Special drawing rights and ecological vulnerability: Monetary hierarchy and the translation of values

Abstract

Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) have regained prominence as international institutions search for ways to respond to recurring financial crises, rising inequalities, and accelerating climate change. As the only international reserve asset not tied to a national currency, SDRs have been debated as potential instruments for redistributive and ecological purposes, particularly since the unprecedented 650 billion USD allocation of 2021. Yet the terms of these debates reveal the persistent dominance of macro-financial logics over alternative framings. This article develops an analysis of how institutional discourses on SDR reform reflect and reproduce the tension between international monetary hierarchy and ecological vulnerability. It shows that ecological concerns are not absent from official debates but systematically translated into the language of liquidity, debt sustainability, and creditworthiness. Such translation renders ecological values legible while erasing their normative specificity, thereby constraining their transformative potential. By linking international political economy with social ecological economics, the article foregrounds the processes of inclusion, translation, and marginalisation through which plural values are managed in global monetary governance. SDRs thus serve less as instruments of ecological transition than as a diagnostic site for understanding the limits of integrating ecological criteria into a system still structured by financial stability and monetary hierarchy.