This chapter explores a range of theoretical and conceptual resources for making sense of the state, with an accent on those most relevant to the role of the state in sustainability transitions. It looks at how the state has been addressed to date in literatures on socio-technical transitions, but also how conceptualisations in disciplines as diverse as politics and political theory, political economy and international relations, geography, sociology and development studies can be selectively combined to provide a more multifaceted, historical, global and political account of the state in all its dimensions as they relate to the challenge of sustainability transitions.

The concluding chapter of the book pulls together key strands of analysis and insights from the preceding chapters and suggests future potential for moving from a transition state (one that effectively manages key transitions in critical sectors of the economy without questioning dominant rationales and modes of statehood) to a state of transformation where sustainability is at the centre of state practice.

The first chapter of the book covers the context, aims and objectives of the book and situates these aims and the book’s approach in relation to both existing strands of academic scholarship and contemporary policy debates about the role of the state in sustainability transitions.

This chapter looks at the industrial state and the ways in which state strategies for managing the economy through industrial policy, tax and regulation have a significant bearing on sustainability transitions. It explores the purpose of the state in industrial society and what implications this has for the prospects of industrial transformation for sustainability, including the potential for shifts in the developmental state that has thus far been deployed to promote conventional economic growth. The final section of the chapter on transforming the industrial state explores the idea that the very dynamism, uncertainty, volatility and ostensibly competitive nature of global capitalism which currently drives unsustainability can also lead to openings for transformation and revival, creative construction following ‘creative destruction’ and the reconfiguring of alternatives.

States do not just seek to manage affairs within their borders. They exist within a competitive, uneven and unequal and highly fragmented international system: shaping and shaped by what other states do through processes of inter-state diplomacy and by being bound, to different degrees, by the rules and procedures of regional and international institutions. The chapter builds an account of the geopolitics of transition from scholarship on political ecology and international relations as well as draws on insights from development studies to understand how countries’ developmental space and policy autonomy over pathways to sustainability is enabled and constrained by global ties of aid, finance and investment. The final part of the chapter explores entry points for transformation in the form of a realignment and rebalancing of politics and priorities in the global state. These include the prospects for shifts in the mandates and institutional configurations of major global governance bodies such as the World Trade Organization (WTO), the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank, for the clearer articulation of transnational harm and liability for environmental negligence beyond state borders as well as rolling back regressive treaty arrangements which have been used to subvert sustainability transitions.

Centring on key state functions of protection and the promotion of the economic and social well-being of its citizens, the welfare state describes a range of functions related to state intervention aimed at reducing the risk of market failure, ensuring a decent living standard and a certain degree of equality and intergenerational distribution. The welfare state thus often plays a central role in relation to essential issues of people’s daily lives such as housing, employment, income security, health and education. Nevertheless, despite some initial explorations of the relevance of perspectives grounded in sustainability transitions for understanding processes of change and innovation in welfare states, the question of welfare remains a neglected area in transition studies and, until recently, in environmental studies more broadly. Yet the welfare state can both be used to enable and hardwire social protection into transitions to protect ‘stranded workers’ and also have a key role to play, and be heavily impacted by, the social costs and adjustments brought about by the disruptions and dislocations that transitions inevitably bring in their wake. The chapter concludes with a discussion of what ‘sustainable welfare’ might look like as part of a transformation of the welfare state.

The relationship between states and their militaries has long been a subject of social enquiry. Most nation-states have their origins in war, formed and reformed by external conflict and civil wars. Yet the military aspects of state power are intimately tied to all other aspects of state power in relation to its industrial, entrepreneurial and global dimensions. Having discussed the ways in which militaries shape and constrain transition pathways through innovation and their everyday conduct as well as the exercise of violence and war, the chapter explores potential to transform the military state arguing that at the heart of transforming the military state is the need to rethink security, possibly along the lines of ecological security. In conjunction with efforts to embed more ecological thinking in relation to security, a prerequisite for such a shift is a revisioning of the goal and purpose of the economy as proposed in Chapter 4, at least in richer countries in the first instance.

The relationship between democracy and sustainability is a contentious one. Yet diverse groups of citizens need to be engaged in the design and implementation of policies and actions across all scales and sectors for them to succeed and be socially acceptable. But how? From protest and mobilisation to participation in policy and the creation of new spaces of citizen engagement through citizens’ assemblies and the like, governments, businesses, cities and civil society actors are all grappling with the challenge of how best to engage citizens in addressing a series of threats to global sustainability but with uneven capacity to do so. In terms of transforming the democratic state, the chapter engages with the literature on ecological democracy and explores the idea that deepening democracy would extend to democratic control over the economy for the common good. In practice, this might imply expanded spaces and scope for deliberation over plural pathways to sustainability and the use of deliberative and inclusive policymaking processes such as standing panels of citizens, regular polling, multi-criteria mapping and citizens’ assemblies and juries. To really deepen democracy and open the state up would mean including issues of core state interest that are currently off limits for debate and not just what are dismissively termed ‘low-political’ issues.

This chapter looks at the entrepreneurial state where the bulk of transitions scholarship has focussed to date. Indeed, technological change is a vital component of successful transitions and deeper transformations. Attention has often focussed on how support can be provided to ‘niche’ technologies and innovations that might ultimately disrupt dominant socio-technical regimes, in part through building markets for new products and services through financing, infrastructures and the generation of demand. The chapter explores the use of policy tools such as financial instruments including subsidies and feed-in-tariffs and industrial policy to support innovation and, implicitly or explicitly, ‘pick winners’. In discussing the transformation of the entrepreneurial state, the chapter explores the question of ‘exnovation’: taking unsustainable technologies out of production and the need to align innovation policy with the need to transform structures and levels of production and consumption which presents a series of challenges for growth-oriented industrial capitalist states and requires a more social, ecological and inclusive vision of innovation and who the innovators are in society.