Trusts at the financial frontier: the flickering forms of property, water, and governance

ABSTRACT Financialization is often understood as an expansive, spreading wave, coming from an energetic, global center of finance and creating new financial frontiers at its edges. Instead of presuming this expansive wave, I show how financial frontiers are flickering arrangements. Rather than spreading continuously, financial frontiers come into being, go dormant, and reignite with intensity. This temporal dynamic becomes apparent when we trace the specific techno-legal devices that proliferate at financial frontiers. I focus on the financial trust, an instrument that, despite its prominence in financial circles, has received comparatively little attention beyond legal scholarship. I chart three historical moments in Costa Rica when the trust appears as a frontier device opening the nature of property, enabling the transformation of ecological processes into sources of rent, and redrawing relations between public and private actors interested in water protection. At these flickering frontiers, the trust does much more than channel and shield financial wealth. As a device, the trust makes fundamental assumptions about social life explicit and opens possibilities for some actors to translate those assumptions into social forms.