We are clearly in a moment of planetary crisis. The Lab’s nascent project on the climate crisis from a political economy approach enables an explicit focus on institutions, power and global governance. Specifically, it allows for addressing three interrelated dimensions of the climate crisis: (1) the political governance challenge of mobilizing climate action and designing new institutional mechanisms to address the global and intergenerational distributional aspects of climate change; (2) the economic challenge of devising new institutional approaches to equitably finance climate action beyond the currently dominant economic rationale; and (3) the cultural challenge – and opportunity – of empowering an adaptive socio-cultural ecology through traditional knowledge and local-level social networks to achieve environmental resilience. 

A centerpiece of the project is an advanced doctoral workshop in AY 2023-24 11.S957 Political Economy of the Climate Crisis. This project is supported by a grant from the Fast Forward Faculty Fund (F^4), one of the initiatives under MIT's Climate Action Plan for the Decade.