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The political economy of contending
pathways to de-carbonisation
Prof. Peter Newell
University of Sussex [email protected]
Our Common Future under Climate Change Paris July 2015
The new terrain of conflict
How much carbon can we
afford to emit? Who gets to
emit it?
How much has to stay in the
ground? How do we keep it
there
How much can be absorbed
by forests and oceans? Who
pays for this and how?
Transitions Talk
Limits of current policy framings
Climate change framed as resulting from lack of:
• Finance
• Markets
• Property rights
• Technology
which requires increased use of each of these.
Notable absence of politics in many of these discussions about institutions, markets and technology.
Multi-level transitions
What’s missing?
Current approaches address increasingly governance but less so politics & relations of power that derive from control over
production, finance & technology
Overly Euro-centric: makes assumptions about (i) states (ii) markets and (iii) civil society that does not travel well to other
parts of the world
Problematic distinctions between niche-regime-landscape
Lacks sense of the spatialities and global interconnectedness of transition(s)
Power
Fail to address the power relations at work that will shape what responses are possible, plausible and acceptable (economically, socially, politically) in prevailing political and economic conditions.
Need ways of getting at fundamental questions of:
Which transition(s)?
Towards what?
By what means?
On whose terms?
Narratives of
green
transformations
Diagnoses
Solutions
Technocentric Either about to or already exceeded many planetary limits; urgency
and crisis.
Emphasis on population; Malthusian models of scarcity and conflict.
Highlighting the role of technology as magic bullets.
But also, potentials of alternative technologies.
Technologies as global public goods to tackle environmental crisis.
Low carbon transitions: new energy technologies.
Including ‘technical fixes’ such as geo-engineering.
Top-down governance arrangements in favour of ‘the planet,’
but also bottom-up, grassroots innovation.
Marketized
Crisis results from market failures, externalities.
Primacy of (green) growth.
Corporations as agents of change.
Technological entrepreneurs, green capitalists and consumers to lead.
Prices will reflect scarcity of resources and demand to protect them,
and reward ecosystem service providers.
Need to allocate and enforce property rights and use institutions to this end.
Economic investments and market incentives to achieve green growth and
a green economy.
State-led
Need for state involvement in steering transformation and re-
embedding markets.
State backed R and D and wider finance central to a
‘developmental state.’
Crisis of governance at national and global levels; importance of
institutions, agreements, international architectures.
At the national level, need for a green state, adopting green Keynesian industrial
policies of stimulus, infrastructural projects, creating green jobs.
At the international level, modifying and reforming existing institutions
or creating new ones (World Environment Organisation).
Strengthening global architectures (Earth System Governance).
Citizen-led
Change comes from below, cumulative actions of multiple,
networked initiatives.
Linking niches, experiments and demonstrations through
movements.
Behaviour change, advocacy and demonstrating alternatives
central: ‘another world is possible.’
Power from below, involving connected social movements (e.g. green consumers,
green living/transition towns; energy-sovereignty movements).
Radical system change required (e.g. arguments for eco-socialism, eco-feminism,
third world environmentalism, post-developmentalism).
Bio-communities; self-sufficiency; de-materialization; de-growth.
Key themes
Politics of knowledge (boundaries, limits, Anthropocene condition)
Role of the state, institutions, policy processes:
transitions management and beyond
The entrepreneurial state
Politics of innovation: from above or below
Politics of finance: which and whose finance for which transition?
The contested politics of transition: The role of social movements
Histories of transition & change in capitalism
Coalitions & accelerating transitions
Politicising the challenge of de-carbonisation
From transition to transformation: learning from major re-organisations of production, technology, finance (industrial revolution; Fordism; Globalisation)
Looking at role of social forces in enabling and frustrating previous transitions
& role in current ones (labour & just transitions)
Working with and against the grain of predominant relations of power:
challenging incumbent power as well as supporting new niches
Having a more nuanced and critical view of the state given its ties to incumbent power & fossil fuel complexes
Disaggregating the role of capital (in general) and finance in particular:
critical to previous waves of creative destruction
Global Politics: Appreciating the role of globalisation and global governance
in opening up & closing down different pathways to de-carbonisation
Prof. Peter Newell
University of Sussex [email protected]
http://steps-centre.org/2015/blog/gtbook/?referralDomain=
