Transcending the Growth Imperative: Can the State be “Greened”?

As the failures of current and predominantly market-based strategies to deal with the climate emergency are met with increased demands for urgent and radical action, politicians, activists and academics alike are (re)focusing on the State for its perceived ability to mobilise social and economic forces in a rapid post-carbon transition. However, such arguments to “bring the State back in” are misguided by their failure to recognise the liberal-capitalist state’s structural dependency on the pursuit of indefinite economic growth as the basis of capitalist development and (neo)liberal standards of prosperity. That is, in the absence of any proven or scalable technologies capable of achieving the absolute decoupling of economic growth from carbon emissions, this dependency represents an ecocidal imperative from which the State in its current form cannot be detached. In other words, the liberal-capitalist state cannot be “greened.” As such, this paper argues that a rapid post-carbon and post-growth transition therefore presupposes a radical post-liberal and post-capitalist transformation of the State. The trend towards instrumentalising the State to radically decarbonise the economy represents the emergence of a “climate neo-statism,” most notable in the various proposals for a Green New Deal and Just Transition which are contingent on the State making considerable and contentious disruptive interventions in the economy and energy system. While interventions at these scales would be unprecedented in modern times, experiences of Covid-19 measures (e.g. lockdowns, mask mandates, welfare payments, etc.) and are now displayed as illustrating that states can act quickly and decisively in times of crisis. This framing therefore implies that inaction on the climate emergency is merely due to a lack of ambition and political will. To follow this climate neo-statist perspective, the logical course of action for activists is to apply greater pressure on politicians. This is however problematised by the extent to which the structural dependency of the liberal-capitalist state on capitalist growth undermines the agency of its institutions and actors to contravene the growth imperative. It is in this sense, then, that the liberal-capitalist state should be considered a barrier to rather than site of radical decarbonisation. Transcending the ecocidal economic growth imperative therefore means transcending the liberal-capitalist state.