Thursday 13 October 2022, 10.00-11.30 CET
Score, Stockholm University, Frescativägen 14 A and Zoom

Responsibilization for a Wicked Future: Pension funds and climate risk

This is an open Score-seminar in cooperation with the Good Economy Seminar: The Good Economy: tools and practices for climate transitions and sustainable economies

Climate change is a wicked problem due to its complexity and embeddedness in other future societal and global issues. Consequently, we view it as a catalyst for responsibilisation, or assigning responsibilities to specific categories of actors. To understand how responsibilisation unfolds we examine the UK pensions' inter-organisational reaction to a regulatory demand to report on their readiness for climate change risks. Using documentary analysis and interviews, we find that responsibilisation revolves around three struggles over the framing of climate change: its fit with a market paradigm, practical accountability and measurement of climate change matrices. The findings indicate that responsibilisation is distributive – actors rely on each other and on non-human actors (measurements, ranking orders) to know and act on climate change. We contribute to the literature on responsibilisation by showing that frames do not shift as much as they circulate through a network of actors, human and non-human.

Link to Zoom: https://gu-se.zoom.us/j/61007817658?pwd=MGtSaFBRVmRIK04yblNoMFE5TGZOUT09

Read more about the Good Economy Seminar: https://www.score.su.se/english/seminars/the-good-economy-seminar