Resources: Globalisation, state and deregulation, Article

23 results
Larry Lohmann

1 February 2022

The new, “green” state/corporate system that was heralded by capitalist visionaries in the early 2020s (including Larry Fink of BlackRock, Mark Carney of the United Nations, Bill Gates of Microsoft and Elon Musk of Tesla) envisioned both an intensification and an extensification of ecological plunder and degradation. The types of centralization involved, argues this discussion paper, amounted to a great deal more than just “greenwashing,” extending to worldwide re-regulation of labour and land.

Larry Lohmann

5 July 2017

Effective research and other action in the field of environment and law requires an understanding of how profoundly both have changed under neoliberalism. The growth of the neoliberal state amid productivity crisis and the move to a more financialized, rent-based global economy has been accompanied by sweeping legal innovations relating to property, trade, investment, rent and criminality as well as an expansion in the mass of written law and in the gaming of legislation.

Trabajo, Desechos y Clima
Larry Lohmann

3 February 2017

What are the effects of capital’s restless attempts to appropriate unpaid cleanup work done by humans and the rest of nature? Neglect of this question has led to repeated confusions about what waste is and how it might better be approached. A refreshed perspective is especially important in an era in which discussions about solid waste have come to focus largely on landfills and climate discussions to focus on real or imaginary carbon sinks.

Institutionalised Corruption and Development Finance
Nicholas Hildyard

13 December 2016

Many lawful, routine, accepted practices in today's economic system are regarded by the general public as corrupt. They have created a distorted, privatised vision of the “public interest” and represent a new trend of state capture by for-profit interests.

Nicholas Hildyard

13 December 2016

This presentation challenges the current rush towards mega infrastructure projects that are being planned the world over as a means of boosting economic recovery.

Nicholas Hildyard

1 October 2016

This article is drawn from the book Licensed Larceny.

Undemocratic, elitist and unstable
Nicholas Hildyard

27 August 2016

This short blog highlights the financial guarantees underpinning today's boom in infrastructure spending.

Nicholas Hildyard

16 November 2015

A background paper (available on request) details the stark divide between rich and poor nationally, regionally and internationally, as value has been progressively extracted over the past few decades from ordinary people.

Shadow Bankers in London
Nicholas Hildyard

1 October 2012

In June 2010, the London Mining Network and The Corner House organized a "Hedge Fund Tour" through London's tony Mayfair district, home of many of the private financial institutions at the heart of the wave of dispossessions that followed in the wake of the 2008 crisis. 

Variations on Polanyian Themes
Larry Lohmann

16 July 2010

One lesson the financial crisis teaches us is: beware of the new carbon markets that constitute today's main official response to climate change. These markets are startlingly similar to the financial derivatives markets that have thrown banking systems into a tailspin. (German version also available.)


Mercados de incertidumbres y mercados de carbono: variaciones en temas de Polanyi

Una de las lecciones que la crisis financiera nos enseña es a tener cuidado con los nuevos mercados de carbono que constituyen hoy la principal respuesta oficial al cambio climático. Este artículo de la revista New Political Economy argumenta que estos mercados son sorprendentemente similares a los mercados de derivados financieros que arrojaron a los sistemas bancarios al caos en 2008.

The Rise of Carbon Trading
Larry Lohmann

22 July 2009

Carbon permit prices flashing on electronic screens in Wall Street trading rooms reflect a complex political movement to reorganize and redistribute power and knowledge. The carbon markets associated with the Kyoto Protocol, the EU Emissions Trading Scheme and the US's Waxman-Markey Act constitute perhaps the last great class project of a waning neoliberal regime – the ill-fated attempt to privatize the climate itself.


El neoliberalismo y el mundo calculable: El ascenso del comercio de carbono

Los precios de los derechos de emisión de dióxido de carbono que aparecen en las pantallas de las computadoras de Wall Street reflejan un movimiento político complejo para reorganizar y redistribuir el poder y el conocimiento. Los mercados de carbono del Protocolo de Kioto y el Esquema del Comercio de Emisiones de la Unión Europea son uno de los últimos grandes proyectos del neoliberalismo – un intento malhadado de privatizar el clima. Este capítulo del libro, "El neoliberalismo y el mundo calculable: El ascenso del comercio de carbono", describe las contradicciones del intento de formar una mercancía con el clima.

Activism, Expertise, Commons
Larry Lohmann

27 September 2005

Seeing social or technical change as the application of new "theory" to "practice" is one of the hazards of 21st-century middle-class life. Middle-class activists could take a leaf from both expert elites and grassroots movements, who both tend to know better.

Sarah Sexton

11 May 2003

The World Trade Organisation's General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) could have a significant effect on human health, and health care services.

New Tensions and Resolutions over Land
Larry Lohmann

31 January 2002

Multilateral agencies have been promoting the commoditization of land in the Mekong region. How is this project being advanced and resisted?

Alan Simpson MP and Nicholas Hildyard

2 February 1999

This article argues that companies seeking public money in the form of grants or subsidies should put forward proposals which can be subject to public scrutiny and accountability.

Dramatic U-Turn or Clever Repositioning?
Nicholas Hildyard

1 June 1997

The package of economic reforms that the World Bank has promoted in recent years -- from privatisation of state or public services and assets to deregulation of labour and environmental laws -- has, in theory, been intended to remove the state from all but a minimal role in the national economy. The best government is considered to be the least government. Yet the practical outcome of these free-market policies has been to increase and redirect the state’s power in favour of transnational interests. Resistance to the “free market state” is growing, as is the demand that the state’s powers be used to protect the interests and rights of citizens, not corporations.

Changing Landscapes of Corporate Control
Nicholas Hildyard

1 July 1996

In the drive to become “competitive”, companies are restructuring their operations on a global scale. It is not companies which are competing, however, but workers and communities, pitted against each other as companies relocate from one country to another in search of new markets, the weakest trade unions, the most flexible rules on working conditions and the largest subsidies. It is time to question the notion that export-led growth and enhanced corporate competitiveness is the route to employment and to press instead for an economy that protects people and the commons rather than corporations.

The World Bank and the Private Sector
Nicholas Hildyard

1 July 1996

Increasingly, multilateral development banks are funding private companies to undertake projects, underwriting the investments through guarantees or providing loans direct to the companies involved. Development is effectively being “privatised”. For companies, a raft of new “corporate welfare” programmes are on offer.

Nicholas Hildyard

1 June 1996

Transnational companies develop extensive networks so they can fashion the political infrastructure that permits them to capture subsidies, manage demand, create new markets, centralize power, enclose new environments, and evade, digest and regulate resistance.

Contention and Resistance in Intercultural Space
Larry Lohmann

1 September 1995

Different actors -- transnational corporations, political and technocratic elites, their opponents and others -- contend with and influence what is loosely called “globalization” in different ways. Constructive and engaged understanding of the power struggles between them all and their resources, motivations, dynamics, strategies, effectiveness, and capacities for alliances requires coming to grips with the ways in which they interpret and present their own struggles.

Approaching Thailand’s “Environmental” Struggles from a Western Starting Point
Larry Lohmann

1 April 1994

Westerners wanting to engage in effective international campaigning often will need to question their very conceptions of what social movements are.

Larry Lohmann

1 November 1993

This opinion piece shows how environmental activists, ecological economists, development experts and deep green theorists tell self-serving and one-sided stories about Noble Savages, Eastern religions, “traditional communities” and ordinary householders. This "Green Orientalism" both arises from and perpetuates power imbalances. It must be constantly challenged by stories told from other points of view.

Villagers, NGOs and the Thai Forestry Sector Master Plan
Larry Lohmann

1 July 1993

Disputes over a forestry master plan formulated for Thailand by Finnish consultants and others illustrate how environmental conflicts are often settled by translating concerns and suggestions in procedures acceptable to the more powerful.