This week's guest, Andrea Leiter, is one of those polymaths who brings not just breadth, but astonishing depth to the work of bridging the worlds of technology, biodiversity and international law; bringing them together in service of a new way of being built from the ruins of collapse.
Andrea works at the intersection of law, digital transformation, and economic innovation. Director of Amsterdam Center for International Law, she's deeply aware of, and involved in, Transnational Law, Digital Economies & Institutional Innovation, all things crypto - as well as being a Social Justice Entrepreneur. She holds a jointly awarded PhD in Law from the University of Melbourne and the University of Vienna, where her dissertation examined the historical foundations of international investment law and the legal architectures of global capital. Her resulting manuscript titled ‘Making the World Safe for Investment: The Protection of Foreign Property 1922-1959’ was published with Cambridge University Press. She is a junior faculty member at the Institute for Global Law and Policy at Harvard Law School.
As legal scholar and strategist, her expertise lies in transnational law, private ordering, the governance of digital economies, and the design of new institutional forms for just and sustainable futures. I came across her when she was a guest on the Blockchain Socialist podcast - one of my must-listens - and heard that she was co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer of the Sovereign Nature Initiative (SNI), a venture which aimed to 'merge nature with digital ecosystems and introduce online communities to ecological stewardship whilst developing novel funding mechanisms for vital biodiversity protection and restoration'. you'll hear more about this in the conversation that follows, but I want to emphasise that the SNI team designed and implemented the Decentralised Ecological Economics Protocol (DEEP), which demonstrated how blockchain infrastructure can serve biodiversity goals. Over two years, SNI developed and distributed more than one million digital collectibles, activating new models of ecological value creation.
Currently, Andrea leads a Dutch Research Council-funded VENI project on Decentralised Autonomous Organisations (DAOs) and their potential to reshape economic governance from below. She also serves as Acting Director of Research at the Amsterdam Center for International Law, where she guides strategic research planning and foster interdisciplinary collaboration. She also co-developed and launched an Advanced LLM in Technology Governance with a public purpose orientation, an effort that included curriculum design, funding acquisition, and stakeholder engagement.
One of Andrea's superpowers is the ability to take complex concepts and make them comprehensible to ordinary people: blockchain, cryptocurrency, the difference between Bitcoin and Ethereum, the potential for technology to be used to heal as well as the many ways it is already being used to harm, so we spent the first half of our conversation exploring the baselines of where we are and what's happening in the world. I refer to Andrea's blog post, 'Who gets to bet on the future?' which first appeared on her Transformative Private Law Blog and is linked in the show notes. She mentioned several books and I've linked those in the show notes too, because they were new to me, and completely mind blowing. I found ExoCapitalism as a pdf where you decide what you pay - this is the value of small presses that actually get what their books are discussing - and Protocols for Post Capitalist Expression is open source - you can read it and engage in the process with others in the Economic Space Agency.
Links
Sovereign Nature Initiative https://sovereignnature.com/
Andrea on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrea-leiter/
Amsterdam Centre for Intenational Law https://acil.uva.nl/
VENI project https://www.nwo.nl/en/researchprogrammes/nwo-talent-programme/projects-veni
Transformative Private Law Blog "Who gets to bet on the future?" https://transformativeprivatelaw.com/who-gets-to-bet-on-the-future/
Andrea on Blockchain Socialist Podcast https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-blockchain-socialist/id1501607045?i=1000660699306
Between Gaia and Ground: Four Axioms of Existence and the Ancestral Catastrophe of Late Liberalism by Elizabeth A. Povinelli https://dukeupress.edu/between-gaia-and-ground
ExoCapitalism: Economies with Absolutely No Limits by Marek Poliks & Roberto Alonso Trillo
https://goodpress.co.uk/products/exocapitalism-economies-with-absolutely-no-limits-by-marek-poliks-roberto-alonso-trillo
PROTOCOLS FOR POST CAPITALIST EXPRESSION by Dick Bryan, Jorge López & Akseli Virtanen https://postcapitalist.agency/
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