Series Summary
This series brings together scholars researching the relationship between green finance, and the everyday experiences of violence and solidarity across the world. Green finance, understood as various models of loans and investments that ostensibly support mitigation and adaptation to climate change, is promoted by international bodies such as the United Nations and the World Bank. However, the abstraction of this language and policies involved obscures the connections to everyday practices of extraction and resistance. This series reinfuses the economics of climate change with people’s histories and agencies. Therefore, anthropologists and adjacent field scholars have a particularly apt skill set for grounding the climate finance discussion in place-based, community-informed explorations across the globe.

Episode Summary
In the first episode of this quarterly series, Fernando Leiva talks about his mapping of the finance-extractivism-climate-change-energy transition nexus focused on Chile, his country of origin. He identifies four areas of research into green financing as a material and cultural project : 1) the depolitization of climate change, veiling its true causes of this crisis; 2) the impacts of carbonization by dispossession and the concentration of wealth; 3) the further subordination of public policy to de-risking investments; and 4) the financialization of nature itself. Leiva presents his bestiario (bestiary) and chronology of financial products as an entry point to analyze the interactions between discourses and power relations in Chile, the birthplace of neoliberalism and other sociopolitical experiments in the last 50 years, and now a leader in the green finance economy. In his view, green finance is also a hegemonic myth project that presents the private sector as the social actor of the future, in an unequal field of cultural creation, against communities betting on collective forms of life. Leiva argues that critical scholarship is needed in these cultural battles of meaning making for the future.

Guest

Fernando Leiva is a Professor of Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of Califprnia, Santa Cruz. He received his PhD in Economics from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst (1998). He is the author of Latin American Neostructuralism: The Contradictions of Post-Neoliberal Development (University of Minnesota Press, 2008) and The Left Hand of Capital: Neoliberalism and the Left in Chile (SUNY Press, 2021). For the last decade, his research deploys a Critical Cultural Political Economy Perspective that examines how semiotic and material practices co-constitute reality. He uses this approach to examine newly emerging strategies with which transnational capital aims to expand the frontiers of extractivism and craft the foundations for a new capitalist hegemonic project anchored on “eco-extractivism.”

Host

Jéssica Malinalli Coyotecatl-Contreras is a University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Latin American and Latino Studies at UC Santa Cruz. She holds a PhD in Anthropology (UCSB, 2025) and a Master’s in Social Anthropology (El Colegio de Michoacán, 2013). Her work builds on the knowledge of women and Indigenous communities, at the intersection of the (built) environment, feminist political ecology, and anti-coloniality in the Americas. Her work has been featured in peer-reviewed articles and online pieces for broader audiences. She is currently working on her first manuscript “Volcanic Sustainability: Progressive Fossil Capitalism, Violent Energy Transition, and Indigenous Futurities in Mexico.”