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Caner Sayan

Caner Sayan

Senior Lecturer in Policy Analysis at Swansea University specializing in water governance, environmental justice, and climate adaptation policy

Jun 29, 2026

3:08
And Caner, can I come to you? What would you add to that,
3:10
please? So the short answer is that in the current political climate, international finance perhaps plays the most important role in the global environmental policy and practice.
3:21
It's not a new phenomenon, though.
3:22
I mean, I don't want to give a lecture about it, but actually environmental politics, once we talk about global environmental politics as a discipline, We tend to take 1972 as the beginning with the organization of the Stockholm Conference, which is the first ever environment conference organized by the United Nations, basically.
3:41
And after that conference in 1970s and 1980s, we start to see a lot of environmental conventions or issues, specific conventions, including Law of Seas, CITES, Ramsar, Bonn Convention, Montreal Protocol and so on and so forth.
3:57
However, actually the game changing part came in 1980s once we started to see the concept of sustainable development.
4:05
Then we actually started to see states are no longer the only actors in environmental policy making processes.
6:51
So to tie this or bring this conversation now to the core of our podcast, which is aid, would you be able to tell us about the overlap that there is between international environment finance and international development finance, so kind of global development assistance? And if you could also comment on whether you think that this kind of finance is skewed more towards middle income or lower income countries, is it more loans or grants?

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