Decolonising the Environmental State: National Sustainable Transitions and the Question of Coloniality

Climate change is widely recognised as one of the defining crises of the 21st century, with growing acknowledgment of profound global disparities in its causes and consequences. Yet, contemporary climate politics fall short of addressing the systemic inequalities underpinning the crisis. The absence of systemic change is particularly striking in Western Europe, where there has been little substantive reckoning with coloniality as shaping the articulation and implementation of national sustainable transitions. Climate politics in the region have become increasingly narrow in both scope and scale, failing to engage with Europe’s role in global warming as inherently linked to its colonial legacy (Vela Almeida et al., 2023). Instead, Western European sustainable transitions commonly prioritise national economic concerns, perpetuating “green sacrifice zones,” whereby the costs of such transitions are passed on to populations and environments in Global South countries (Zografos & Robbins, 2020). Positioned as common sense, this approach sidesteps transnational entanglements that shape the crisis and responses to it, allowing national transitions to remain disconnected from the global sphere. It is through the naturalisation of national economic concerns in Western European sustainable transitions that decoloniality becomes an empirical and epistemological impossibility. Against this background, this paper offers a conceptual problematisation of the persistence of national economic primacy in contemporary sustainable transitions. It does so by relating the emergence of the environmental state to a longer history of economic expansion, environmental domination, and colonial exploitation. Indeed, while the emergence of the environmental state is conventionally located in the late 1960s and 1970s (Meadowcroft, 2012), environmental concerns were part and parcel of colonial projects of consolidating and expanding state power during empire (Guha, 2000). Tracing the state’s institutional genealogy in this way centres a different context through which climate change has become defined and responded to as a problem. In other words, this is not only a matter of setting the historical record straight but of uncovering how colonial histories have important implications for identifying current and future responsibilities beyond national economic concerns in Western Europe. This paper challenges contemporary environmental state and sustainable transitions literature in four ways. First, it argues for moving beyond snapshots of national policies by considering the broader historical context that has given rise to distinct definitions of climate change. Second, it considers how the spatial scale is limited as an isolated focus on the national level enforces a disconnect between national policy and global governance, neglecting the interplay of scales at which climate politics unfold. Third, it calls for a more robust examination of global power structures that underpin national transitions, demonstrating how their neglect has reinforced historical and spatial limitations. Fourth, engaging seriously with the decolonial project, this paper questions the notion of the state as the most appropriate locus for climate politics. Ultimately, while the goal of decolonial analysis is not merely to improve academic disciplines but to achieve political goals, it is only through what Walsh and Mignolo (2018) term “epistemic disobedience,” that analytical categories shaped by histories of colonialism can be challenged.