IMF Efforts to Address Climate Change: The Impact of Trump 2.0 on International Climate Action and Future Prospects
IMF Efforts to Address Climate Change: The Impact of Trump 2.0 on International Climate Action and Future Prospects
Professor Ben Clift, Department of Politics and International Studies
Alt text: Abstract image of a political leader's silhouette, representing "Trump 2.0," casting a shadow over environmental imagery, including melting glaciers and wildfires.
9th June - 12:00 pm - 1.30 pm, S2.09, Law School & MS Teams
About the Seminar
International Monetary Fund (IMF) thinking and prescription on tackling climate change is evolving, and shapes climate policy possibilities. Although a relative late-comer to tackling environmental crisis, in a key shift the Fund now sees climate change as ‘macro critical’. The Fund highlights environmental tipping points and the urgency of curbing fossil fuel use, advocating prompt and bold action (especially eradicating fossil fuel subsidization) to achieve the deep decarbonization of the world’s economies. The analysis thus unearths a widening repertoire of economic ideas, including greater catalysing role for the state and public power in green transition. Analysing flagship publications, and drawing on interviews with IMF staff unearths broad repertoire of elements, including a surprising emphasis on redistributive politics and just transition.
Analysing IMF’s economic thinking on climate policy reveals the scope and limits of working towards green transition within global economic governance institutions, and how the Fund navigates the restrictions imposed by its mandate, the limits of traction with governments. The IMF sets out ambitious reforms, yet its apolitical, technocratic worldview neglects the political power dynamics central to contemporary fossil-fuelled capitalism. These incumbent power relations, compounded by limited IMF traction, constitute significant impediments to tackling climate change.
The Fund developed its Climate Change Strategy (2021) under a supportive US Presidency actively tackling climate change. Growing challenges to the international rules-based liberal order from an anti-‘globalist’ climate change denying US President openly hostile to global governance institutions may alter the limits of thinkable policy and climate action. Coinciding with the IMF Spring meetings, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent urged the IMF to abandon ‘mission creep’ into issues of climate and gender, which he asserted were ‘not the IMF’s mission’ (FT 2025). This hostile environment diminishes scope for IMF decarbonisation ambition, indicating how particular permissive international conditions are necessary for technocratic climate governance.
Schedule
12:00 PM - 12:30 PM Networking Lunch
12:30 PM - 1:15 PM Seminar and Q&A
Speaker Biography
Ben Clift is Professor of Political Economy with a research focus on the political economy of the ecological crisis of capitalism. His work explores how economic ideas about tackling climate change are contested within technocratic bodies, influencing the search for ambitious climate policies. Ben has published extensively on the IMF and its role in global economic governance, including his 2018 book The IMF and the Politics of Austerity in the Wake of the Global Financial Crisis (Oxford University Press). His research critically examines how institutions like the IMF engage with climate policy, the political dynamics surrounding it, and the economic strategies shaping global climate action.
See these Publications
Global economic governance and environmental crisis: IMF Economic Ideas and the Limits of its Climate Policy AdvocacyClimate Policy
(with Caroline Kuzemko) ‘The social construction of sustainable futures: how models and scenarios limit climate mitigation possibilities’New Political Economy