The techno-finance fix: A critical analysis of international and regional environmental policy documents and their implications for planning

This article is concerned with the interaction of international, regional and national policy on climate change and sustainability, and the implications of these policy dimensions for planning. With the scientific consensus pointing to unequivocal human influence on the ecosystem, the issue of how best to manage climate change and ecological sustainability is arguably now a matter for economic, political, policy and planning domains. However, despite the warnings of scientists that ‘business as usual’ economic accumulation is no longer an option, this analysis of international and regional policy suggests that in the main, solutions are proffered that merely shift forms of capital accumulation and enforce ‘business as usual’, rather than providing transformative trajectories to plan for climate change adaptation and mitigation.

This article traces key documents from an international level including United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports, to EU regional policy, and sectoral policy at a sample national level. This is with a view to providing a theoretical backdrop, and a summary of selected relevant documentation that planners may be required to consider with respect to climate change issues. This article may therefore be considered in part, as a ‘map’ of the policy landscape for planners, highlighting the policy tensions and the conflicts that exist between international, regional and national levels of policymaking. These tensions largely lie between the areas of economic and ecological stability, and usually fail to reconcile contradictions between economic growth and protection of the ecosystem.

The article introduces the concept of the ‘techno-finance fix’ to analyse and critique the dominant solutions to climate change. These solutions involve a dovetailing of a hope in emergent, new and not-yet-existing technologies, with a hope that the markets will fund the correct types of technological innovation deemed necessary to mitigate climate change. Therefore, the implications for planning involve an imperative to respond to climate change, and knowledge in the key aspects of climate change policy. However, the response at a planning level depends on which dominant narratives are being forwarded from the top down at a multi-layered policy level. This work therefore suggests that the ‘techno-finance fix’ is a dominant approach to climate change mitigation and adaptation, and that planning for climate change is thus informed by this dominant narrative, to the marginalising of alternative solutions, including those outside the market or technology.