Rethinking Finance in the Face of New Social, Societal and Environmental Challenges

The contributions in this book are from a workshop held from 3 to 5 July 2019 at the Institut d'Etudes Politiques in Lille, organised as part of the AFEP/IIPPE colloquium. The guiding theme of the meeting was Rethinking finance in the face of new social, societal and environmental challenges.

This scientific meeting was well before the global pandemic, known as the Covid 19, which seemed to appear in China in the end of 2019 and spread – as is well known – to the entire planet during the year 2020. To date, it is not yet possible to predict with any certainty how the world economy, which has been severely affected by the measures taken by the various states concerned to deal with this pandemic, will be able to recover. Nor is it known whether other comparable or even larger-scale disasters will not occur in the coming years, as the current situation is more than ever a result of the ‘radical uncertainty’ referred to by J/M. Keynes (A Treative on Probability, London, McMillan, 1921). The guiding theme of the July 2019 symposium in Lille has, without wishing to do so obviously, anticipated a collective reflection on the need for ‘Rethinking finance in the face of new social, societal and environmental challenges’.