Call for Papers: The socio-economics of loss and decline in the climate crisis
Special issue for Socio-Economic Review
Guest Editors:
Valentina Ausserladscheider, University of Vienna, ([email protected]),
Timur Ergen, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, Cologne, ([email protected]),
Philipp Golka, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, Cologne, ([email protected]).
Submission deadline for full papers: October 1, 2025
The climate crisis threatens capital on an unprecedented scale. Enormous amounts of capital invested in carbon-intensive assets such as in fossil fuel production are facing write-offs as part of climate change mitigation efforts. Furthermore, both adapting to and failing to adapt to ongoing climate change is projected to cause vast social dislocation and economic losses amounting to trillions of dollars. Despite the long-standing socio-economic interest in green transitions and problems of structural change, the adaptive, destructive, redistributive and protective processes that emerge – or fail to emerge – as huge quantities of financial and real assets face such climate-related ‘stranding’ have not yet been investigated systematically.
This special issue attempts to fill this gap by inviting scholars from political economy, sociology, anthropology, business studies, economic geography, industrial relations, organizational analysis, and neighboring disciplines to contribute to the analysis of the socio-economics of asset stranding and its inherent aspects of loss and decline. While the special issue welcomes conceptual contributions, preference will be given to theoretically rich and methodologically sound empirical analyses (qualitative and/or quantitative). The following themes and research problems will be at the core of the special issue:
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The inequalities of damage and decline:
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Climate-related loss and decline, as well as the societal responses they trigger, have a direct relation to distributional outcomes between firms, industries, households, and societies. How do such stranding processes tie in and interact with economic, social and global inequalities? Who are the winners and losers of policies related to asset stranding, and how does this affect broader socio-economic issues? Are there different levels or types of affectedness, different levels or types of resistance or different capabilities of shaping stranding modalities? How can we conceptualize unequal capabilities to adapt to stranding in the climate crisis?
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Varieties of asset stranding:
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How are varieties of capitalist societies, regions, and firms affected by climate-related damage and decline? Are there discernable configurations that link particular models or regimes of accumulation and growth with corresponding models or regimes of climate-related loss? Can socio-economic variety in various dimensions help explain variety in how societies deal with problems of asset stranding more broadly?
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The socio-economics of climate risk:
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Asset stranding is intimately tied to capitalist societies’ ways of allocating and managing risks. Actual and anticipated losses interlock with compensatory schemes through welfare states, private insurance, preemptive state regulation and public assistance commitments. What socio-economic consequences result from such institutionalized responses in the climate crisis? How do increasingly common, costly and concentrated losses react back onto societal risk management?
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The politics of stranding policies:
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Climate-related damage and decline creates considerable challenges for various issues of economic policy, such as, for example, challenges of concentrated loss, production chain reorganization and systemic risk management. How do these challenges affect employment, fiscal, monetary, industrial, skill formation and trade policies across the globe? How does asset stranding influence the producer group and electoral politics of economic policymaking?
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Asset stranding and the world of finance:
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Financial and macroeconomic projections suggest that stranded assets can translate into major financial instability as sudden devaluation can have cascading effects on investment portfolios and market performance. Such systemic risks, however, seem to not yet have entered mainstream risk assessments by financial actors. How is stranding anticipated, initiated, shaped and managed by financial actors as well as regulators in financial markets?
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Stranding and decline as an uneven process:
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Recent conflicts over transnational climate policy have highlighted that there is a major fault line of 21st century climate politics between poorer societies heavily affected by the environmental effects of occurring climate change and rich countries capable of orderly adaptation and large-scale compensation. As such, climate change mitigation and adaptation are problems of global scale – offering potential for exchange between hitherto compartmentalized regional studies communities. How do the global politics of climate-related loss and decline unfold at various levels of analysis?
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The anticipatory politics of asset stranding:
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Opening up asset stranding to socio-economic scholarship involves investigating the processes of classification, evaluation, modeling and prediction that shape categories of stranded assets as well as the responses and reactivity that emerge from such categorizations. How do cultural processes and socio-political values impact future-oriented stranding decisions as well as the compensatory policies related to damage from climate change?
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Submissions
Papers will be subject to the Socio-Economic Review’s double-blind peer review process. Submissions should be directed through the online submission system. Please note the length of the text, including references and footnotes, must be between 6,000 to 10,000 words, exclusive of tables and figures. For full submissions guidelines and the editorial statement, please visit our website at https://dbpia.nl.go.kr/ser.
In addition, the special issue editors host a paper development workshop at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne, Germany, May 7th to 9th, 2025. Authors are encouraged to apply to the workshop by emailing the special issue editors an extended abstract (ca. 1000 words) that describes their planned contribution, empirical material, and methodological approach. Please indicate in your application whether you want to be considered for the limited funding available to cover travel expenses.
Deadline for workshop applications: January 15, 2025
Furthermore, the special issue editors host the Mini-Conference “MC08: The socio-economics of asset stranding” at SASE 2025 annual conference in Montréal. Authors are encouraged to submit their planned contribution to the Mini-Conference via the SASE online submission system.
