Hedersdoktorföreläsning med Anette Mikes: Climate risk and the politics of hope

Abstract

Even amongst those who acknowledge intensifying climate risk, there are diverse understandings of risk—and therefore of this risk—with varied and conflicting implications for action.

In this talk, I differentiate three perspectives on climate risk—preventable, strategic and external—and argue that societal actors selectively adopt the one best aligned with their institutional purpose and their hopes for future responses and outcomes. Those who regard climate risk as preventable demand urgent preventive action; those who regard it as a strategic risk make cost-benefit calculations to determine a mix of managerialist responses, and those who regard it as an external risk call for the development of resilience and better crisis response.

Instead of such partial understandings, I offer a synthesis, arguing that climate risk is a conflict-of-interest problem, for which selective and self-serving responses are insufficient. Drawing on an alternative perspective derived from the environmental humanities and contemporary literary works, I argue that our predicament is a planetary and species-level risk that calls for a moral reimagination of humanity’s standing in what ecologists call the web of life, which in turn calls for widespread structural reform and cultural change.

Connecting this planetary and species-level narrative with the accounting and management disciplines, I highlight some of the managerialist myths that accounting helps to maintain, chiefly due to its focus on the dominant preoccupation with shareholder value growth and a particular concept of profit. At the same time, I argue that accounting (and the related legal framework for corporations) is amenable to change and can therefore be mobilised by advocates of structural reform to reignite moral imagination and replace the dominant narratives of growth and profit with other definitions of societal and corporate progress. Some of this is already happening.

Overall, I offer reflections on accounting and a particular politics of hope that is active, oriented towards multiple values at risk, and focussed on countering prevailing despair, cynicism and dread.

Om Anette Mikes

Anette Mikes är verksam vid Saïd Business School och Hertford College, University of Oxford (tidigare HEC Lusanne, Harvard Business School samt London School of Economics and Political Science). Hennes forskning har starkt bidragit till att utveckla ett centralt område inom redovisnings‐ och ekonomistyrningslitteraturen, nämligen riskhantering. Inom detta område är hon en pionjär med sina djupa fallstudier från den finansiella sektorn. Med sitt fokus på “man‐made disasters” har Dr. Mikes forskning under under senare år utvidgats till att omfatta etik och hållbarhet. Hon har också på ett unikt sätt bidragit till att bygga broar mellan akademi och praktik. Detta är bland annat tydligt i hennes arbete och bidrag i etablerandet av “The Oxford Ministry for the Future”. Syftet med detta initiativ är att skapa ett multidisciplinärt nätverk av akademiker och praktiker som tillsammans påverkar samtalet om klimatförändring och hur samhället bör angripa detta problem. Dr. Mikes har tilldelats flera priser och utmärkelser för hennes bidrag till forskningsfronten inom riskhantering och styrning.

Promotionen av nya hedersdoktorer äger rum i universitetshuset den 31 januari 2025.