The Principal Investigator on the 'Rethinking the Market' project is Matthew Watson. I am Professor of Political Economy in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Warwick. As befits the award of an ESRC Professorial Fellowship, I have sole responsibility for ensuring the successful completion of all aspects of the underlying project. Nonetheless, I am seeking to build additional capacity within my specialist subject field of International Political Economy around the questions that animate both this specific project and my research interests Link opens in a new windowin general. My intention, then, is to build a team to outlast the lifetime of my Fellowship so that further progress can be made in establishing historical, history of ideas and historiography approaches more centrally within IPE.

In an attempt to promote this sort of work amongst early career cohorts, I am seeking to incorporate both PhD students and Postdoctoral Fellows into the wider intellectual orbit of the project. I am always looking to extend my project team still further. I remain happy to help sponsor applications for both PhD studentships and Postdoctorial Fellowships nature if they directly complement the programme of work I am undertaking for my Professorial Fellowship.

 

RECENTLY COMPLETED PROJECT-FUNDED PhD STUDENTS

 

Jack Copley successfully defended his PhD in December 2018. He started his programme in October 2014 on an ESRC studentship as one of my project-funded students and was co-supervised by Ben CliftLink opens in a new window. His thesis was entitled, 'Financialisation and the State: Global Crisis and British Financial Regulatory Change'. Jack is currently an Assistant Professor in International Political Economy at Durham UniversityLink opens in a new window.

His Synopsis: My research explores the political governance of ‘financialisation’ – a term that denotes the expanding role of financial markets at various scales of contemporary capitalism, from global economic structures to the mundanities of everyday life. My PhD thesis examined the motivations that led the British state to propel this phenomenon in the 1970s and 1980s through four crucial policy measures: the 1971 Competition and Credit Control experiment, the 1979 abolition of exchange controls, the 1986 Big Bang deregulation, and the 1986 Financial Services Act. Much of the political economy literature explains the British state’s reasons for pursuing financial liberalisation by pointing to the role of financial sector lobbying efforts and the growing influence of neoliberal governance norms. My thesis challenged this through a detailed examination of recently-released archives from the government, Bank of England, and lobby groups. My findings indicated that financial liberalisation measures were not taken in response to elite lobbying or as part of a broad neoliberal blueprint, but rather constituted ad hoc, pragmatic attempts to address immediate governing dilemmas caused by the stagflation crisis. This research suggests that analyses of the state’s role in propelling financialisation must be rooted in a broader theory of the state’s governance of capitalism’s crisis-prone development. Find me on academia.eduLink opens in a new window.

 

Javier Moreno Zacares successfully defended his PhD in December 2018. He started his programme in October 2014 on an ESRC studentship as one of my project-funded students and was co-supervised by Chris ClarkeLink opens in a new window. His thesis was entitled, 'The Political in Political Economy: Historicising the Great Crisis of Spanish Residential Capitalism'. Javier is currently an Assistant Professor in International Political Economy at Durham UniversityLink opens in a new window.

His Synopsis: My research expertise lies at the intersections of political economy and historical sociology, where I have developed two related strands of research. (1) The first strand explores the historical roots of the Spanish housing crash
within the broader crisis of the Eurozone. This is the focus of my doctoral thesis. The main contribution of this work is a new narrative of the Spanish housing crash centred around the historical and political sociology of Spanish residential capitalism, with a focus on historical institutional legacies and on the class politics of urban clientelism. (2) The second strand of my research intervenes in the theoretical debate on how to conceptualise capitalism itself. Using the method I have developed in my work on the housing crisis, I argue that the origins of Spanish capitalism are to be sought in eighteenth-century Catalonia and not, as previous scholars have argued, either in the Empire of the sixteenth century or in the liberal state of the nineteenth century. Rather than as two parallel avenues of research, I see both strands as part of a single research agenda, unified by the overarching theme of how to use history to understand, and explore alternatives to, contemporary political economy. Building on these foundations, my next research project seeks a comparative outlook. Exploring the historical development of British, German, and Spanish property markets, I will put these experiences in conversation with one another in order to reinterpret our understanding of what residential capitalism is and how it works. My published work can be found on my academia.eduLink opens in a new window page.

 

ONGOING PROJECT-LINKED PhD STUDENTS

 

Jessica Eastland-Underwood started on the programme in October 2020 with a University of Warwick PAIS PhD studentship. Her thesis is provisionally entitled, 'How did everyday understandings of the economy mobilise protesters during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States of America?’ I co-supervise her with Chris ClarkeLink opens in a new window.

Her Synopsis: My research is interested in what people mean when they say ‘the economy’. My project is inspired, in part, by rhetoric from both the Reopen the Economy and Black Lives Matter protests describing the economy and economics. I argue these everyday descriptions indicate a more complex understanding than the one often featured in existing top-down studies of understandings of the economy. The existing literature evaluates ‘lay’ understandings based on concepts as defined by economists, privileging economistic conceptions. Utilising novel, pluralistic methodologies, I will ask everyday Americans to explain their experience of the economy in their own words. I contend that the salience of the economy in American political life is the consequence of an attempt to constitute an ideal of the citizen as an economistic actor. I anticipate that the everyday understandings of the economy will expose the residue of the Polanyian economistic fallacy, confusing the substantive economy for its market form. The ultimate aim of my research is contributing to a body of knowledge that seeks to understand the economy in a way that is more reflective of the lived experience of the people who constitute it.

  

RECENTLY COMPLETED PROJECT-LINKED PhD STUDENTS

 

Fabian Pape started on the '1' year of his '1+3' programme in October 2017 on an ESRC Doctoral Training Partnership scholarship and a University of Warwick PAIS PhD studentship. His thesis was entitled, 'The Macrofinancial Turn in Central Banking: Money Market Changes and Federal Reserve Policy after the Global Financial Crisis'. He sat his viva in December 2022 and was awarded his PhD without the need to undertake any corrections. I co-supervised him with Chris ClarkeLink opens in a new window. Fabian is currently an LSE Fellow at the London School of EconomicsLink opens in a new window.

His Synopsis: Following the global financial crisis, the Federal Reserve has taken on broader responsibilities in macroeconomic management and financial stability policy. While the existing literature has tended to analyse these new functions separately, I bring them together at the level of money market strategy. To that end, the thesis analyses the impact of the Fed’s expanded money market footprint between 2008 and 2020. I show how questions of liquidity governance impart important shortcomings on the central bank’s overall money market strategy. As monetary policy, fiscal policy, and financial stability imperatives become increasingly entangled in the organisation of market liquidity, they impose conflicting demands on central bank policy that cannot be easily reconciled within existing policy frameworks. As the result of this impasse, the Federal Reserve has generally pursued a hands-off approach to complex policy issues, notably by relying on its market-accommodating rather than market-shaping capacities, or what is now increasingly called a de-risking strategy. In raising questions about potential contradictions built into the Fed’s macrofinancial policy framework, the thesis highlights the politics that inhere in the organisation of highly technical market interventions. To explain the transformation of Fed policy, I draw on two conceptual developments. First, I employ a critical macrofinance lens to view the quintessential task of central banking not simply as reacting to changes in inflation with interest rate measures, but more broadly as ensuring a certain level of liquidity within the system. Analytically, this shifts the focus of attention away from the central bank’s role in affecting macroeconomic aggregates—such as inflation, employment, or growth—and towards a macrofinancial understanding of the interactions between central banks and private finance. Second, and drawing on this approach, I link transformations in market microstructure to macro-level transformations in central banking by analysing how central bankers problematise the role and governance of liquidity within financial markets. I show that while liquidity continues to be understood primarily as a technical question of ensuring stability within the financial system, the governance of liquidity entails highly political questions of market organisation that shape how policymakers navigate and negotiate the contradictions between various policy interests.

 

Guillaume Beaumier successfully defended his PhD in his online examination in April 2021. He started his programme in January 2017 on an Erasmus Mundus GEM-STONES studentship. He was co-supervised between the Universities of Warwick in the UK and Laval in Canada, as well as having a six-month internship with McKinsey in Brussels. I was his Warwick supervisor and Jean-Frédéric MorinLink opens in a new window was his Laval supervisor. His thesis is entitled, 'The Evolution of Privacy Regulation: Convergence and Divergence in the Transatlantic Space'. He began a two-year Postdoctoral Fellowship at Georgetown UniversityLink opens in a new window, Washington DC in the autumn of 2021, following a successful application to the Fonds de Recherche du Québec.

His Synopsis: My research explores how regulatory issues arising from the development of e-commerce are being governed. In doing so, I question the European Union's ability to shape the ‘rules of the game’ in a complex international environment. I furthermore examine how interactions between public and private regulations are influencing each other.

Through this work, I argue that international political economy scholars should go further than recognise the inherent complexity of the international realm and adopt the analytical tools put forward by complexity theory. I expect that this theoretical approach will allow me to produce an original contribution to the academic research being done on both e-commerce and global governance. It should notably contribute to critically reappraise the extensive use of neoliberal economic principles in the study of international political economy.

 

Leo Steeds successfully defended his PhD at an examination held at the University of Warwick in January 2020. He started his programme in October 2015 on an ESRC Doctoral Training Centre studentship and was co-supervised with Stuart EldenLink opens in a new window. His thesis was entitled, 'Earth, Property, Territory: The Birth of an Economic Concept of Land'. In January 2023, Leo will begin a two-year Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Glasgow on the Adam Smith @ 300 project.

His Synopsis: In recent years responses to a broad range of environmental issues, from climate change to conservation, have frequently been phrased in terms of the need to create markets for environmental 'goods'. Such schemes, heralding from the tradition of neoclassical economics, have frequently been shown to be problematic when put into practice. My research seeks to offer a critique of market-based approaches to environmental degradation by questioning the historical conditions of possibility of conceptualising the natural world as external to the sphere of economy. To do this, I interrogate economic thought of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in order to understand the conceptions of nature which informed the development of the modern notion of economy. I am particularly interested in the significance of land as a central category in eighteenth century economic thought, and its subsequent decline as a concern of economists through the nineteenth century. The research highlights the problematic nature of conceiving environment in terms of economy, and points to a need to re-think conventional notions of the market economy if we are to make progress on the most pressing environmental issues of today.

 

Lorenzo Genito successfully defended his PhD at an examination held at the University of Warwick in January 2019. He started his programme in October 2014 on a University of Warwick Development and Alumni Relations Office studentship and was co-supervised with Ben CliftLink opens in a new window. His thesis was entitled, 'What Markets Fear: Understanding the European Sovereign Debt Crisis through the Lens of Repo Market Liquidity'.

His Synopsis: This study calls into question the use of sovereign bond yield differentials (spread) as an indicator of fear of default during the euro crisis. I argue that the literature exhibits an important gap in its understanding of the mechanisms underpinning the provision of bank funding in the euro area through its fixation with the fear of sovereign default as the key driver of spread. On the one hand, sovereign bonds are the main source of collateral in repo contracts, which banks use to access short-term funding in the euro area. On the other hand, central counterparty clearing houses (CCPs) clear a significant proportion of repo trades in the euro area, which means that these companies play a fundamental (yet neglected) role in the connection between sovereign debt and bank funding in Europe. One of the arguments I make in my thesis is that the specific form of European financial integration enacted under the auspices of EU rules exposed sovereign debt markets to systemic vulnerabilities. Indeed, the key finding of my study is that the sudden increase in collateral requirements by LCH.Clearnet, the world’s largest CCP, reduced the liquidity of Irish, Portuguese, Italian and Spanish sovereign bonds as collateral to access short-term funding in repo transactions, leading to bond sell-offs that destabilised sovereign debt markets. I conclude that the widening of the spreads from 2010 to 2012 was therefore also an indication of investors’ concerns with funding liquidity risk, and not only of fear of sovereign default. More broadly, the analysis developed in my project problematises our understanding of market behaviour during the euro crisis, as well as highlighting the relevance of CCPs and the repo market for global financial stability.

 

David Yarrow successfully defended his PhD at an examination held at the University of Warwick in December 2018. He started his programme in October 2014 on an ESRC Doctoral Training Centre studentship and was co-supervised with Ben CliftLink opens in a new window and Christopher HolmesLink opens in a new window of King's College London. His thesis was entitled, 'Accounting Against the Economy: The Beyond GDP Agenda and the Limits of the 'Market Mentality''. David began a fifteen-month post in February 2019 in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Edinburgh, as a Research Fellow Supporting REF Impact Case Studies. Before the end of that contract, he applied successfully for a permanent Lectureship in Political EconomyLink opens in a new window in the same Department.

His Synopsis: My research investigates the political agenda to reform GDP and national accounting which has emerged since the financial crisis. In particular I study post-growth statistical initiatives by the UK government, the EU and the OECD. I locate these trends within a wider questioning of growth as the central development paradigm following the financial crisis, with governance institutions and NGOs increasingly interested in developing statistical evidence about the broader dimensions of economic ‘progress’, sustainability and the good life. Drawing on the ideas of Karl Polanyi, I examine how ideas about the nature of the economy and its relationship with society are evolving as a result of these initiatives, and the role market ideology plays in mediating these dynamics. I am interested in the implications of these developments for the prospects of a post-growth political economy with a broader vision of livelihood at its core.

 

Andrew Anzur Clement successfully defended his PhD at the Université Libre de Bruxelles in November 2017. He conducted his doctoral research between 2014 and 2017 within the framework of the Erasmus Mundus GEM School double degree programme at the ULB and Warwick. He was co-supervised by Amandine CrespyLink opens in a new window at ULB. His thesis was entitled, 'An Integration of Discord: How National Identity Conceptions Activate Resistance to EU Integration in the Popular Press Discourses of Poland, Spain and Great Britain'.

His Synopsis: I am a political scientist with research and teaching interestsLink opens in a new window relating to EU studies and communication studies. More specifically, I focus on the relationship between national boundaries and identity conception. My doctoral research centres on the complex interlinkages between national identity and interests, as they relate to attitudes towards European integration in the context of the Union's single market for persons. The findings showed that the manner in which identity influences interest perception causes the news media to emphasise events that seem deviant or threatening. The resulting narratives could stand to create moral panics within national societies. These narratives innately suggest the 'proper stance' one should take if an apparent threat is to be resolved. I have published articles in the Eastern Journal of European StudiesLink opens in a new window and East European Politics and SocietiesLink opens in a new window that begin to showcase my thesis findings. In future research, I plan to focus on prospects for the construction of common identity through analysing mass-mediated discursive constructions of 'Europe' as a common space for movement in relation to its outsides.

 

Lauren Tooker is an Early Career Fellow at the Institute of Advanced StudyLink opens in a new window at the University of Warwick. She completed her PhD in 2017 on an Erasmus Mundus GEM School studentship under co-supervision between Warwick and the Université Libre de Bruxelles. She was co-supervised at Warwick by Lena RethelLink opens in a new window and at the ULB by Firouzeh NahavandiLink opens in a new window. It was awarded the 2018 Jean Blondel PhD Prize for best thesis submitted throughout Europe by ECPR, the European Consortium for Political Research. Her thesis is entitled, 'Ordinary Democracy: Reading Resistances to Debt after the Global Financial Crisis with Stanley Cavell’s Ordinary Language Philosophy’. Lauren passed her PhD without corrections.

Her Synopsis: I am a political economist focused on the everyday politics of finance, with research and teaching interests in cultural economy, ethics, and the finance-security relation. My doctoral research explored how people are dissenting from market relations of debt in the wake of the global financial crisis. It showed how debt is being reshaped as a collective ethical and political bond, even as it remains an individual bind, by people acting
within and against the vulnerabilities wrought by financialisation and longer histories of injustice. My latest research examines the contemporary turn to digital technologies and data politics to secure financial relationships between citizens and the state.

 

Lisa Tilley began a three-year Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at Queen Mary University of London in September 2017, having previously held a Newton-funded postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Warwick. She subsequently took up a permanent lecturing post at Birkbeck College in the autumn of 2018, and then a Lectureship in Development StudiesLink opens in a new window at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London.

Lisa successfully defended her PhD in January 2017. She started her programme in October 2012 on an Erasmus Mundus GEM School studentship under co-supervision between Warwick and the Université Libre de Bruxelles. She was co-supervised at Warwick by Lena RethelLink opens in a new window and at the ULB by Firouzeh NahavandiLink opens in a new window. Her thesis was entitled, 'The Condition of Market Emergence in Indonesia: Coloniality as Exclusion and Translation'. Lisa passed her PhD without corrections following her examination in January 2017.

Her synopsis: My researchLink opens in a new window explores the interrelations between regimes of difference, physical space, and the extension of (and resistance to) market forms of life. This work has taken shape through my research encounters in Indonesia as well as through an engagement with postcolonial and decolonial theory. Within decolonial thought, broadly conceived, attention is paid to forms of difference (racial, cultural, aesthetic, ethical, epistemic) and to the temporal and hierarchical organisation of these forms of difference. My work considers the role of these constructed hierarchies in processes of commodification (especially of knowledge, land, and labour), and related processes of dispossession. My fieldwork in Indonesia has taken place in terminable sites (urban slums and rural settlements) and has revealed how spatial relations underpin ways of being – such that displacements and dispossession can provoke ontological translations within social groups.

 

Filip Brkovic started his programme in October 2011 on an Erasmus Mundus GEM School studentship under co-supervision between Warwick and the Université Libre de Bruxelles. He was co-supervised at the ULB by Jean Luc De MeulemeesterLink opens in a new window. He passed his PhD without corrections in December 2015. His thesis was entitled, 'An Assessment of Possibilities for Stronger Inclusion of Upper-Middle-Income Economies in the Fairtrade System - Case Study Serbia'. Exceptionally sadly, Filip died suddenly just one month after his succesful viva.

His Synopsis: My PhD researchLink opens in a new window is focused on the Fairtrade system and how market regulation through the Fairtrade price has the potential to reshape the market experience of poor and marginalised agricultural producers. This is a form of private governance that mimics some of the broader social structures of neoliberalism whilst at the same time challenging a number of neoliberal political logics. In this way it holds distinct possibilities for creating a fairer global economic system and more just outcomes within the sphere of international trade. However, to fully exploit this potential, I argue, it is necessary for more attention to be paid to the group of upper-middle-income economies of the Global North that are currently excluded from the Fairtrade system as producers. I use the example of Serbia as one of these producer-excluded countries to challenge the current limits of the Fairtrade system and to show how the capacity of that system to influence market outcomes would be extended through the development of a Fairtrade-like system on the national level.

 

Tobias Pforr is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow on the FATHUMLink opens in a new window project at the University of Reading, following two successful stints as a Teaching Fellow at the University of Warwick, a year as an Institute of Advanced StudyLink opens in a new window Early Career Fellow and research fellowships at both Warwick Business School and University College London. From June 2018 he is employed as the sole social scientist on a NERCLink opens in a new window-funded project called Forecasts for Anticipatory Humanitarian ActionLink opens in a new window. He started his PhD programme in October 2011 on an Erasmus Mundus GEM School studentship under co-supervision between Warwick and Libera Università Internazionale degli Studi Sociali Guido Carli di Roma. His co-supervisor at LUISS was Sebastiano MaffettoneLink opens in a new window. His thesis was entitled, 'Meaning Construction and the Socialisation of Economic Ideas: An Autobiographical Approach', and he successfully sat his viva in December 2015. Tobias is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the European University InstituteLink opens in a new window in Florence.

His Synopsis: My research conceptualises the production and transmission of economic knowledge and ideas in contemporary Anglo-Saxon societies. In comparison to the fully formed economic agents of standard economic theory, actual persons need to learn what it means to act economically and to envision themselves within a variety of different markets. This learning process continually takes place through multiple, overlapping, and often contradictory processes of socialisation and internalisation. My work explores a number of dimensions to such processes and their consequences for individuals. One dimension concerns the role of economics courses at university; another the role of popular culture (novels, films, and magazines) in fostering and subverting particular economic ideas; yet another connects these issues to Johan Galtung’s theory of violence. In each of these instances I analyse what the concept of the market might be taken to mean. Contrary to the widespread opinion that the concept of the market simply refers to the place of exchange, I demonstrate that it has in fact a number of very different meanings. Different commentators often employ the term with different meanings in mind without being aware that this is the case. The result is that many disagreements about what markets are and how they function are simply misunderstandings about what a person is trying to say. A first step towards a better public debate about the nature and goals of economic systems should therefore be an awareness of what the concept of the market means in different cases and of how to talk clearly about it.

 

Nick Taylor is currently a Research FellowLink opens in a new window at Goldsmiths, University of London, attached to the ESRC-funded Centre for the Understanding of Sustainable ProsperityLink opens in a new window. Before that, he held an Early Career Fellowship in the Institute of Advanced StudyLink opens in a new window at Warwick. He started his PhD programme in October 2011 on an ESRC 1+3 studentship and was co-supervised by Ben CliftLink opens in a new window. He passed his PhD without corrections in December 2015. His thesis was entitled, 'Perspectives on the Social Question: Poverty and Unemployment in Liberal and Neoliberal Britain'.

His Synopsis: My doctoral researchLink opens in a new window focuses on historical and contemporary perspectives of poverty and unemployment in liberal and neoliberal Britain. It looks at the transition to neoclassical economics from classical political economy and the development of understandings of unemployment among policy-makers in the late 19th century and early 20th century, as well as the contemporary era of ‘workfare’. The aim is to show how economic understandings of poverty and unemployment exist alongside, and are even underpinned by, particular moral understandings of the poor and unemployedLink opens in a new window. Assumptions about the behaviour of particular economic subjects and understandings of economics as a science are thus open to normative contestation. It is a call to think beyond the language of the market, of supply and demand, to consider how the unemployed subject is constituted. Interesting parallels emerge between the strategies of today's government and its Victorian predecessors in the way in which individuals are inserted into market relationships through disciplinary means.

 

Rune Møller Stahl is currently working as a policy advisor for the Red-Green Coalition in the Danish Government in the gap between successfully defending his PhD in May 2018 and the opening of the window for applications for postdoctoral fellowships in Denmark. He was a PhD student from the University of Copenhagen under the supervision of Ben RosamondLink opens in a new window who visited Warwick under my guidance in 2015. His thesis was entitled, 'Economic Theory, Politics and the State in the Neoliberal Epoch'.

His Synopsis: My research is focused on the way in which economic ideas gain influence in the policy world, and how relations of power, networks and social forces are shaping the way we conceive of the economy. As such, my research is situated at the crossroads of the fields of International Political Economy and the History of Economic Thought. My PhD project is focused on the role of the economics profession in the turn towards neoliberalism in Denmark and United Kingdom in the period since 1970, and the interaction between developments in economic science and wider social and political developments. The focus of the thesis is especially on the ideological and legitimating function that macroeconomic theory plays in the political world, and on the institutions that connect the academic world to the state and private sector, and functions to transmit and translate ideas from one sphere to the other. Find me on academia.eduLink opens in a new window or the University of CopenhagenLink opens in a new window for more.

 

David Adler is currently a Research Fellow in the Renewing the Centre team at the Tony Blair Institute for Global ChangeLink opens in a new window. From 2015 to 2017, he was an MPhil student from the University of Oxford under the supervision of Ben AnsellLink opens in a new window. His thesis is entitled, 'As Safe as Houses: The Political Origins of Housing Bubbles', and this saw him successfully pass his Rhodes Scholarship MPhil at New College, Oxford in the summer of 2017.

His Synopsis: Housing booms and busts are a defining feature of the contemporary global economy. Yet the literature has paid scant attention to their political dimensions. My research focuses on the case of the United Kingdom, where house prices surge to historic highs, enriching a class of landlords and owner-occupiers while leaving the rest behind in what has become known as 'Generation Rent'. As this bubble inflates, the risks to the economy and all of its participants intensify. Yet Britain’s politicians continue to introduce pro-cyclical interventions, offering 'Help to Buy', selling off the last remaining Housing Association stock, and squeezing social renters with a Bedroom Tax. My research focuses on this political puzzle, asking how regulators, landlords, renters and other stakeholders make sense of this crisis. Using a mix of qualitative methods, I examine how the historical effort to construct a 'property-owning democracy' in Britain continues to drive pro-inflationary policies today—and what this might mean for the looming crash ahead.

 

PROJECT-LINKED EARLY CAREER FELLOWS

Caroline Kuzemko holds a two-year Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Future Research Leader Fellowship which she began in October 2016, in addition to being an Assistant Professor in International Political EconomyLink opens in a new window in the Department of Politics and International Studies. Her project is entitled, ‘Power Distributions: Local Authorities, Sustainable Energy, and Devolution’Link opens in a new window.

Her Synopsis: One notable aspect of the current UK political economy of energy is the movement towards greater decentralisation, which is evident with regard to both political authority and also in the increasing embrace of sustainable energy. In a break from decades of privatisation and centralisation of energy local public authorities are becoming increasingly involved in providing sustainable energy services. At the same time, many are also applying for and securing devolution deals. Some research argues that decentralising energy can be vital in securing popular acceptance of sustainable energy transitions, partly through greater civic participation, whilst others argue about the ‘power of the local’ to deliver better-attuned services and to enhance democracy. This research project will critically examine such claims through a close analysis of sustainable energy policy and practice in five UK local authorities as well as of the various contexts within which they operate. The focus will be on exploring and explaining: how sustainable energy projects are shaped by local and national political processes, including devolution; how local energy policy choices relate to existing energy institutions and infrastructures; and what capacities local authorities have to act in the area of sustainable energy and why.

 

Chris Clarke has recently completed a three-year Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship which he began in September 2014, in addition to being an Associate Professor in Political EconomyLink opens in a new window in the Department of Politics and International Studies. His project is entitled, 'Prospects for a Relational Finance: The Political Economy of Peer-to-Peer Lending in the UK'.

His Synopsis: Building on my previous researchLink opens in a new window on the history of economic ideas and the politics of financial markets, my project examines an emerging form of finance that claims to be more responsible and democratic than the mainstream: peer-to-peer lending. Advocates of this so-called ‘social lending’ emphasise the benefits of removing big banks from the lending equation. Such benefits are often highlighted as part of efforts to ‘rethink’ how financial markets operate. Online P2P lending firms facilitate the process of financial intermediation by directly connecting individual savers and businesses to individual borrowers and other businesses who want to borrow money. In ways not usually found in opaque financial markets, the platforms can be used to generate lender/borrower awareness not only of one another’s financial needs but of one another in distinctly human terms. This form of intrinsically social lending can therefore be viewed as a novel experiment in making borrowers known ‘relationally’ rather than simply as a reflection of a ‘rationally’ calculated credit rating score. How, I ask, and to what extent, might P2P lending prove to be more responsible, that is socially useful, and more democratic, that is locally controlled, than traditional forms of financial intermediation? Find out more here: peeringintofinance.comLink opens in a new window.

 

Joel Lazarus held a one-year Independent Social Research Foundation Independent Scholar Research Fellowship which he began in April 2015 and ended in April 2016. He is now an independent researcher. His project is entitled, 'Reviving our Sociological Imagination'.

His Synopsis: My 'Reviving Our Sociological Imagination' (ROSI) project brings together critical approaches to pedagogy, political economy, financial anthropology, and cultural studies in an attempt to catalyse and facilitate a process of democratic public praxis in which people across the UK and beyond are encouraged and supported to come together to learn about and debate the nature of our market society today and to respond to its consequences. The plan is to produce a television drama series called 'The Floor' based on the trading floor of an investment bank, in addition to a ROSI website and a collaboratively-written book. All of this will be produced in collaboration with bank staff, scriptwriters, filmmakers and academics. The website and book will give viewers the conceptual and theoretical tools to analyse the drama on a deeper level. Viewers will then be encouraged to debate their ideas both online and in local 'book club' style groups. The first step on this road in my first year (funded by the Independent Social Research FoundationLink opens in a new window) is to develop a concept and practice of what I call 'democratic television' – the democratisation of both the production and consumption of television that this project seeks to espouse.