Tim Krieger

How can ordoliberalism, with its focus on stable market institutions, handle decisionmaking under the deep, Knightian uncertainty of climate change? At the catastrophic tail of climate risks, where tipping cascades and civilizational threats resist credible probabilistic modeling, standard expected-utility optimization loses traction. We argue that ordoliberalism should adopt a "qualified maximin" decision rule for this domain, while cost-benefit methods still govern climate decisions where probabilities remain credible. Rawlsian conditions constrain the rule, and a practical heuristic that weighs worst-case severity against forgone benefits balances it, yielding a two-stage policy design: institutionalize a precautionary floor against unacceptable losses, then pursue aggregate gains through competition-compatible instruments. The floor operates at two levels: a temperature guardrail, normatively prior to national implementation, and each state's fairshare contribution plus a domestic protective layer rather than an independent guarantee. Expert judgment and deliberative citizen forums, embedded in an international constitutional contract, can make this architecture workable.

Securing access to water, energy, and food (WEF) remains a critical challenge for countries in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), a situation exacerbated by climate change through the increasing frequency of extreme weather events. Agrivoltaics (AV) are the integration of solar energy production with agriculture and rainwater harvesting, and offer a promising solution to the WEF nexus. However, despite the technology's growing global popularity, it remains underutilized in SSA. This paper, drawing on the authors’ work in a German research project implementing agrivoltaic demonstrators in The Gambia and Mali, explores both the opportunities and challenges of AV systems in the region. Barriers such as technical complexity, socioeconomic inequities, and weak governance frameworks present significant obstacles. We argue that unless regulatory, socioeconomic, social, and technical challenges are adequately addressed, the substantial potential benefits of AV will be diminished. Scalable AV solutions to the WEF nexus will remain difficult to realize without appropriate politico-institutional safeguards.

This chapter investigates the links between economic freedom and violent conflict. After discussing theoretical arguments that relate economic freedom to various types of violent conflict, ranging from small-scale terrorist activity to large-scale civil and interstate wars, we confront theoretical predictions with empirical evidence from various empirical studies. In summary, we find substantial empirical support that the long-run benefits to the promotion of pro-market institutions contributes to external and internal peace and stability beyond mere economic gains. This ought to create additional incentives for policymakers to facilitate economic freedom. At the same time, we discuss shortcomings of the existing literature as well as challenges to the mainstream view of a positive link between economic freedom and peace, thereby pointing to potential avenues of future research.

Populist movements increasingly challenge liberal Western market democracies. Populism can be explained only in part by phenomena like globalization and digitization producing winners and losers in economic terms. Growing feelings of alienation from the market-democratic system and the perceived loss of autonomy within the political system contribute to rising populism as well. In this chapter, we ask whether elements of public deliberation may be a means to reasonably responding to the populist challenge by strengthening citizen sovereignty in addition to consumer sovereignty. Ordoliberalism, as a specific form of liberalism that aims at achieving both a ‘functioning and humane order’ within a system of ‘interdependent orders’, is particularly apt to embrace the idea of public deliberation if it is rules-based.

The economic tradition of ordoliberalism , understood as the theoretical and policy ideas of the Freiburg School, emerged in 1930s and 1940s Germany. In the years thereafter, it was quickly superseded by Keynesianism and other theories imported from the English-speaking world. The crisis in Keynesian economics in the mid-1970s led to what has been described as a “renaissance of ordoliberal reasoning” (Gebhard Kirchgässner) during the late 1970s and the 1980s. The present paper describes this development in detail and shows how it affected the academic discourse and, more indirectly, policymaking. In academic economics, ordoliberal concepts were used to inform debates about pressing issues of the day such as unemployment, social security reform, competition policy, the provision of public goods, and European integration. There was, however, no consensus on the methodological question of whether ordoliberalism could be fully integrated into international research programs such as the new institutional economics or constitutional economics. The paper argues that the renaissance of ordoliberalism failed to have a lasting impact on German academic economics and discusses possible implications of this finding for the future of the ordoliberal research agenda.