Industrial restructuring, spatio-temporal fixes and the financialization of the North European forest industry

Abstract

Departing from the Regulation Approach and the concept of spatio-temporal fixes, this article analyses how different mechanisms of financialization have ameliorated and accelerated crisis-tendencies in the North European forest industry and its implications for labour, suppliers and corporate R&D. Although wood products can potentially ameliorate the climate crisis by substituting plastics, petrochemicals, polyester and various other applications from fossils, firms have been slow to advance into these higher value-added segments. Instead, under an increasingly financialized accumulation regime, innovation has been undermined through R&D downsizing while dividends have been increased to shareholders at labour’s expense. Meanwhile, amid ultra-low interest rates, the industry’s profitability has been supported by appreciating forest assets that are increasingly treated as a new financial asset class by the financial sector. Evidently, while some mechanisms of financialization are detrimental to firms, the financialization of forests has constituted a profitability-enhancing socioecological fix (McCarthy, 2015; Ekers & Prudham, 2017) not only for financial capital (Ekers, 2019) but also for non-financial firms themselves. In the long run, however, it is highly uncertain if forest asset prices can be kept from depreciating amid the problems of profitability, weakened ecological carrying capacity, rising interest rates and strained supplier relations.