Abstract
AbstractMunicipal bonds are a financial instrument once largely limited to North America. Today, they are appearing in international development reports as a novel best‐practice for closing the world's infrastructure funding gap and for promoting democracy. Critics of financialization have argued that municipal bonds have had the opposite effect: they have deepened austerity, ceded control of democratic municipalities to the global financial industry, and depoliticized public decision‐making. Yet in this article, I observe a relationship between democracy, politics and finance which contrasts with the now common uses of ‘financialization’ popularized by critical scholars in Euro‐American universities. I argue that, elsewhere in the world, capital markets have come to be understood as an important element of democratization. To make this argument, I develop the concept of ‘financial publics’—a group of strangers participating in a reflexive and reciprocal style of address through which they negotiate their financial relationships with one another. Using this concept, I analyze data drawn from over two years of ethnographic research on one of the most noteworthy experiments in municipal finance in the global South: the City of Dakar's failed attempt to issue the first ever municipal bond on the Regional Stock Exchange of West Africa.
Funder
National Science Foundation
Subject
Urban Studies,Sociology and Political Science,Development
Cited by
3 articles.
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