Lukas Bogner

The world’s new US$125 billion rainforest trust fund revives a 1990s idea – and shows its limits Cop30’s flagship Tropical Forests Forever announcement puts investors before rainforests.

New commentary!

I’ve been doing some work on World Bank experiments with trust funds for conservation in the 1990s.

It looks like, having run out of other ways to private finance our way out of climate crisis, they’re back at COP 30 with the TFFF.

theconversation.com/the-worlds-n...

I've written a short piece on international law, fetishism, and ideology - now out on Legal Form. I suggest that international law is an ideological fetishism of international relations.

I'm very happy that my dissertation about legal expertise in climate finance was accepted for defense, which will be on November 24th, 14:00 CET. For those interested in listening in online, there's more info here: ruc.dk/en/events/lu... :)

🚨New Article Out! “The Scottish Road to Net Zero: Corporate Welfare and Assetization Cascades”

The article focuses on the evolution of the land-based natural capital market in Scotland in light of the country's net zero efforts.

The fact that not only is the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is still increasing, but the *rate of CO2 increasing* in the atmosphere is still increasing is true nightmare stuff.

Carbon offsets have failed for 25 years, and most should be phased out - research Academics at the University of Oxford and the University of Pennsylvania have conducted the most comprehensive review of evidence on the effectiveness on carbon offsetting to date and concluded the pr...

www.smithschool.ox.ac.uk/news/carbon-...

Still dancing.

#Denmark politicians wage a #culture #war on #academia —with @roskildeuni.bsky.social as their go-to target.

These attacks are assaults on #freedom, #rights and #democracy. We spoke out:

@berlingske.bsky.social : www.berlingske.dk/synspunkter/...

@politiken.dk : politiken.dk/debat/debati...

Me and a bunch of brilliant colleagues got an op-ed responding to the recent political attacks on Roskilde University in the Danish newspaper Politiken today.

Hostility towards #academia and #immigrants is widespread. #Denmark is no exception. Under political and media pressure, earlier this week @roskildeuni.bsky.social decided overnight to close its Master's degree in Business Administration and Leadership (BAL) from 2026.

🧶 1/20

Governing through guesstimates: mock precision in international organisations International organisations (IOs) collect and disseminate a wide array of statistics. In many cases, the phenomena these statistics seek to quantify defy precise measurement. Hard-to-measure statis...

Governing through guesstimates: mock precision in international organisations, by Lukas Linsi, Seiki Tanaka, Francesco Giumelli, & @lenseabrooke.bsky.social

I'm hiring two Post-Doctoral Fellows in International Political Economy/Economic Sociology as part of the ADD project funded by the Velux Foundation. The posts are linked to an AI Sustainability package led by Christina Lioma at KU and me at CBS, drawing insights from comp sci & political economy.

“Historically, science fiction has served as a playground for radical imagination, challenging oppressive systems and imagining alternatives. But in Silicon Valley, the genre’s emancipatory potential has been stripped away, repurposed as a legitimizing script for what I call reactionary futurism.”

This is very good so far but one thing it doesn't have is a visual representation of just how far these companies are from breaking even on their AI-related capex:

Deutschland muss zur Einhaltung des 1,5-Grad-Ziels bis 2035 aus fossilem Gas aussteigen. Trotzdem lobbyiert Siemens Energy weiter für den ungebremsten Ausbau von Gaskraftwerken. Fakt ist: Sauberes Gas ist eine dreckige Lüge! Mehr dazu im neuen Bericht von urgewald: www.urgewald.org/shop/siemens...

Rolling out the Wall Street Consensus? Multilateral development banks and the trilemma of private capital mobilization - Anissa Bougrea, Mattias Vermeiren, 2025 This article offers the first comprehensive account of the challenges Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs) face in implementing the Wall Street Consensus, a fi...

🚨New article out with @mattvermeir.bsky.social in @compchange.bsky.social: "Rolling out the Wall Street Consensus? MDBs & the Trilemma of Private Capital Mobilization"
We examine why MDBs are failing to deliver on the promise of "mobilizing trillions" for the SDGs👇
Here:

🔥 ⚖️ 🌐HAPPENING NOW: Historic #ClimateJustice Ruling being delivered by the 🇺🇳 🧑‍⚖️ International Court of Justice.
🚨This ruling could signal a new dawn for climate law & accountability
📝 🧵 Live thread below with context, summary & analysis 👇
#ClimateJusticeAO #AOLetsGo

This article now has a volume & issue number 🥳

📢 Publication alert – How often have you thought "Oh, that's a bad policy"? Then this is the right book (OA) for you: "Ineffective Policies: Causes and Consequences of Bad Policy Choices", co-edited by Roberge, McKeen-Edwards & Campbell-Verduyn. ⬇️ /1
bristoluniversitypressdigital.com/edcollbook-o...

Teaching the political economy of the green transition this term, I used, and learned from, some amazing 𝐜𝐥𝐢𝐦𝐚𝐭𝐞 𝐩𝐨𝐥𝐢𝐜𝐲 𝐭𝐨𝐨𝐥𝐬 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐤𝐞𝐫𝐬. A 🧵 on some of the best. Further suggestions are very welcome, I'll add them below.

4. Lukas Bogner wrote a great piece on the role of law and transnational expertise in shaping the 'asset coding' of green finance that upholds many pillars of conventional finance (and hence limits its effectiveness)

journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

a few years in the making: our special issue on the IPE of Green Finance is complete!

🧵on its content:

1. Sarah Sharma and I wrote a (long) editorial introducing the idea of a green finance ecosystem and calling for a 'deep engagement' of IPE w. gr. finance 👇

journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

I had some fun writing an accessible text for learners seeking resources to problematize mainstream economics. This is especially meaningful to me because since my bachelor's in economics, I have spent much of the past decade thinking about how to study politically the economy shorturl.at/lohRl

😬

Revealed: how Wall Street is making millions betting against green laws Guardian analysis finds fossil-fuel and mining firms have won $92bn of public money from states, with a growing number of cases backed by financial speculators

The Guardian dropped this piece on third party funding of ISDS cases yesterday - I can very much recommend the 2021 RIPE article by Dafe & Williams covering this for further reading doi.org/10.1080/0969...

An offshore finance news outlet describes the ‘tough competition between IFCs [International Financial Centres] globally (big and small) to win the rights to domicile newly established ESG-based funds and similar vehicles’ (IFC Review, 2022). In practice, this competition means that jurisdictions compete on legal affordances that can be drawn on (race to the bottom) rather than on the legal provisions (race to the top) that would regulate green finance flows. For example, a report published by the Hong Kong Green Finance Association develops a series of recommendations to develop Hong Kong as a ‘leading investment fund hub for green and sustainable infrastructure financing’. The report includes various concrete recommendations as to how Hong Kong can expand its definition of tax-exempt infrastructure and live up to investor expectations towards ‘tax neutrality’ and emphasizes the common law and favourable dispute resolution capacity in the SAR. It summarizes that ‘Hong Kong is already a popular hub for fund managers to manage both onshore and offshore funds. It can also become an important hub for public and private infrastructure funds which can effectively channel local and international investors’ monies to target [green and sustainable infrastructure] assets’ (2022:4). Its recommen- dations on enforcement of green requirements for funds registered in Hong Kong contain mainly voluntary/private-led measures while concrete regulatory suggestions are effectively absent. The report directly compares its location advantages with other intermediary jurisdictions such as the Cayman Islands, Luxembourg and Singapore. This is followed by another example from India

Some more examples from a paper I wrote last year here:

The Global City With world leading financial expertise, the UK is ready to work with you

I study legal experts so there's a lot of talk about what jurisdictions do. There is e.g. competition between Singapore and UK to have 'favorable legal environments' for voluntary carbon markets. The UK develops an entirely new category of property ('digital assets') for it, also covering crypto.

Tax havenry as a climate adaptation strategy - that's a new one

was just writing about commercialized sovereignty in the discussion section of my phd (about climate finance), this is a nice little add-on, thanks!!

BP expected to scrap renewables target in shift back to fossil fuels Goal of increasing renewable energy generation 20-fold to be ditched, shareholders to be told this week

3 lessons here:
1/ fossil asset owners will keep these assets as long as gov'ts will let them.
2/ oil and gas net zero pledges are an elaborate distraction -- both for ESG optimists and consumers
3/ liberals take note: the market won't supply decarbonization.
www.theguardian.com/business/202...