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New Multilateral Development Banks in Turkey and Brazil: Green Lending vs. Business as Usual | Ali Rıza Güngen (York University), Stephen Nelson (Northwestern), Şeyma Kabaoğlu (Northwestern)

Register: bit.ly/may11panel

Co-sponsored by MENA and the Keyman Program

"New Multilateral Development Banks in Turkey and Brazil: Green Lending vs. Business as Usual,"

discussion panel with

Ali Rıza Güngen (York University), speaker
Şeyma Kabaoğlu (Northwestern), discussant
Stephen Nelson (Northwestern), moderator

Wednesday May 11
12pm – 1pm CT
Register: bit.ly/may11panel
 

New Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs) made it easier for global South actors to access infrastructural investment funding. While banks such as Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and New Development Bank are committed to expanding green lending, their commitment rests on using country regulatory frameworks and national intermediaries. An analysis of new MDB lending in Turkey and Brazil shows that the broader connections of the approved projects to the environmentally destructive strategies of accumulation are ignored. New MDBs simultaneously extend green finance opportunities while supporting high-risk projects. They can achieve their current green targets if they continue relying on national intermediaries and country systems, which are themselves designed with loopholes to prevent effective decarbonization.

Şeyma Kabaoğlu is a doctoral candidate in the anthropology program at Northwestern University. Her dissertation project is a long-term ethnographic study of politics of doubt and ethical finance in Turkey's Islamic participation banking industry. She examines everyday encounters of bank employees with customers and legal authorities as they challenge and enact notions of religious economic exchange. Şeyma has a BA in Economics and Sociology from Boğaziçi University in Istanbul. She is also the host and content creator of the Fidiro Kahvesi Podcast (Turkish) and the upcoming Talking Anthropology Podcast (English).

Ali Rıza Güngen is a political scientist and Middle East Studies Association Global Academy Fellow whose research focuses on dependent financialization, state transformations and public banks in the Global South. Dr. Güngen has served on the executive board of the Turkish Social Sciences Association and the editorial board of social sciences journal, Praksis. His recent research inquires the limits and possibilities of the uses of public banks for an equity-oriented post-pandemic recovery in the global South. Publications include: articles in The Journal of Peasant Studies and New Political Economy, The Political Economy of Financial Transformation in Turkey (Routledge) (co-editor), Financialization, Debt Crisis and Collapse: The Future of Global Capitalism (in Turkish) (co-author), new book Politics of Debt: Financial Inclusion in Turkey published in 2021 (in Turkish), and several other works focused on the political economy of emerging economies.

Professor Nelson’s main research and teaching interests lie in the subfields of International and Comparative Political Economy. His recent work explores a variety of topics, including the politics that shape the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) lending policies; the structure and governance of financial markets before and after the near-collapse of the American financial system in 2008; the political dynamics of developing and emerging market countries’ decisions to open their economies to international capital flows; how organizational cultures shape the behavior of international institutions; and the international organization of sovereign debt markets. His book, The Currency of Confidence: How Economic Beliefs Shape the IMF's Relationship with Its Borrowers (Cornell University Press, 2017), is based on his American Political Science Association 2010 Helen Dwight Reid Award-winning dissertation. Additional publications include: articles in International Organization, International Studies Quarterly, Review of International Political Economy, and Review of International Organizations.