Standards and SSOs in the contested widening and deepening of financial markets: The arrival of Green Municipal Bonds in Mexico City

Hanna Hilbrandt and Monika Grubbauer
Additional contact information
Hanna Hilbrandt: University of Zurich, Switzerland

Environment and Planning A, 2020, vol. 52, issue 7, 1415-1433

Abstract: Particularly since the financial crisis of 2008, much has been written about the growing influence of finance in the development of cities in the global North. Today, financial markets also appear to be expanding southwards. A small but growing number of existing studies on the financialization of Southern cities helpfully explore how international investment changes urban development locally. Yet, they say less about the actors, procedures, and hurdles through which global market expansion is forged and expanded in the first place. In this paper, we examine the role of standards and standards-setting organizations in fostering market expansion and financial deepening. In particular, we highlight the efforts of standards-setting organizations in implementing a novel financial tool, green municipal bonds. Green municipal bonds are debt instruments that allow cities to raise capital through the issuance of bonds exclusively for investment in projects certified as sustainable. First employed by European, Canadian, and US cities, the paper traces the processes that led up to the issuance of these bonds in Mexico City, one of the first municipalities in the so-called ‘emerging markets’ to issue green municipal bonds. Our findings indicate that standards barely impacted project implementation; nevertheless, with the political efforts of standards-setting organizations, standards worked as vehicles through which infrastructures of markets, knowledge, and political support were built, legitimized, and secured. While these processes widened and deepened financialization, they also encountered challenges in terms of the long-term stabilization of these infrastructures and the upkeep of political support.

Keywords: Financialization; standards; development; green municipal bonds; Mexico City (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0308518X20909391 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:envira:v:52:y:2020:i:7:p:1415-1433

DOI: 10.1177/0308518X20909391

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Environment and Planning A
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().