Recent assessments of planetary prospects have underscored the emergence of compounding ecological, social and economic crises, while emphasizing the limited time available for ameliorating their consequences.
Climate change is the clearest focus of this concern. But it is also a symptom of other underlying problems - including those associated with the globalization of the paradigm of economic growth. As a consequence, thinking about ‘green economies’ has shifted from emphasizing the need to decouple ecological impacts from resource use to underlining the need for absolute reductions in the conversion of nature and the use of material resources.
Rapidly transforming and reducing production and consumption to ecologically sustainable levels could have dramatic consequences for social welfare and infrastructure provision, employment, international trade, and the domestic and international distribution of wealth, among other considerations. This paper asks whether previous exchanges about the ecological state – a state ‘that places ecological considerations at the core of its activity’ - have defined a state adequate to handle these evolving circumstances.
The barriers to, and opportunities for, a rapid transformative response occur across broad mutually constitutive domains, including the ecological; structural economic; technological; political/legal; and behavioural/legitimatory.
The paper first examines, in the light of previous work on the ecological state, the reconfiguration of demands upon the state’s roles in these domains. It focuses on what it terms the Transition State - a state-type capable of rapidly and synergistically driving decarbonization, dematerialisation and economic contraction agendas while meeting key social and environmental welfare objectives. The paper then seeks to locate these observations historically by considering the impact of the present economic crisis on state capacity. Finally, as demands on states vary greatly according to their circumstances, it considers specific challenges faced by states in a small number of developed and developing nations.
