Financing European Sustainable Urban Development: (un)Intended Policy Breakdowns?

The paper critically discusses  the financialization of  sustainable urban development projects with Jessica instrument introduced by the European Investment Bank during the Cohesion Policy 2007-2013. We argue that the normativity of the concept of sustainability, as used in Jessica, is instrumental to entrepreneurial market based interests that have little or no impact in terms of social justice in cities. Using quantitative and qualitative data from a recent Study ( Ramsden, Colini, 2013), the paper focuses on two cases London Green Fund and Poznan urban regeneration in which Jessica has currently invested for the creation of holding funds. 

The main criteria for Jessica financial investment,   is that it must be applied in European cities in relation to integrated plans for urban regeneration in which public participation is strongly encouraged. The analysis of these two cases in the paper highlight three main potential policies breakdowns. First, the creation of highly complex financial mechanisms ( which ostensibly  have high transaction costs, lack of transparency, legitimacy and accountability) serves the purpose of excluding civil society, and undermining public debate around public moneys. Second, the accessibility to these financial investments imposes new forms of multi-level governance whose criteria of sustainability shape planning decisions at local level. Third, that new entanglement between state, civil society and the private sectors are created under the conceptualization of sustainability, but whose sole scope for relation is mostly driven by strategies for accessing public funding.

Building on current debate around financialization of the urban, the paper concludes that the neoliberalization of sustainability principles  must be studied as multi-level phenomenon: with this the ultimate scope of the paper is to unveil the intrinsic tensions and contraddictions of sustainable urban development by stressing its financial mechanisms  as main drivers of the reproduction of inequalities.