Dr. Livia Hinz is research associate at the Robert Schuman Centre (EUI) and post-doctoral researcher at Università degli Studi di Roma UnitelmaSapienza. She holds a PhD from the EUI, where her dissertation examined the interaction between international investment protection and sovereign debt governance. Previously, she obtained LLM degrees from the EUI and New York University. Her research interests concern international economic law and international finance, with a particular focus on sovereign debt.

She will speak on the topic "Can multilateral development finance help reconcile debt and environmental sustainability?"

The roundtable explores the potential role of multilateral development banks in fostering debt sustainability and environmental protection, drawing in particular on recent experiences with debt-for-nature swaps. Broadly defined, debt-for-nature swaps involve debt buyback operations – often including an element of debt relief - linked to environmental objectives. Although not a new concept, interest in these mechanisms has been revived following a landmark transaction concluded by Belize in 2021, followed by several other deals (e.g. in Barbados, Ecuador and Gabon). Nonetheless, the effectiveness of debt-for-nature swaps remains debated, especially regarding their capacity to deliver meaningful debt reduction. Against this background, the discussion seeks to assess the potential and the limitations of these arrangements both from an environmental and a financial perspective, and to identify the conditions that might contribute to their success. Moreover, it considers whether and how multilateral development banks could support such operations, based on their mandate and financing practices. The involvement of multilateral development finance could, indeed, be key to address current shortcomings, especially in terms of scale, amount of debt relief and – at least to some extent – legitimacy.