| Summary: | The decrease of total amount of atmospheric CO<sub>2</sub> is an important societal challenge in which CO<sub>2</sub> reduction has an important role to play. Electrocatalytic CO<sub>2</sub> reduction with homogeneous catalysts is based on highly tunable catalyst design and exploits an abundant C<sub>1</sub> source to make valuable products such as fuels and fuel precursors. These methods can also take advantage of renewable electricity as a green reductant. Mn-based catalysts offer these benefits while incorporating a relatively cheap and abundant first-row transition metal. Historically, interest in this field started with Mn(bpy-R)(CO)<sub>3</sub>X, whose performance matched that of its Re counterparts while achieving substantially lower overpotentials. This review examines an emerging class of homogeneous Mn-based electrocatalysts for CO<sub>2</sub> reduction, Mn complexes with meridional tridentate coordination also known as Mn pincers, most of which contain redox-active ligands that enable multi-electron catalysis. Although there are relatively few examples in the literature thus far, these catalysts bring forth new catalytic mechanisms not observed for the well-established Mn(bpy-R)(CO)<sub>3</sub>X catalysts, and show promising reactivity for future studies.
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