Climate Finance, Policy, and Just Transi

The field of responsible investment has grown rapidly over the last twenty years, with the climate crisis serving as the paradigmatic ESG issue for investors. In the private sector, investors pledge to decarbonize their portfolios, ask for carbon reporting to manage that task, join together to engage corporations on their transition plans. As activity has grown, questions about the effectiveness and limitations of climate finance approaches to the climate crisis have grown along with them. A narrow focus on decarbonization has begun to give way to broader considerations of the transition and the risks and opportunities it poses for affected workers and communities, on the belief that social cohesion is a precondition for successful transition. Private sector initiatives have been complemented with public policy and public investment efforts to shape environmental, social, and economic outcomes. Climate finance is in a moment of reflection, change, and doubt.

This course will survey and analyze the ways that public and private investment are being or could be directed in support of a Just Transition (i.e., a low-carbon transition that does not worsen social inequalities), and various ways to think about how effective climate finance can be. We will look at investors’ approaches to the decarbonization of the economy in political and social context, asking: how do or should investors integrate concerns for workers, communities, and environment into climate finance? what kinds of public policies are needed to ensure that investment points towards a Just Transition? The result, we hope, will lead both to a better understanding of the roles public and private investment in a Just Transition, climate policy, and an expanded critical capacity to analyze how well it’s working.