Dear Colleagues,
We would like to invite you to participate in a workshop on Greening the Economy to be held at Freie Universität Berlin between June 2nd and 4th, 2023. Participation can be in person or via Zoom.
The damage to ecosystems and populations across the world caused by the climate crisis is undoubtedly the most urgent policy issue of the day. Governments across the world are taking steps towards becoming low-carbon economies, reducing the environmental cost of economic growth, and incorporating climate-related risks into discussions of socio-economic vulnerability. More research is needed, however, to take stock and to compare how they are going about taking those steps, what factors shape the choice of policies, and their respective levels of success. Although international climate summits and agreements provide a platform for nations to unite around common objectives, substantial variations exist in how governments involve themselves in the greening of the economy. The politics of green economy initiatives tends to be fraught with ideological divisions, competing interests, and institutional complexities.
Most political economy research remains focused on questions of economic growth, as well as distributional equity and social welfare within both advanced capitalist and developing economies. While we have a strong comparative understanding of different “varieties of capitalism,” we feel that our concepts and theories lack any systematic approach to understanding the ecological sustainability of these models, mostly urgently now around climate change issues. In political science, climate change has been explored from the view of international relations and transnational governance, as well as in relation to party politics and social movements. Meanwhile, economic analysis has helped address collective action aspects of climate policy, and examine incentive-based policies such as carbon taxes. Business scholars have focused on corporate responsibility and sustainability related innovation. We feel the time is overdue for a more integrative cross-disciplinary discussion of climate issues from a political economy perspective that takes into account the social and political foundations of the green economy.
We would like to bring together scholars who are actively thinking and researching about these questions to share theoretical insights, research strategies, and emerging findings. The format of the workshop will be hybrid, allowing for in-person and a limited number of remote participants. The organizers of the workshop will be guest editors of a forthcoming special journal issue on this topic in Regulation & Governance. Participants will be invited to submit their papers to this issue following a separate call for papers later in 2023.
If you are interested in participating, please submit an extended abstract (~400 words) to GreenEconomy workshop and greeneconomyberlin@gmail.com no later than March 15th. Please indicate whether you wish to present 1) a full written paper or a short presentation only of early-stage research, and whether you wish 2) to participate in-person or via Zoom. Organizers Basak Kus (bkus@wesleyan.edu) and Gregory Jackson (gregory.jackson@fu-berlin.de) aim to announce the workshop program by April 1st. We have limited funding for participants who are not able receive funds from their home institutions.
While we welcome submissions about green economy initiatives broadly, we are particularly interested in proposals engaging with this topic from the following vantage points:
State’s role in developing green economy initiatives
What kinds of policies have governments across the world embraced to support green economy initiatives? What are the major fault lines of variation, and what causes them? What role do institutional structures of policymaking, ideas, business interests, civil society organizations play in the process? How does the government’s role in greening the economy compare to the other functions of the state? How has the climate crisis impacted the role of regulatory, welfare, developmentalist, or other forms of the state?
Political Economy of Growth and Sustainability
Nations have varying growth models. How are these various types of growth models related to green economy initiatives? How does our knowledge of comparative capitalisms expand by looking into these linkages? Is there a trade-off, as politicians of different ideological stripes have argued for decades, between tackling the climate crisis on the one hand and attaining economic growth and job creation on the other? What does comparative data tell us about this?
Political Discourses of the Green Economy
What are the prevailing ideas and discourses about greening the economy in different nations? How have these ideas changed over time? What kinds of variations do we observe in the way various societal actors—ruling parties, interest groups, civil society organizations, experts—envision and frame green economy initiatives?
The Changing Role of Business
How do corporations and the financial sector engage with climate change through corporate social responsibility (CSR) and other sustainability initiatives? How does the business sector utilize private self-regulation and how do these models complement or crowd out state regulation? How does business lobbying impact the position of states toward climate policy? What role do civil society actors play in the development of the green economy acting between states and markets?
Political Parties and Green Economy Initiatives
How do green economy initiatives factor in party programs? How much change has been observed over time? Where do we see divergences and convergences?
The Role of Regulation and Regulatory Politics
How do green economy initiatives intersect with regulatory bodies, and regulatory politics more broadly? To what extent do the questions of sustainability feature in the work of agencies in charge of regulating economic activity? Whether, to what extent and in what ways do regulatory agencies incorporate climate change related risks into their safety and soundness evaluations?
Climate Justice and the Global South
The climate crisis is disproportionately affecting the countries of the Global South, who contribute far less to global carbon emissions and have yet to enjoy high levels of economic growth. Even within advanced economies, climate change often disproportionately impacts very poor communities, and communities of color. How do the green economy initiatives address issues of inequality between and/or within countries? To what extent and how do they address protection of those who are vulnerable?