Two decades of analysing the state in the green transition: Where are we now?

As climate scholars explore how to achieve climate objectives, they have routinely returned to the state in numerous different forms. Despite instructive and ongoing analyses of financial institutions, multinational corporations, charities, or businesses, scholars almost inevitably return to the state as the key actor to determine whether climate objectives will be achieved. Even then, optimism that the state might act as the deciding factor can be dampened when countries such as Argentina and the United States retrench on their climate ambitions. 

Determining what the state is or, more precisely, what it should do to enable the green transition, has led to a proliferation of conceptual definitions for almost two decades now. In our recent article, we suggest that the debate surrounding the conceptus of the state has become overly conflated. Through tracing the developments in the literature, we outline what has brought us to this point, and we argue that we should (re)anchor the debate into a green state focused on ‘a state-led approach to ensuring environmental sustainability’. That is to say that rather than concern ourselves with typical academic debates of conceptual understandings of the state, we should instead focus our efforts on utilising the state towards material environmental ends. 

Conceptualising the state

Beginning in and around the year 2000, in what we call Phase 1, the environmental movement began to conceive of a conceptualised version of the state some years after the Rio Summit in 1992. Initially, this was focused on alternatives to the then-governing approach practised in many developed countries. Early propositions ranged from the Ecological State, the Ecostate and the Environmental State. It is not controversial to say that the ‘Green State’, pioneered by Robyn Eckersley, came to be the most prominent term used by environmental activists, scholars and policymakers alike during this time. The term came to denote an ideal, even romanticised, view of what the state could and indeed should do to bring capitalism into greater harmony with the natural world. This concept arguably remains the most commonly used in the environmental/climate literature to this day. 

After the Global Financial Crisis in 2008, a significant proportion of climate scholars became concerned with the so called ‘return of the state’. Primarily, this reflected the state intervening in the macroeconomy through processes such as equity purchases, fiscal stimuli and Quantitative Easing (QE), all of which were taken together so as to mean a ‘bailout’ for the financial system, to avoid further economic contraction. As such, many considered the state to have again become an important unit of analysis after its peripheralisation under the prior four decades of neoliberalism. Whether this depiction ever actually reflected reality is, of course, a point of contention. We nonetheless refer to this period as beginning the process of ‘Phase 2’ of conceptualising the state.

Table 1. Overview of conceptualisations’ origin and central content (authors’ compilation).

Ecological state Lundqvist (2001)

Ambitious green policies do not have to eradicate  democratic institutions as shown in the example of democratic social welfare states

Environmental state Mol & Buttel (2002)

The institutionalisation of environmental tasks in state policies and politics as seen in industrialised countries of North America, Europe, and Oceania

Green state Eckersley (2004)

A green state can only be realised through a new form of democracy that includes non-human animals and future generations. 

Ecostate Meadowcroft (2005)

Similarly to the evolution of welfare states, ecostates will likely develop over time in the form of messy and imperfect variations 

Environmental Authoritarianism Beeson (2010)

Authoritarian regimes may prove more capable of responding to the complex political and environmental pressures than some democracies. 

Authoritarian environmentalism Gilley  (2012)

This non-participatory approach to public policy-making and implementation is more effective in producing policy outputs than outcomes.

Eco-social state Koch & Fritz (2014)

It is difficult for welfare states to evolve into eco-social states, given the inability to decouple economic growth from environmental degradation. 

Sustainability state Heinrichs & Laws (2014)

States may claim to be sustainable, but evidence shows that sustainability is not prioritised compared to other concerns in practice 

Green entrepreneurial state Mazzucato  (2015)

Green transition should be steered by state-directed innovation and implemented in partnership with the private sector

Developmental environmentalism Kim & Thurbon (2015)

As seen in the example of South Korea, green growth can be pursued through developmental approach in what can be termed development environmentalism

Environmental state (revamped) Duit et al. (2016)

To overcome the elusive usage of related terms and steer an empirically oriented research agenda on how state intervention is actually framed in political practice. 

Environmental nation state Mol (2016)

States’ ability to protect the environment is challenged as states loose power over the market as part of neoliberal globalisation

New developmentalism Dent (2018)

Ecological modernisation and state capacity can be merged into ‘new developmentalism’ to capture a developmentalist approach to decarbonisation

Climate Leviathan Wainright & Mann (2018)

A capitalist planetary sovereignty is most likely to emerge to address climate change as opposed to non-capitalist and non-planetary alternatives

Eco-developmental state Esarey et al. (2020)

Pro-growth developmental states have become greener by prioritising environmental sustainability and deriving growth from green technologies 

Green new deal  Chomsky & Pollin (2020)

A democratic mandate must be used to reign in the private financial sector must and replace it by the state in financing a green transition

Green developmental state Gabor (2021)

Using a developmental state approach for green transition through developmental banking that prioritise green public investment

Big Green State  Gabor & Braun (2024)

The state uses non-market mechanisms and hard discipline on the private capital to ensure adequate green financing 

Subsequent events saw numerous other conceptualisations of state emerge and rise to prominence, including the Climate-State, the Eco-Social State, the Environmental State (revamped) and more recent iterations of the Big Green State and the Climate Leviathan (see Table 1 we compiled). Each of these concepts has its own normative underpinnings, policy proscriptions and roots in different political perspectives. Similarly, they have gained various degrees of purchase within the literature, with some continuing to have relevance, whereas others have almost been forgotten. Of these numerous concepts, a notable example would be the idea of the Climate Leviathan, which presently occupies a prominent role for many scholars due to the recent book by Geoff Mann and Joel Wainwright. This itself follows a previous positing of a ‘Greening’ of the Leviathan almost a decade earlier.

Conflation

After the last two decades, this pluralisation of concepts in the literature has seen these terms remain not analytically distinct but instead become conflated. In what we would now call ‘Phase 3’ of the literature’s development, many of the terms listed in Table 1 have come to be used interchangeably. This, we argue, is impractical for two reasons. First, the internal inconsistency between the terms diminishes their efficacy in conveying their intended purpose. Second, given the pressing material implications of climate and ecological breakdown, we believe time would be better spent thinking about how to utilise the existing state for climate objectives as opposed to continuously conceptualising alternatives. This second feature has recently been discussed by Peter Newell in this blog series.

To rectify this, in our article, we argue for an anchoring of literature around the green state. We contend that the green state concept can be used both normatively to explore how the state can ensure environmental sustainability, as well as empirically, to explore how states perform at this task. Similarly, we argue that it remains possible to apply the notions of ideal and non-ideal theory. The ideal is needed to capture what we should work towards, and the non-ideal is where we find the most immediate guidance on what can actually be done now.

Our intention is not to dismiss other concepts but to acknowledge the preponderance of the green state as evidence of its greater utility and for the scholar using alternative terms to establish why competing terms provide anything beyond that. As deciding a way forward is a collaborative effort by numerous scholars in the debate, we intend for our contribution to be an incitement for further discussion. We hope that our intervention into the debate therefore provides a timely clarification and basis for a more practical way forward. 

Photo by Gábor Molnár on Unsplash