Historical Perspectives on the Financialization of Sustainability

The morning session explores the last decades’ processes in which financial interests, logics, and metrics shape societal efforts toward sustainability. Reflected in the diffusion of ESG practices among investment houses and banks worldwide, and in sustainability policies of governments and other organisations, this governance financialisation process couches sustainability in for-profit investment logics and situates capital markets as a pivotal mechanism of the sustainable transition. This first session invites an interdisciplinary discussion about the historical origins, stages of development, and overall trajectory of the financialization of sustainability.

Woke Capital, Sustainability and Speculation at the End of the End of History

The afternoon session will explore the so-called “woke capitalism” and how it faces increasing backlash, causing emergence of deeper tensions over the role of finance in shaping environmental and social futures. If what we are experiencing is the end of the end of history, the meandering horizon of liberal justice has no where else to go. In the absence of imaginable collective futures, financial speculation emerges as the dominant mode of distributing authority amidst unravelling institutional frameworks. For example, the initial rise of crypto-finance promised decentralized, democratized access to capital and new models of sustainable investment. Yet, rather than disrupting financialized sustainability, cryptocurrencies have now largely become sites of pure speculation, increasingly entangled in reactionary MAGA cryptostatecraft—where libertarian fantasies of financial sovereignty collide with nationalist politics and extractive economic models. As these speculative structures deepen, this session critically assesses how speculation, as a mode of financial governance, structures the possibilities and limits of livable futures

Programme 

About the organisers

Rami Kaplan is a senior lecturer in the Departments of Sociology and Anthropology and Labor Studies, Tel Aviv University. He studies global corporate capitalism,  global governance,  global environmental politics, corporate social responsibility, corporate power, business elite networks, and the ESG movement.

Jens van 't Klooster is Assistant Professor for Political Economy at the Political Science department of the University of Amsterdam. His research focuses on the governance of financial markets. His most recent publication is ‘Planetary financial policy and the riskification of nature’ (2025 Review of International Political Economy).

Giulia Dal Maso is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the University of Venice Ca' Foscari and National University of Singapore and research fellow at The New Institute (TNI), in Hamburg. Her research focuses on the impact of financial markets on social and political spheres in post-socialist contexts. Her work has appeared in publications such as Jacobin, Historical Materialism, the Journal of Cultural Economy, South Atlantic Quarterly.

Andrea Leiter is the Acting Director of Research at the Amsterdam Center for International Law. Her current research project ‘(Re)coding Values: Decentralised Autonomous Organisations as Pathways toward Sustainable Societies?’ is funded by a VENI grant of the Dutch Research Council (2024-2027). Andrea also co-developed ecological and social justice projects at the intersection of technology, economics and governance like Sovereign Nature Initiative and A Thousand Breaths.

If you wish to attend this event, please reach out to giulia.dalmaso@unive.it or ramikaplan@tauex.tau.ac.il.