Climate Crises and the Reactive State: Exploring the Glass Ceiling of Transformation

Advanced industrial states have so far failed to take adequate action to mitigate the accelerating anthropogenic crises of the earth system, most notably the climate crisis and the mass extinction of living species. There seems to be a structural limit akin to a glass ceiling of transformation keeping state action firmly within an incrementalist, growth-oriented and technology-driven trajectory of reformism. In this paper, I analyse the reasons for this structural lock-in of transition trajectories. In a first step, I review prevalent explanatory accounts that emphasise either capitalist hegemony, functional constraints of the state or a lack of popular support as their explanatory variables. To this, I add another analytical angle by exposing the necessarily reactive nature of representative order, and thus of modern democratic states. Building on a social-constructivist theory of the state, I argue that representation can form a stable order only if it is constructed to react to a reality that is perceived to be generated outside that order. In relying on the market system as their external source of ‘independent’ facts, democratic representative systems tend to externalise ‘authorship’ of social reality and to deny accountability for it. They are designed to reactively manage these external facts and hence to depoliticise the sphere of government as much as possible. That way, they manage to stabilise the very process of representation around a reified core of ‘externally’ generated facts. However, a politics of transformation would indeed have to ‘internalise’ large parts of reality-production by subjecting them to purposive, collectively binding decision-making. Thus, transformation would require the active authorship of reality by political institutions, which, however, would destabilise the institutional order. I conclude with a few institutional suggestions to ease this dilemma in an attempt to render democratic statehood more amenable to transformative change.