of entrenched market logics, the concentration of capital in the accounts of financiers, and the unwillingness or inability of most states to reckon with the magnitude of changes required. In this session we want to explore empirical cases and hear experimental conceptualizations of projects that switch actually-existing capital into processes that lead not to the reproduction of capitalism, but to forms of durable socioecological repair.