Call for Abstracts

Making Climate Finance Work – Insights from Ethics, Economics and Law

Cambridge Forum on Corporate Climate Governance explores how corporate actions to address climate change can contribute to a sustainable future. It examines the governance and decision-making processes, as well as the legal, regulatory, and financial frameworks needed to support these efforts.

The journal supports the growth of academic and practitioner research in this area and aims to push forward the global corporate climate agenda by using peer-reviewed research to better inform, engage and influence individuals working in or advising publicly listed companies, private enterprises, family-owned businesses, state-owned enterprises and other corporate entities. It seeks to publish applied academic articles alongside contributions from non-academic experts, practitioners and policymakers as well as contributions jointly authored by academics and their counterparts in business, finance and the legal and accounting professions.

To foster meaningful dialogue between academic and non-academic experts, the journal prioritises clear, accessible language in all its published contributions.

Cambridge Forum on Corporate Climate Governance is part of the Cambridge Forum journal series, which progresses cross-disciplinary conversations on issues of global importance. 

The journal invites submissions for a themed Issue on: 

Making Climate Finance Work – Insights from Ethics, Economics and Law, guest edited by Roland A.J. Mees, Dirk J. Bezemer, and Cynthia A. Williams.

In the first instance, please submit an extended abstract of 1,000 words (excluding references) to the journal at cfg@cambridge.org copying the guest editors at r.a.j.mees@rug.nl, d.j.bezemer@rug.nl, and cynwill@iu.edu. Please see details on the shared frame of reference and the topics below. Please include up to ten key references for the work in your abstract. The editors invite submissions from scholars and practitioners throughout the world, and encourage contributions in particular from scholars in Africa, South America, and Southeast Asia.

The deadline for submissions of abstracts is 15 October 2025.

Following the submission of abstracts, authors will receive responses by the end of October 2025. Authors will be invited to participate in a workshop in the Netherlands to further the interdisciplinary insights at the core of this themed issue. This interdisciplinary workshop will likely take place in January 2026. After the workshop, authors will be asked to submit full articles of 5,000 to 10,000 words, by end February 2026, which will then be double-blind peer reviewed. We aim to have this themed issue on Climate Finance published in Q2 2026.

Submission Guidelines

Cambridge Forum on Corporate Climate Governance seeks to engage multiple subject disciplines and promote dialogue between policymakers and practitioners as well as academics. The journal therefore encourages authors to use an accessible writing style.

This themed issue, Making Climate Finance Work – Insights from Ethics, Economics and Law, will examine the role of finance in the climate transition from ethical, economic, and legal perspectives. A consensus has developed suggesting that mobilizing finance is key to the transition, and that the private financial sector should take the lead in both mobilizing and directing finance, provided that necessary public-sector conditions are met. Those conditions include creating a level playing field and public de-risking of climate asset markets. The aim of this issue is to scrutinize this consensus critically and constructively from an interdisciplinary perspective, addressing five specific themes, as set out below. The overall questions guiding the issue are: What roles are each of private and public finance best suited for in the climate transition and how should these sources of finance be structured to interact with one another?

The guest editors envisage a themed issue which starts from a set of premises that will be the shared frame of reference for the authors. We propose that the following five premises apply throughout the themed issue:

First, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which informs governments assembled in the UN and the public globally, is a reliable source of information, reflecting the global scientific consensus on climate change. The authority of the IPCC as advisor to the UN is well established, its projections of future effects have become increasingly precise over the years, and the global scientific consensus underlying its policy recommendations is strong: virtually 100 per cent of climate scientists support the conclusions of the IPCC.

Second, we take as a given that human beings collectively have a moral obligation to exercise their best efforts to mitigate climate change, since this is what it means to respect the rights of future generations to live their lives in human dignity. This position follows from ethical reflection on the rights of future generations and on the climate science evidence that global warming since the Industrial Revolution is mainly anthropogenic. On this basis, climate ethics supports the position that people alive now have the moral obligation to take climate action, both individually and within private and public organizations and institutions. 

Third, the UNFCCC (1992) and the Paris Agreement (2015) embody the global political consensus of what ought to be done to keep global warming around 1.5 degrees Celsius. This understanding includes the obligations assumed by the affluent (high-income OECD) countries to assist the Global South in meeting their obligations under the agreements. These UNFCCC Annex II countries^[1] have historically contributed the most to greenhouse gas emissions. Therefore, they should lead finance and support the Global South in its endeavors to mitigate and adapt to climate change (UNFCCC 1992, Art. 4.3–4.4).

Fourth, mitigating climate change in line with the Paris Agreement requires appr. 1-2 per cent of the global GDP per annum, as the Stern Review has shown (Stern 2007). This means that at a global level the financial resources are available, without making the global population on average significantly worse off. Also, the consensus among economists is that the economic benefits of strong and early climate action far outweigh the economic costs of delay or inaction (Stern 2007).  We work from the premise that decisive climate action now is economically reasonable. This premise includes the assumption that the required financial resources, science, and technology for the transition are available – but they need to be effectively harnessed.

Fifth, given the urgency to make significant progress on achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) before 2030 (“2020-2030 = Decade of Action”), we encourage contributors to seek solutions not by inventing new institutions, but to focus on how the existing institutional infrastructure can function better. Our premise is that there are realistic yet large improvements within that infrastructure, focusing on actions that key actors representing these institutions could and should take.

Given the above premises, the themed issue’s editors invite views from ethics, economics and law concerning each of the following themes regarding climate finance.  

1) There is enough finance for the transition and for preserving nature on which economies depend, but is it in the right place? – The richest 10 percent of the global population accounted for over half of emissions between 1990 and 2015 (Oxfam 2020). They, and the countries they live in, have the resources to cut emissions which the Global South often lack. But currently emissions are not being cut sufficiently, either because the political economy within affluent countries is dominated by the super-rich and vested interests; and/or because the global political economy is dominated by nations and institutions that in effect serve the interests of powerful industries and countries based on wealth inequality. Moreover, wealth inequality is increasing. All of this suggests the need for policies that redistribute wealth within the affluent countries and between countries globally such that the financing needs of the Global South and preserving nature can be satisfied.

2) Financing the preservation of nature – How can financial resources be mobilized to preserve nature and limit deforestation? On the preservation of nature, in December 2022 a global agreement was negotiated in Montreal committing to preserve 30% of land, inland water, marine and coastal areas of biodiversity importance, and to restore 30% of degraded such areas. How does finance come into this task? Is natural capital return on assets integrated into corporate decision-making? How is the accounting discipline changing to incorporate nature, and what more needs to be done?

3) Finance for the Global South – As from the Earth Summit in 1992 onward, the affluent countries (“Annex II countries”) have signed up to the obligation to assist the Global South in their efforts to mitigate and adapt to climate change. However, to date the affluent countries have failed to deliver on this obligation. How is this failing perceived from the perspective of countries in the Global South? What changes in the infrastructure of financial institutions in the Global South would be required to enable the delivery of the commitments of the Paris Agreement? What would effective climate finance, technology transfer, and capacity building require from institutions in the Global South?

4) Between public and private balance sheets: which finance institutions will help us reach the Paris Goals? – What are the roles of public and private finance institutions, and what is the proper balance between the two? Climate stabilization can be viewed as a public good, with clear public goods features such as non-excludability and free-riding risks. These features would motivate the use of (international and national) public finance to address climate change. The current consensus tends towards ‘blended’ finance, which is the strategic use of public finance for the mobilization of additional private finance towards sustainable development, including climate stabilization. This approach accords a large role to develop markets in privately traded instruments that finance climate action. Critics view this approach as part of a ‘Wall Street consensus’ that creates multi-trillion-dollar green bond markets for the private sector to trade with profit, de-risked by public underwriting. Others point to the need for public coordination rather than private leadership in targeted public-good and large-scale investment programs and to historical evidence that structural transformation in the first place requires not private finance but government-led financial direction and regulation. In the face of this controversy, we critically and constructively ask which division of roles between public and private institutions will help us reach the Paris Goals?

5) Long termism in a global financial world infected with short termism – The International Energy Associations (IEA)’s conclusion (IEA 2021) that there can be no new oil, gas, or coal exploration or development if the global economy is to transition to a net-zero economy, puts long termism at the heart of the financial world. In this regard, public pension funds occupy a unique position in the global financial architecture. Funded by the public, supported by law, based often on contributions on a non-voluntary basis, with long-term obligations for the financial welfare of their citizen contributors, public pension funds fulfil public roles, and may often be government-policy led. Yet many are managed as if they were large, purely private hedge funds. What implications might be expected if public pension funds and other financial institutions understood that their intergenerational obligations require changes in their investment activities based on a much more informed consideration of the kind of future into which their younger contributors will retire?

In summary, to act on the above-mentioned themes, we need both the ‘should’ and the ‘could’, and therefore we need ethics, economics, and law. Ethics addresses the ‘should’, economics the ‘could’, and law is arguably a bridging discipline, in this taxonomy. Importantly, we do not aim to propose new institutions that would be required in an ideal world. Our contention is that the restriction to real-world (or at least, ‘current world’) ethics, economics and law poses novel or under-explored questions. Our premise is that there are realistic yet large improvements within the current institutional infrastructure, focusing on actions that key actors representing these institutions could and should take. Our goal is to clarify how the challenge to reduce emissions can be realized based on the ethical, economic, and legal possibilities that actors and institutions have in the real world as it is today.

Abstract and Full Article Submission Process

As mentioned above, we invite submissions of abstracts of up to 1,000 words (plus ten key references) relating to one of the above themes from the perspective of ethics, economics, or law ultimately 30 September 2025. Please send your abstract to the journal at cfg@cambridge.org, copying the guest editors at r.a.j.mees@rug.nl, d.j.bezemer@rug.nl, and cynwill@iu.edu.

Should your abstract be accepted, then submissions of full articles should be made through the journal's online peer review system. Authors have the option to submit a range of article types to the journal. Please see the journal’s author instructions for more information. 

All submitted articles will undergo a double-blind peer-review, in line with the journal’s review process. Accepted articles will appear digitally and open access in the journal. Acceptance of an abstract does not guarantee acceptance of the full article, but even then engagement in the process and workshop will support scholars’ and practitioners’ interdisciplinary networks. References for all submissions should consistently follow Chicago style and be complete.

All authors will be required to declare any funding and/or competing interests upon submission. See the journal’s Publishing Ethics guidelines for more information.  

Contacts 

Questions regarding submission and peer review can be sent to the journal’s inbox at cfg@cambridge.org.