States of transition? From governing the environment to transforming society
What is the role of the state in supporting transitions and deeper transformations towards a more sustainable world?
The role of the state in supporting shifts towards a more sustainable society is receiving increasing academic and policy attention from interest in green (new) deals to planet politics through to more critical attention to the ecocidal and extractivist nature of states. Despite this, the focus often starts and (frequently) ends with the governance of transitions, where the state is merely one actor among many and the tensions and contradictions between the range of roles it simultaneously performs are often left under-analysed. The state is often caricatured variously in political debate as too big, too powerful, too small, too inefficient, too ineffective or too unsustainable. But the reality is more complex, nuanced and contingent on the historical and geographical context, prevailing social relations and the state function and issue in question. Recognition of this forms the starting point of my new book States of Transition, whose subtitle captures the need to move beyond a predominant focus on the state’s role in governing the environment and to attend more to the limits and possibilities of social transformation through and beyond the state.
Increasing expectations and demands are being placed on the state from citizens, businesses, social movements and regional and international institutions to restructure economies, strengthen governance systems, as well as make them more inclusive and transparent, and deal with the social justice challenges that arise from the pursuit of a ‘just transition’. But, at the same time, states both face and create unprecedented pressures from multiple intersecting and social, economic and environmental crises. The need to simultaneously innovate, regulate, consult, redistribute, police and globalise transitions confronts the state with a series of tensions and trade-offs in its approach to sustainability. This places the state squarely at the centre of the contested politics of disruptive and accelerated transformative change.
States of Transition takes a deep dive into the multiple roles states are playing in supporting transitions to a more sustainable world, exploring where there is scope for their transformation. Going beyond unhelpful binaries which cast the state as the central problem or the all-encompassing solution to ecological and social crises, it explores diverse current state practice across key domains from the military and democratic state to the welfare, entrepreneurial industrial and global state. To do this, it builds on theoretical resources from a range of disciplines, as befits the challenge of making sense of these diverse aspects of state power. It moves beyond existing analysis of the ‘environmental state’ and normative projections around the form a ‘green state’ might take, in order to explore scope for a ‘transition state’ to emerge, capable of corralling and transforming all aspects of state power behind the goal of responding to the existential threat of planetary collapse.
Whether examined in their entrepreneurial, regulatory, competitive, developmental, military or welfare form, states are one of the key arenas of struggle in which social actors negotiate how and by whom transitions should be governed, and on whose terms, and are therefore the target of competing social demands about the future. While hopes might be invested in the idea of a ‘transition state’, whereby key state functions and capacities are increasingly corralled behind the task of tackling the existential threat posed by a deepening ecological and social crisis, our understanding of how, when taken together, different but interrelated aspects of state power enable or impede the capacity of the state to rise to this challenge remains limited. The notion that states neutrally steer, corral and manage different elements of transition towards stated goals is to neglect the deeply political nature of transitions and the social relations in which they are embedded.
States do much more than govern. The causes of unsustainability are hard-wired into economic, political, social and cultural systems, infrastructures and behaviours, over which states have significant degrees of direct and indirect influence and control and are centrally implicated. To grapple with this reality adequately requires a broad notion of the state which extends way beyond its executive functions, to the multiple levels and arenas in which its authority is exercised. To understand the tensions, contradictions and injustices that flow from how these (often competing) roles are performed – or neglected- requires a more political economy account and one which roots the state in broader social relations of which it is part and helps to reproduce. This means being attentive to the networks and social and global relations of power in which the state is situated and which it seeks to enrol to achieve collective social ends and manage the tensions and contradictions it is confronted with.
Each chapter of the book introduces a key dimension of state power of relevance to debates about sustainability transitions. Starting with that aspect of state power which has received most attention to date, the entrepreneurial state, it moves on to the industrial and military state, the democratic, welfare and global state. Many of these dimensions have been neglected in the study of transitions where a focus on technology, innovation and environmental policy predominates. In States of Transition, I show how these other aspects of state power deserve as much, if not more, attention. Having introduced each dimension of state power, each chapter then explores its significance for sustainability transitions. The final part of each chapter explores scope for transforming that aspect of state power. Exploring questions, for example, such as whether the entrepreneurial state be called upon to accelerate exnovation(phasing out unsustainable technologies) and support social innovation and greater citizen engagement in identifying social priorities for innovation. Or, since the demands of the military state cast a long shadow over technological innovation and exact a huge ecological and human impact, what form could a more de-militarised state take in a world that requires less policing of extractivism and where vast resources could be reallocated to sustainability transitions?
Beyond posing these vital questions, each chapter looks at emerging strategies to transform the state through efforts to nurture repair and circular economies to break the link between innovation for unsustainable economic growth, to deepen democracy through deliberation and citizen assemblies that challenge the power of incumbent actors, and to re-think work and welfare through job-sharing and basic income schemes where the state has a vital role in rebalancing economy, society and ecology.
In practice, this means not treating the state as an aspatial and universal, homogeneous governance structure abstracted from social, economic and ecological relations. The messy and everyday politics of transformation in each of these domains of state power will necessarily be a function of the interplay between competing pathways to sustainability. How they interact and unfold will be a function of the nature and capacity of the state, the role of political culture and where countries are located in the global economy, such that moving from a transition state to state-led transformation will be an uneven and globally differentiated process. Effective strategies will need to reflect this if they are to succeed. It is a process rather than a clear end point regarding the form and character of the state. It will be a protracted and conflictual struggle given the shifting nature of demands on the state from human and non-human sources in the face of ever-shifting challenges. But having a clearer understanding of the nature, breadth and contested nature of state power allows us to engage more effectively in this endeavour.
A more disruptive politics of transformation requires us to acknowledge and then challenge and change the relations of power where the state sits at the centre. It invites us to take a wider view of politics and a deeper view of the state to understand its role in disruption and acceleration. This requires us to better understand the military, global, welfare, industrial, entrepreneurial and democratic functions of the state and how these may impinge on the possibilities of transformative trajectories. A state committed to positive transformative change might look very different. It might be a smaller state, if military functions are reduced and greater control passed to local authorities and regions as part of projects to deepen the democratic state. But there may be a scope for a more activist and interventionist state, not afraid to stand up to incumbent actors and interests, willing to construct visions and plans for a sustainable society, using key state levers of tax and industrial policy and support to sustainable innovation but held to account for them through stronger mechanisms of citizen engagement and oversight.
A state willing to support socially useful and ecologically sustainable forms of technology and investment in new infrastructures, to redistribute wealth through a basic income scheme and to tax corporations and polluters to redirect resources to where they are most needed to centre sustainable welfare as a core goal sounds like an attractive proposition. There is no one model of ‘the state’, and just as there are varieties of capitalism, so too there will be varieties of transition and transformation. But, in most cases, the state is at the centre of competing claim-making about the politics of different pathways and continues to be critical to attempts to build a more sustainable world for which all of us now need to strive.
Photo by Subhendukhan via Wikimedia Commons | Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence
