Seminar: "Who must adjust? Sovereign debt and the politics of ecological transition" by Sven van Mourik

Sven van Mourik will be visiting ICTA-UAB to give a workshop on how sovereign debt and climate finance affect developing countries and how the costs of economic and ecological transition could be distributed more fairly.

Title: "Who must adjust? Sovereign debt and the politics of ecological transition"
 

Speaker: Sven van Mourik, historian of global political economy

• Date: Wednesday, 21st October, 2026
• Time: 14.00-15.00
• Venue: Sala Montseny (Z/022 & Z/023) ICTA-UAB 

Who must adjust when debt repayment conflicts with human needs and ecological transition? Drawing on financial history, archival research, and a new dataset of sovereign debt restructurings, this presentation explores how creditor coordination, trade finance, and IMF conditionality have systematically shifted the burden of adjustment onto debtor countries. It considers how China’s rise and export credit agencies are reshaping this landscape, and whether climate finance risks reproducing these asymmetries through “green structural adjustment.” Revisiting Southern-led proposals for fair debt arbitration, it asks how new financial institutions could help shift the burden of adjustment from low-emitting debtor states toward wealthy creditors—and what this would mean for degrowth.

Sven van Mourik is a historian of modern Europe and the global political economy, specializing in the history of austerity, sovereign debt, structural adjustment, and relations between Europe and the Global South since the 1970s. His research combines archival work, oral history, and quantitative analysis to examine how European governments and international institutions have shaped systems of debt governance and distributed the costs of financial crises. His book project, A World Disciplined: Austerity, Europe, and the Global South since the 1970s, traces the development and international circulation of austerity practices.