Sustainable futures require deep social and economic transformations to address climate change adequately. The current landscape of intergovernmental and market-based coordination is not delivering...
The New Geopolitics Of The Green Transition
The only path forward for tackling the climate crisis hinges on cooperative industrial strategies to coordinate clean energy investment and infrastructure development.
Green economic planning as ‘directed entanglement’
Sustainability transformations depend on ambitious state action. We propose green economic planning as a framework for states to set ambitious climate plans and ensure policy coherence across three dimensions: inputs (sources of information, planning directors, and political regimes), processes (technical expertise and political negotiation), and outputs (monetary-financial, fiscal, and state ownership strategies). To capture how green economic planning works across democratic and authoritarian institutions, we conducted a comparative case study of three countries. France’s intersectoral non-green and Denmark’s sectoral green planning covers democratic institutions, while China’s intersectoral green planning covers authoritarian institutions. Through these cases, we show that 1) green economic planning is both feasible and adaptable across diverse political economies, 2) effective planning requires balancing decentralized information flow with strong central coordination, 3) successful planning depends on managing tensions between autonomous planning agencies, market discipline, and long-term political legitimacy. We term this ‘directed entanglement,’ positioning it as a cornerstone for the emerging research agenda on green economic planning—a blueprint for navigating the use of the state to steer a green transition under capitalism.n analytical framework of elite and resistant imaginaries to trace how these actors construct competing futures of platform labour in EU regulation. These imaginaries transpire in response to the reorganisation of labour relations amidst the digital transformation of socioeconomic institutions. They reveal how platform infrastructures challenge institutional boundaries and reshape the governance of work in the EU. Through a qualitative methodology that combines critical thematic and discourse analysis of stakeholder submissions, the study investigates the frictions that transpire when elite and resistant imaginaries encounter one another. The inductive framework of ‘elite’ and ‘resistant’ imaginaries of platform work illuminates the strategic negotiation of categories and its evolution throughout the policymaking process. The research contributes to scholarship on digital labour and the governance of platforms and algorithmic systems within the EU by offering a critical communications account of how competing imaginaries interact within the regulatory infrastructures of the digital economy. The central empirical contribution of the project lies in re-situating regulatory arbitrage through the analytical lens of elite/resistant imaginaries and discursive friction. The analysis demonstrates how BusinessEurope takes advantage of longstanding techniques of regulatory escape, such as burden shifting and legal fragmentation, and combines them with the systemic structural asymmetries within the European single market to incentivise lenience for platform self-governance models and soft law (Scharpf, 1999). By analysing digital transformation and status classification, the thesis demonstrates how the future of the platform labour economy is co-constructed through frictions that culminate in a sophisticated arbitrage strategy, organised around the ontological construction of the platform as an ‘intermediary’ (Gillespie, 2010). The next chapter discusses the conceptual map of regulatory arbitrage in the PWD as a critical output of the research and considers the limitations of this project, and the future trajectory of trade union discourse on platform work.
The Coming Ecological Cold War
How the green transition is reshaping geopolitics
The ‘wicked trinity’ of late capitalism: Governing in an era of stagnation, surplus humanity, and environmental breakdown
Scholars within the fields of political ecology, environmental political theory, and international political economy tend to evaluate the prospects of state-led environmental transitions in general terms – enquiring as to the capitalist state’s inherent properties and their environmental implications. Less attention has been paid to how the state’s green capacities are conditioned by contemporary evolutions in the form and pace of capital accumulation. Capitalism’s directional pattern of historical development poses unique challenges for green state projects. Its drive to raise labour productivity metabolises nature on a growing scale, while generating conditions of overproduction and rendering a progressively larger portion of the population superfluous to the production process.Thus, the question is not simply whether the state can rise to the challenge of climate change, but rather how states are scrambling to govern the intersecting crises of climate catastrophe, economic stagnation, and surplus humanity. This ‘wicked trinity’ compounds the tensions at the heart of the capitalist state, resulting in an increasing inability to perform its role while sustaining its liberal form. This governance trilemma is illustrated by the case of the solar photovoltaic boom, where the spectacular increase in the productivity and scale of solar panel manufacturing have generated oversupply and falling profitability. States have reacted by indefinitely providing subsidies, financing automation technologies thatexacerbate labour superfluity, and relocating solar panel manufacturing to places with authoritarian labour regimes. The case of photovoltaics is a microcosm of the general predicament faced by states as they struggle to govern capitalism’s secular developmental tendencies.
The geopolitical fight to come over green energy
The struggle for sustainable energy will soon put China, the US and Europe on a geopolitical collision course. But moving away from fossil fuels is a Herculean task, and a greener politics will not transcend tragedy.
Urban problems: nature-based solutions and a Green New Deal everywhere
Nature-based Solutions with localised Green New Deals could save our settlements, and provide a just transition to a low-carbon society
A Reality Check on Our ‘Energy Transition’ | The Tyee
To our peril, there’s been no green revolution. Just green addition to rising fossil fuel use.
Political Scenarios for Climate Disaster - Dissent Magazine
In the Global North we often act as if our future will be a warmer version of today: liberal capitalism, plus flood insurance, minus coral reefs. That future is a fantasy.
Home - Schumacher Center for a New Economics
Our mission is to envision a just and regenerative economy; apply the concepts locally; then share the results for broad replication. Programs Library Lectures & Publications The Decentralism File Community Land Trust Local Currencies Reinventing The Commons All Programs eNewsletters All News “Since there is now increasing evidence of environmental deterioration, particularly in … Continued
The future is made of energy | Orca Notes
A megatrend way bigger than decarbonization is probably the key to abundance and sustainability both.
In Deep
The numbers are simply mind-blowing: up to £264 billion for a climate “solution” that will increase emissions. Has the government lost its mind?
Cleaning up a coal-fired mess
China’s green-industrial complex makes deep decarbonisation possible, but far from inevitable
Carbon Captured
How the fossil fuel industry turned the plan to solve climate change into a plan to save itself
Draft Environment Strategy
The Environment Strategy sets out a holistic framework for delivering Scotland’s role in tackling the global crises of nature loss, climate change and pollution. It brings together our existing policy response to tackling these crises and builds on these by outlining new priorities and proposals.
Environment strategy: transformative changes for sustainability
This is an independent report by Professor Valerie Nelson on behalf of the Scottish Government to inform the development of the forthcoming Scottish Government Environment Strategy.