Studies of financialization have highlighted how politics, particularly through the state, drives the increasing entanglement of financial actors and rationales in the production of urban space. This article shifts the angle to consider the challenges that uncertain politics pose for such entanglement. Looking beyond techno-calculative practices, it explores how finance works politically to sustain value extraction within fragmented regulatory landscapes. It does so through historical and ethnographic analysis of financial investment in urban water and sanitation provision in Brazil, drawing on fieldwork, interviews, and a new dataset on public-private contracts to interrogate how private water companies navigate politico-regulatory relations under financial investors like private equity. It shows that while these providers were quite engaged in local politics under their original owners (construction groups), under financial investors they sought to “escape” it by curbing ties to public officials, reducing the autonomy of local subsidiaries, and successfully lobbying for national standards on regulatory norms. It argues these centralizing efforts constituted forms of centripetal politics meant to enhance asset monitoring, increase regulatory legibility, and reduce political uncertainty. The findings illuminate how financial investors work across political scales to navigate political risk and sustain financial value, thus problematizing the conventional analytical focus on how finance capitalizes on local forms of entrepreneurial politics. Crucially, they reveal the need to treat institutional environments not simply as filters for financial investment but as objects of political contestation by financial actors. This allows for blurring the boundaries between finance and politics, and for politicizing finance.

中文翻译：

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在政治不确定的世界中确保财务回报：巴西的金融和城市水政治

对金融化的研究强调了政治，特别是通过国家，如何推动金融参与者和城市空间生产的基本原理日益复杂化。本文转换角度来思考不确定的政治给这种纠缠带来的挑战。除了技术计算实践之外，它还探讨了金融如何在政治上发挥作用，以在分散的监管环境中维持价值提取。它通过对巴西城市供水和卫生设施的金融投资进行历史和人种学分析，利用实地调查、访谈和公私合同的新数据集来探究私营水务公司如何在金融投资者（如私人产权。它表明，虽然这些提供商在其原始所有者（建筑集团）的领导下大量参与地方政治，但在金融投资者的领导下，他们试图通过限制与公职人员的联系、减少地方子公司的自主权以及成功地游说国家政府来“逃避”当地政治。监管规范标准。报告认为，这些集中化的努力构成了向心政治的形式，旨在加强资产监管、提高监管的可读性并减少政治不确定性。研究结果阐明了金融投资者如何跨政治尺度运作，以应对政治风险并维持金融价值，从而对金融如何利用当地创业政治形式的传统分析焦点提出了问题。至关重要的是，它们揭示了不仅需要将制度环境视为金融投资的过滤器，而且还需要将其视为金融参与者政治竞争的对象。这使得金融和政治之间的界限变得模糊，并使金融政治化。