Event Date: February 6, 2025 - 11:30am to 1:00pm
Location: FSS 4006, 120 University Private, University of Ottawa

Presented by CIPS and the International Political Economy Network (IPEN)

The concept of ‘nature-related risks’ has emerged over the last five years as a key framework for integrating biodiversity into sustainable finance knowledge and practices. Drawing on interviews, documents, and observations, Sylvain traces the key events, actors, and reports that have shaped this new ‘conceptual innovation’ for representing the unstable and contested meaning of biodiversity, particularly within the realm of ‘green central banking’ and the Network for Greening the Financial System (NGFS). He argues that nature-related risks represent a renewed ‘climatization’ of biodiversity, emerging during a new cycle of international biodiversity negotiations in the early 2020s. Through this process, biodiversity has been reframed and hybridized with the dominant domain of global environmental politics, extending the authority of climate scientists, especially climate economists, into biodiversity governance. However, this shift obscures the root causes and broader consequences of biodiversity loss. As a result, sustainable finance practices designed under this framework might paradoxically exacerbate the biodiversity degradation they aim to prevent.

This event will be in English.

Speaker:

Sylvain Maechler holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of Lausanne. He is currently a Swiss National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow, holding visiting scholar positions at Goethe University Frankfurt and the University of Ottawa for a research project on how central banks address environmental crises, particularly biodiversity loss. He is also a research fellow at the University of Lausanne. His research lies at the intersection of global environmental politics and international political economy, examining the evolution of contemporary capitalism in the face of the global environmental crises, particularly through the economic valuation of nature and other accounting, financial, and market-based instruments. His work has been published in leading journals, including the European Journal of International Relations, Global Environmental Politics, New Political Economy, and the Review of International Political Economy.

Chair:

Jacqueline Best is a Full Professor in the School of Political Studies at the University of Ottawa. Her research is at the intersection of international relations, political economy and social theory. Her current research examines the role of exceptionalism, failure, and ignorance in economic policy, tracing their evolution from the early days of neoliberalism to today.