233044 SE Exploring an emerging climate change and finance nexus (2025S)

This course will explore an emerging nexus of climate change and financial flows. The connection between climate change and financial flows was initially attended to by social movement actors due to the massive flows of capital that kept extraction and use of fossil fuels going. This nexus between climate change and financial flows eventually become even stronger when private initiatives by investors mobilized around climate change concerns in transnational networks. In addition, financial flows became the target of systematic regulatory attempts through the EU strategy on sustainable finance and related directives, to steer financial flows in a more sustainable direction. In this course we will explore various sites for making connections between climate change and financial flows: social movement campaigns and related responses from financial institutions and regulatory bodies. What happens at each site when the connection between climate climate change and financial flows are made. The STS approaches and concepts we will draw on relate to previous work on issue-publics, issue transformation, and ‘assetization’ as a process in which valuation practices from financial economics are imposed on new aspects of society.

The course engages researchers from the project Fossil Free Futures. Divestments across the Nordics, that studies the nexus between climate change and financial flows, with a special focus on fossil fuel divestments and the pension capital, in three countries (Sweden, Denmark and Norway).