By its presence or absence, the state features centrally in discussions about collective responses to the ecological crisis currently enveloping the world, often understood as sustainability transitions. Increasing expectations and demands are placed on the state from citizens, businesses, social movements and regional and international institutions to restructure economies, strengthen governance systems, as well as make them more inclusive and transparent, and deal with the social justice challenges that arise from the pursuit of a ‘just transition’. But, at the same time, states both face and create unprecedented pressures from multiple sources in the form of the polycrisis observable in a series of short- and longer-term intersecting and social, economic and environmental crises (Lawrence et al. Reference Lawrence, Janzwood and Homer-Dixon2022),¹ or what Moore describes as a ‘singular crisis’ with ‘manifold expressions’ (Moore Reference Moore2015: 298). These fault lines are magnified by political crises induced by populism and the erosion of democratic institutions which enable social demands to be articulated and addressed.

The need to simultaneously innovate, regulate, consult, redistribute, police and globalise transitions confronts the state with a series of tensions and trade-offs in its approach to sustainability transitions. This places the state squarely at the centre of the contested politics of disruptive and accelerated transformative change. Whether examined in their entrepreneurial, regulatory, competitive, developmental, military or welfare form, states are one of the key arenas of struggle in which social actors negotiate how and by whom transitions should be governed, and on whose terms, and are therefore the target of competing social demands about the future. While hopes might be invested in the idea of a ‘transition state’, whereby key state functions and capacities are increasingly corralled behind the task of tackling the existential threat posed by a deepening ecological and social crisis, our understanding of how, when taken together, different but interrelated aspects of state power enable or impede the capacity of the state to rise to this challenge remains limited.

Despite a number of important contributions, critical thinking and conceptualisation of the role of the state in both more narrowly defined sustainability transitions as well as deeper transformations remains underdeveloped. The distinction between transitions and great transformations is significant, as Eckersley argues, because of its implications regarding the nature and extent of state agency and ‘the depth and direction of change towards ecological sustainability’ (Eckersley Reference Eckersley2021: 246). Transition and transformation (co)exist on a spectrum, nevertheless, from narrow ‘plug-and-play’ changes to technology adoption and patterns of behaviour through to a deeper and more profound recasting or re-embedding of the state and market within broader frameworks of social and democratic control (Polanyi 1980 [Reference Polanyi1944]), which require key shifts in power to secure planetary survival (Newell Reference Newell2021a). It is a distinction to which we will return throughout the book (see Table 1.1).

There is now a burgeoning literature on sustainability transitions, some strands of which are increasingly recognising the centrality of questions of governance and, by default or by extension, acknowledging the role of the state as enabler or barrier to sustainability transitions (Duit Reference Duit, Feindt and Meadowcroft2016; Craig Reference Craig2020; Hatzisavvidou Reference Hatzisavvidou2020; Hausknost and Hammond Reference Hausknost and Hammond2020). This turn towards governance and politics in the study of transitions (Meadowcroft Reference Meadowcroft2008; Johnstone and Newell Reference Johnstone and Newell2018; Silvester and Fiske Reference Silvester and Fisker2023) is partly a function of political scientists and political economists increasingly engaging with transition debates (Meadowcroft Reference Meadowcroft2009; Kuzemko et al. Reference Kuzemko, Lockwood, Mitchell and Hoggett2016; Bernstein and Hoffman Reference Bernstein and Hoffmann2019; Newell Reference Newell2021a). But, more recently, it also reflects an increasing return to state interventionism, heightened under Covid, and a belated recognition of the vital role of states across arenas such as innovation, regulation and diplomacy, witnessed in debates about a Green New Deal (Pettifor Reference Pettifor2019) and just transitions (Swilling and Annecke Reference Swilling and Annecke2012; Newell and Mulvaney Reference Newell and Mulvaney2013). Geopolitically, the increasing salience of ‘rising powers’ in the global economy has brought to the fore models of state capitalism and the developmental state (Leftwich Reference Leftwich2000; Nem Singh Reference Nem Singh2024) that have yet to gain traction in the ‘Lockean heartlands’ of the global economy (van der Pijl Reference Van der Pijl1998) with important implications for models of transition, while questions of war and the military state are never far from view and are actively constitutive of the form and possibilities of transition pathways.

Yet while philosophers and large bodies of social science scholarship have sought to make sense of the state and its role in society over centuries, critical thinking about diverse aspects of the state’s role in sustainability transitions is underdeveloped. It often starts and ends with narrower discussions of governance and the institutional arrangements required to manage and steer sustainability transitions. It also often remains siloed in relation to individual state functions (whether environmental, industrial or innovation policy, security and foreign policy or welfare) rather than grounded in a wider and deeper understanding of what I am calling ‘states of transition’: the uneven and contradictory ways in which state power is currently being deployed to seek to manage and control socio-ecological change and disruption. Such a siloed approach makes it harder to assess the overall prospects of a ‘transition state’ emerging where one of the overriding objectives and logics of the exercise of state power becomes the collective management of societal transitions or, more ambitiously still, to support deeper transformative change.

In this sense, the book departs both from discussions about the emergence, form and limits of an ‘environmental state’, which, through ecological modernisation, seeks to reconcile environmental management with overriding growth imperatives (Mol et al. Reference Mol, Sonnenfield and Spaargaren2010; Duit et al. Reference Duit2016; Hausknost and Hammond Reference Hausknost and Hammond2021), and from normative enquiries into the form a ‘green state’ might take (Eckersley Reference Eckersley2004; Barry and Eckersley Reference Barry and Eckersley2005). In the case of the former, an environmental state is ‘a state that possesses a significant set of institutions and practices dedicated to the management of the environment and societal-environmental interactions … [with] specialised administrative, regulatory, financial and knowledge structures that mark out a distinctive sphere of government activity’ (Duit et al. Reference Duit2016: 5–6). Largely dedicated to managing the ‘externalities’ of industrial society and dealing with the contradictions this generates, the limits of this project of environmental statehood are becoming ever more visible and manifest themselves in the legitimacy crises environmental states now face regarding their inability (and unwillingness) to generate responses of the nature, speed and scale required to adequately respond to ecological crises and therefore afford citizens the protection they need. In part, this relates to the fact that the environmental state, as Hammond and Hausknost (Reference Hausknost and Hammond2021) show, derives it ‘functional logic’ from the paradigm of ecological modernisation: ‘the strategy of increasing the effectiveness and efficiency of environmental management through means of technological and administrative innovation without at the same time questioning the basic structures of the capitalist mode of production or industrialism more generally’ (Hammond and Hausknost Reference Hausknost and Hammond2021: 2). A transition state has thus far failed to address the causes of the polycrisis and underlying drivers of our current predicament where a more fundamental reset of the goals and functions of contemporary life is required. As Hammond (Reference Hausknost and Hammond2021: 174) suggests:

To move the discussion forward, this book seeks to build a broader understanding of the role of the state in sustainability transitions by bringing to bear interdisciplinary perspectives on key dimensions of state power with an assessment of how those dimensions relate to sustainability transitions, before assessing the prospects of their transformation. It follows and applies this approach to each dimension of state power explored in the book from the entrepreneurial, industrial and military state to the democratic, welfare and global state. Though the principal focus of this book is the role of the state in enabling and frustrating sustainability transitions, the approach I take is to understand the state as a whole in order to understand the interrelationships and cumulative effects of diverse state functions on the prospects of pathways to change. This is because the entrepreneurial, industrial, military, welfare, democratic and foreign policy functions of states have at least as much impact upon the ability of states to build a sustainable society as more narrowly defined and bespoke environmental policies (where most scholarly attention has been focussed to date) but whose traction and impact will be minimum in the absence of change in these other areas of state policy. This distinction is captured in the subtitle of the book: from governing the environment to transforming society.

Moreover, although the state frequently appears as saint or sinner, saviour or devil in political debate – caricatured as too big, too powerful, too small, too inefficient, too ineffective, too unsustainable – the reality is more complex, nuanced and contingent on the historical and geographical context, prevailing social relations and the state function and issue in question. Understanding the varieties of states in all their (in)glorious guises helps to challenge these unhelpful binaries and to counter dominant narratives about market-led transitions which obscure and negate the role of the state. This is important because past cases of large-scale and rapid socio-technical change reveal that new technological systems require significant public support in the form of state investment, regulation and establishing and enforcing property rights, for example (Mazzucato Reference Mazzucato2011; Vogel Reference Vogel2018). Despite claims to the contrary, transformations in markets are always embedded to different degrees in state–society complexes. The notion that transitions unfold as a result of the ‘natural’ operations of the market guided by (an often elusive) ‘invisible hand’ or that they will be unproblematically imposed from above and accepted below seems fanciful at best, missing the messy and contingent nature of actually existing transitions, while being historically illiterate about the conditions in which previous periods of transition have taken place. As Polanyi reminds us, ‘the market has been the outcome of a conscious and often violent intervention on the part of government which imposed the market organisation of society for non-economic ends’ (Polanyi 1980 [Reference Polanyi1944]: 250).

Likewise, however, the notion that the scale of change now required and the time frames in which it has to happen will be achieved solely through citizen-led innovations and grassroots resistance in ways which bypass or do away with the need for the state, however appealing, seems naïve. As Hausknost and Hammond put it, ‘A rapid, purposeful and comprehensive decarbonisation of modern society without the force of law and without adequate institutions of deliberation, will-formation, decision-making, policy coordination and enforcement seems highly unlikely’ (Hausknost and Hammond Reference Hausknost and Hammond2021: 4). Or as Eckersley reminds us, ‘no other institution can match the state’s regulatory capacity’ and ‘nor is there any other institution with the resources and financial transfer mechanisms to provide social welfare and address inequalities and injustices on the scale of states, and this makes them central to managing the unavoidable dislocations that will occur in the transition process’ (Eckersley Reference Eckersley2021: 248). The same challenges face those supportive of degrowth. Writing on the role of the state in degrowth transformations, Buch Hansen et al. (Reference Buch-Hansen, Koch and Nesterova2024: 76) argue:

We are left, therefore, with the challenging political task of contesting, as well as reworking, the state in ways which make it more likely to be able to perform the critical political work of coordinating and orchestrating collective social change in ways that respond to a notion of the planetary common good.

1.1 Locating the State

So, what then is the state? What independent agency does it (whatever that it may be) exercise? ‘No definition of the state is innocent’ (Jessop Reference Jessop2008: 2) and every definition is inevitably partial and selective. In some renditions, it appears as an almost empty vessel without autonomous agency whose significance derives only from the rulers, classes or bureaucrats that work within it and control its structures. This is why some prefer to talk about governments and executive branches, rather than the more general category of the state. But state structures and institutions outlive particular ruling coalitions, governments and regimes and even many of the people that occupy them (such as civil servants) do not change when governments come and go. Nor do other key pillars of power such as the military, police and the legal system, nor the entrenched ties and relationships which bind the state as a global actor. Nor, absent a coup, do basic democratic functions. Neither do they stand above or apart from the social relations which they seek to govern but at the same time crystallise.

Bob Jessop, the author of many classic texts on the state, suggests ‘the core of the state apparatus can be defined as a distinct ensemble of institutions and organisations whose socially accepted function is to define and enforce collectively binding decisions on a given population in the name of their “common interest” or “general will”’ (Jessop Reference Jessop2008: 9). Though this provides a broad definition, it does exclude certain activities such that ‘not all forms of macro-political organisation can be classed as state-like nor can the state simply be equated with government, law, bureaucracy, a coercive apparatus or another political institution’ (Jessop Reference Jessop2008: 9). The extent to which that function is ‘socially accepted’, adequately serves the ‘common interest’ and the means by which decisions are made ‘binding’ and enforceable provide the terrain of contestation in many societies about whose interests are served by state policies and how much legitimacy surrounds the law, policing and foreign policy interventions used to enforce them.

This is the backdrop to critical questions about the scope for change, transition and transformation in the role of the state regarding the multiple and intersecting social, economic and ecological crises that the world now faces. There are many varieties of states and statehood, embedded in turn within varieties of capitalism and non-capitalist economies (Hall and Soskice Reference Hall and Soskice2001). As Jessop notes, ‘The basic features of capitalism as a mode of production and object of regulation assume different patterns in different varieties and stages of capitalism’ (Jessop Reference Jessop2002: 1) as accumulation regimes and political regimes couple, uncouple and co-evolve. Deciphering what it is about the state that is structural, fixed, inevitable and impervious to change, and what it is, on the other hand, that might be reformed or transformed as part of broader projects of social and ecological transformation, is a vital contemporary task. Might it be possible, for example, to expand state functions of protection, radical innovation and environmental stewardship while reducing, better regulating or subjecting to social control the industrial and military functions of the state as part of a vision pursued by a ‘transition state’ or a more transformative successor? Or is such an endeavour fruitless and naïve given the core functions of a state in a competitive capitalist and anarchical international society where there are few constraints on the use of force and violence? Other scholars have referred to a ‘glass ceiling’ on the capacity of the state to support the sorts of transformations required for sustainability whereby there exists ‘a structural barrier that marks the line until which environmental reform is compatible with functional requirements of the state and beyond which its compatibility gives way to functional tension, conflict and outright contradiction’ (Hausknost and Hammond Reference Hausknost and Hammond2021: 3). Notions of degrowth and sufficiency propose to transgress that ceiling by reducing consumption and production and impacting employment and state revenues which are ‘toxic for all but the sustainability imperative’ (Hausknost Reference Hausknost2020: 22). These tensions and contradictions exist in relation to extractivist and growth-oriented economies whose consequences are apparent in ever increasing social and environmental crises which states struggle to manage.

But they also find expression in the crisis experienced by modern forms of democracy which give rise to a profound crisis of legitimation (Blühdorn Reference Blühdorn2020) around who states represent and how in the context of a fraying social contract, where their ability to provide basic protection and secure citizens’ rights is compromised by a refusal to reverse the economic processes driving ecological and societal collapse. This points to the distinction between an environmental state with ‘specialised administrative, regulatory, financial and knowledge structures that mark out a distinct sphere of government activity’ (Duit et al. Reference Duit2016: 5–6) and a ‘transition state’ whose overarching goals are supporting the necessary deeper transformations in the economy, politics and society (see Table 1.1). The shift is from managing environmental change within and for capitalism to supporting transformative social and economic change compatible with a sustainable society where fundamental shifts (and reductions) in patterns of production and consumption are the goal rather than substituting technologies and energy sources in a ‘plug-and-play’ fashion (Newell Reference Newell2021a). Indeed, as Hausknost (Reference Hausknost2020: 21) suggests, ‘the logic of state imperatives is cumulative … Previous transformations of the state thus expanded state functions rather than replacing them.’ Any such reconfiguration would require broader shifts in power within and between states, driven and accompanied by deeper shifts in cultures and values to presage and embed that change and to sustain structures of governance with a very different view of the responsibilities of the state in pursuit of a radically distinct view of the good life. Change of this nature and scale is unlikely to come from within the state, though support for such shifts from key allies within the state may well be critical to their success.

This landscape of power is not a static one. The roles, functions, capacities and landscapes of power in which states are embedded (but at the same time reconfigure) are in flux, as expectations of states and views about how to assess their effectiveness evolve and change. From mercantilist to competition states, colonial to postcolonial states, developmental and post-developmental states, Keynesian to neoliberal and postliberal, the functioning, organisation and purpose of states are always in a process of rearticulation and realignment in the face of shifting global and domestic pressures from social forces and external events. Securing domestic legitimacy is vital to maintaining some measure of control and order amid this shifting terrain where ecological crises further test the ability of states to protect their citizens and dispose of their duties. For Machiavelli (Reference Machiavelli2020 [1532]: 48), states’ strength should be assessed according to their ability

Though written long before the advent of the environmental crisis which presents a new order of challenge for statecraft, the essence in his comments about states being pulled in competing directions to shore up their legitimacy and maintain power through ‘soft’, ‘hard’ and performed means resonates today.

Crises of course precipitate change and have the potential to give rise to legitimacy crises for states. The global Covid pandemic shifted ground in fundamental ways by giving the lie to long-cherished neoliberal myths about the inability and incapacity of the state to intervene in the economy: to determine which sectors, industries and people are more in need of protection than others and to prioritise protection over profit. In some parts of the world, we saw states requiring industries to convert their production to respond to the Covid crisis as breweries started repurposing alcohol for use in hand sanitisers and vacuum cleaner manufacturers were instead required to produce ventilators for hospitals. These moments of disruptive change showed that industries can be repurposed much more quickly than dominant narratives had led us to believe. ‘Magic money trees’, said not to exist, turned out not only to exist but to be constantly bearing fruit (in the wealthier centres of the global economy at least) in the form of furlough and state-sponsored bailouts to workers and key sectors affected by the constraints imposed on our patterns of work, travel and social interaction by the lockdown. Reflecting on responses to the pandemic, Andreas Malm (Reference Malm2020: 7) notes:

In the face of an emergency, state action was decisive, wide-ranging and effective. Parallels with, and speculation about, whether such interventions might presage similar efforts to tackle the climate emergency inevitably followed. But the experience of this period, to some extent, helped to correct the dominance of anti-statist neoliberal ideology whose ascendance coincides with vastly increased emissions and the obvious need for herculean state-led efforts to decarbonise the global economy, what Naomi Klein calls ‘an epic case of bad timing’ (Klein Reference Klein2015: 73).

The contested role of the state solicits a spectrum of strong reactions and counter-reactions from activists, businesses and governments themselves amid calls for a Green New Deal (Green New Deal Group 2008; Pettifor Reference Pettifor2019), for strengthened forms of global governance and planet politics (Burke et al. Reference Burke2016) or for critiques of the extractivist, ecocidal nature of the capitalist or industrialist state (Dunlap and Brock Reference Dunlap and Brock2022). To some extent, these conflicting views of the state reflect the multifaceted nature of state power and its consequences, something I suggest in this book that we need to appreciate, differentiate, conceptualise and engage with more systematically in studies of sustainability transitions. They bring into focus some of the core tensions and contradictions in the ways states both support and frustrate sustainability transitions: between functions of protection (of society and the environment) and promotion (of industry), between innovation (bringing technologies to market) and exnovation (taking them out of production), between providing security but doing so through militarism and violence (which renders others insecure) or more broadly still between legitimation (for social acceptance) and accumulation (of capital).

These raise, in turn, more fundamental questions that political economists and political ecologists have long wrestled with about the relationship between labour exploitation and industrial expansion, securitisation and democratic freedoms and the compatibility of infinite economic growth with a finite planet. In this sense, the state can be thought of as the concentration, centralisation and embodiment of some of the key contradictions and tensions which inhere in capitalism: the reproduction of inequalities which circumscribe consumption for growth (the first contradiction); the ways in which growth diminishes the resource base upon which accumulation is premised (the second contradiction); and the tensions this produces between capital and labour and between humans and more-than-human nature (O’Connor Reference O’Connor1998). These contradictions are manifest across the different dimensions of state power and the performance of diverse state functions, which reflect not just a plethora of societal demands and human needs but conscious political attempts to manage these deeper contradictions through the use of the institutional and material power of the state and to both maintain social order and protect elite and incumbent power from challengers to their authority. This often takes the form of ensuring that discussions about transitions are kept on the terrain of techno-managerial management and not allowed to spill over into calls for deeper economic, social and political transformations: trasformismo rather than transformation (Newell Reference Newell2019).

The state is at the heart of navigating, obscuring and seeking to appease these tensions but does so not in isolation or devoid of historical context. Social, economic and ecological interdependencies bind the collective fates of states and their citizens together. How they resource their economies and create and distribute wealth is the product of intra- and inter-societal inequalities and their racialised, gendered and class-based manifestations. This is why the book includes a chapter on the global state to reflect the reality of the state’s location in a world economy characterised by multiplicity and uneven and combined development (Rosenburg Reference Rosenberg2013) to push beyond the national focus of many transition studies. Levels of development are relational and interdependent, whether viewed as part of a world system (Wallerstein Reference Wallerstein2014) or a product of global relations between the core and the periphery (Cardoso and Faletto Reference Cardoso and Faletto1979). This means that sustainability transitions in one part of the world are often only possible because of transitions elsewhere – and thus need to be understood in relation to (since they are dependent upon) these other transitions. Appreciating this deep inter-relationality is vital. Whether this is visible and understood through analysis of political and economic relations between ‘rival states and rival firms’ (Stopford and Strange Reference Stopford, Strange and Henley1991), along global wealth chains (Seabrooke and Wigan Reference Seabrooke and Wigan2017), by following the money or from an appreciation of the patterns of ‘ecologically uneven exchange’ that underpin modes of extraction and trade in the global economy premised on the availability of ostensibly ‘cheap’ labour and nature (Patel and Moore Reference Patel and Moore2017), this intimate relationality between transitions, mediated in direct and indirect ways by states, needs to be comprehended. It also poses huge practical and political challenges to the possibility and effectiveness of the global governance of just transitions across spaces, scales and social groups (Newell et al. Reference Newell, Daley, Mikheeva and Pesa2023) while disorienting methodologically nationalist accounts of transitions which treat them in isolation from one another.

But a more historical account is vital too. Colonialism forms the basis of the resource wealth of many industrialised nations in Europe (Rodney Reference Rodney2018; Bhambra Reference Bhambra2021; Newell Reference Newell2021b) that style themselves as transition leaders, and the term ‘new colonialism’ is invoked to describe dominant patterns of extractivism between China and sub-Saharan Africa, for example, as part of a ‘new scramble for Africa’ (Ayers Reference Ayers2013) around land, energy and water. Yet clearly colonial patterns of extraction, uneven exchange, land grabbing, dispossession and the use of violence extend far beyond relations between ‘rising powers’ and African states. Historical legacies cast long shadows over the current politics and pathways to sustainability (Sultana Reference Sultana2022) and colonial imaginaries, circuits of capital and practices of power continue to operate today. It is important also to situate the very practice of sovereignty itself historically (Bartleson Reference Bartleson1995) as the foundation of the state system. As Jessop notes, drawing on Teschke’s work (Reference Teschke2003) on ‘The Myth of 1648’, ‘a system of territorially exclusive, mutually recognising, mutually legitimating national states exercising formally sovereign control over large and exclusive territorial areas is a relatively recent institutional expression of state power that is historically contingent rather than an inevitable and irreversible result of social development’ (Jessop Reference Jessop2008: 5). States continue to operate as just one institutional ensemble among others within a broader social formation but remain nevertheless ‘peculiarly charged with overall responsibility for maintaining the social cohesion of the social formation of which it is merely a part’, primus inter pares, meaning the state is ‘continually called upon by diverse social forces to resolve society’s problems and is equally continually doomed to generate “state failure”’ (Jessop Reference Jessop2008: 7).

Given the central role of the state at the intersection of these historical and contemporary processes and as a vital node in circuits of economic and ecological exchange, it is unsurprising that there is a growing recognition that ‘from protecting niches, nurturing research and technological innovation through to industrial policy, regulation and enforcement, the range and depth of powers that only the state can call upon will be required if radical and rapid transitions are to be achieved which allow humanity to operate within planetary boundaries’ (Johnstone and Newell Reference Johnstone and Newell2018: 72). What is also often missing from such discussions, however, is a more historically grounded, global and geographically sensitive account of which states are playing roles in which transitions, where, when and why and on whose behalf, as well as a more granular account of the variety of state forms, functions and practices which, when taken seriously (and together), provide a richer account of the potential and limitations of state-led transitions to sustainability. Starting to build such an account is crucial, I argue, as part of an attempt to mobilise key intervention and leverage points, to inform social theories of change, to build more effective coalitions and alliances for change and to hardwire urgency and equity into state responses to our collective predicament, as well as dispel myths about lack of agency and the absence of precedents for change.

On the one hand, a wider and richer account of different aspects and dimensions of state authority might be thought to introduce unwelcome complexity by pointing to additional sites of power and resistance that have to be overcome in order to accelerate just transitions and sow the seeds of transformative change. In other words, it is hard enough shifting innovation and industrial policy or strengthening environmental policy. Why also take on the might of the military state or the complexity of the welfare state or bring foreign policy into the equation? On the other hand, unless we attend to each of the multifaceted aspects of the state and their role in enabling or frustrating sustainability transitions, we will likely fail in endeavours to build a more socially just and sustainable society, since continuing with a predominant focus on one set of state activities (around innovation and regulation or environmental policy narrowly conceived) obscures other, often more powerful, state functions (in relation to welfare, foreign policy and militarism) which, whatever the merits of the former, are outweighed by lock-in to unsustainable pathways produced by the latter. From education, health and welfare, innovation and representation to defence and foreign policy, all aspects of state activity impact positively or negatively (and nearly always both) upon the prospects of sustainability transitions. Getting within, amongst and beyond the state helps to identify the cracks, fragilities and vulnerabilities in state power, as well as reveals some of the potential ways in which state power could be mobilised for more progressive and sustainable ends. It affords at least the possibility of moving beyond binary accounts of the states’ role in transitions – interventionist/laissez-faire, neoliberal/social democratic, liberal/coordinated and so on – by forcing us to hold these different latent and actual potentialities simultaneously in our analysis.

1.2 Understanding the State

How then can we best understand, conceptualise and engage with the complexity and contradictions that derive from the diverse ways in which states govern and un-govern sustainability transitions?

Specifically:

• How can we best account for the role of the state in sustainability transitions?

• What roles are states currently playing with respect to those transitions?

• What prospects are there for the transformation of key state roles in sustainability transitions?

Each chapter in the book first introduces an aspect of state power. It then applies this to the question of sustainability transitions before finally exploring the prospects of transforming that aspect of state power. This structure reflects the core argument of the book that the dominant role of most states at the current conjuncture is one of trasformismo: enabling transitions within and for capitalism rather than transformations of it and which move beyond it. Rather than addressing key contradictions within capitalism and industrialism which produce unsustainability, current transitions are for the most part aimed at managing them, displacing them and moving them around through spatial and temporal fixes. In so doing, dominant transition responses further entrench social, economic, racial and gendered inequalities: the very antithesis of just transformative change. Indeed, it would be surprising if deeply unjust economies and societies produced just transitions if what shifts is only a technology or system of service provision and not the power relations which determine access to that system, the labour conditions which prevail in their production and who bears the ecological costs which result from it. Though often described as national plans and experiments, contemporary transitions are intimately interconnected because of the ecological flows, social and labour relations and networks of production and finance that bind them together.

This is the ‘deep relationality’ explored in the book which requires a more global and holistic account not only of the state but of the contexts in which states are seeking to address sustainability challenges. Relationality is key to understanding the social, spatial and ecological organisation of transitions, as well as the potential for deeper transformations. It has many dimensions that are explored in this book, including the state and social relations (of which it is a part and, at the same time, crystallises); the state and its relationship to its own society and citizens (where relationalities are bounded by the duties and obligations that flow from being bound by sovereign borders and the fabric of the social contract that underpins citizenship); relationalities between state functions and within and across the state (which, because they are in tension with one another, produce the conflicts and contradictions explored in the book); relationalities across societies (the state as a nodal point in a global system of states and transnational relations which shape that relationship); the state’s relation to nature (the ecologies of statehood) and the materialities of the state and the ways in which it is both grounded in and seeks to manage the ecologies and material base which its fate is intrinsically bound to.

In this book, I show how the role of the state cannot just be reduced to one of governance and governing transitions. The notion that states neutrally steer, corral and manage different elements of transition towards stated goals is to neglect the deeply political nature of transitions and the social relations in which they are embedded. States do much more than govern. The causes of unsustainability are hardwired into our economic, political, social and cultural systems, infrastructures and behaviours, over which states have significant degrees of direct and indirect influence and control and are frequently centrally placed. To grapple with this reality adequately requires a broad notion of the state which extends way beyond its executive functions, to the multiple levels and arenas in which its authority is exercised and its reach felt across political and civil society (Gramsci Reference Gramsci, Hoare and Nowell Smith1971). To understand the tensions, contradictions and injustices that flow from how these (often competing) roles are performed – or neglected – requires a more political account and one which roots the state in broader social relations of which it is a part and helps to reproduce drawing on theoretical resources outlined in Chapter 2. This means being attentive to the networks and relations of power in which the state is situated and which it seeks to enrol to achieve collective social ends and manage the tensions and contradictions it is confronted with.

I argue in this book that we need to see deeper and more radical shifts across all sites of state power and not just those which have been the focus of debate about the environmental state so far (though those need to change too), namely technology, innovation and environmental policy, and to a lesser extent industrial and tax policy. Rather, we need to address how the state conducts foreign relations, its monopoly on the use of violence through war, imperialism and policing, its industrial, extractivist and centralising tendencies and exclusionary dynamics which mean most of the world’s citizens are unable to actively shape their collective destiny. Hence, as well as analysing emergent, embryonic and unfolding transitions in the contemporary world, I also refer to historical transitions with a view to better appreciating and foregrounding the ways in which neglected dimensions of state power had a bearing on the direction, form, nature and speed of previous transitions: whether foreign policy and its military iterations, industrial and welfare policy or the degree of democracy prevailing in those transitions that states have overseen in the past. This requires a deeper, more rounded, more political, geographical and historical account of the state.

The chapters that follow do not end with a fatalistic and pessimistic account derived from an analysis of contradictions and limits, however, as is often common in critical political economy scholarship. They rather point to examples, precedents, parallels and emergent state practices which show, for example, that demilitarisation is possible because it has happened before; that rapid conversion of industries has been achieved; that welfare can be prioritised by states; that drives towards reducing consumption and waste can be overseen by governments that normally seek to fuel it; that democracy can be deepened through new forms of engagements with citizens traditionally excluded from politics; and so on. Highlighting these examples gives lie to the notion that states cannot change or lack the agency and will to tackle major global challenges. But neither should it provide the basis of a naïve optimism that the state will save us from ecological collapse and deepening social inequalities. Far from it. Many of the transitions and shifts described in the book derive from intense social struggle, often over decades, in preparing the ground for progressive state action and once in place it still has to be fought for against attacks from those wanting to roll back or otherwise control the state for their own purposes.

State forms, functions and capacities vary hugely, resulting from different histories and locked into different patterns of uneven development. As Weber (Reference Weber1948) noted, there is no activity that states always perform and none that they have never performed. We can observe then different views of the state and its role in regulating markets and the appropriate role of business in societal transitions. From a political culture seemingly at ease with a command and control and centralised model of planning which produces visions and missions (such as India’s solar mission reflecting a particular Nehruvian legacy of state planning or reflected in Kenya’s Vision 2030) to transitions largely focussed on private sector–led innovation and investment (such as Jet Zero in the UK or the Breakthrough Agenda agreed at the Glasgow climate Conference of the Parties (COP) in 2021 to advance business-led sectoral transitions), the politics and practice of transitions are not immune from deeper ideological currents and worldviews. Likewise, there are diverse views of the role of business in policy, from the lack of perceived need to negotiate with business in China (Newell Reference Newell2008c) to state complexes deeply entwined with capital (such as the Minerals Energy Complex in South Africa) (Baker et al. Reference Baker, Newell and Phillips2014) to more tripartite bargaining in social democratic and more coordinated economies such as the Netherlands and Denmark where business associations and trade unions both have a central role (Greene and Carter Reference Greene and Carter2024). Regulatory ideologies also diverge around, for example, the political acceptability of tax measures (harder in the US than Northern Europe) and the extent to which regional institutions such as the European Union (EU) should be allowed to shape transition pathways (resisted in the UK and more embraced in France and Germany for example). Different levels of democratisation and scope for civic engagement and deliberation create more openings in settings like Denmark, the UK, Ireland and France, where climate assemblies have been held, but are unavailable in China for example.

Globally, shrinking civic space sharply constrains scope for popular engagement with transition pathways and the deepening of the democratic state (Newell, Shankland et al. Reference Newell, Daley and Twena2022). Political party systems make a difference too. Where proportional representation (PR) voting systems have amplified the influence of Green parties whose role in government has been crucial to Germany’s Energiewende energy transition (Lockwood Reference Lockwood and Scoones2015), first-past-the-post systems have inhibited effective voice in many other democracies such as the UK. Different degrees of integration and incorporation into the global economy in relation to trade, aid relations and levels of indebtedness all structure scope for autonomous action in pursuit of sustainable development. For many countries in the Global South especially, the relevant model might be what some scholars in the varieties of capitalism tradition call DMEs (dependent market economies) (Hall and Soskice Reference Hall and Soskice2001) with important implications for levels of policy autonomy and independence from incumbent actors. Meanwhile, dominant economic models such as the finance-led ‘regime of accumulation’ in the UK accounts for its eagerness to use its structural advantage as home to the City of London and it is no coincidence early voluntary carbon trade centred around the Chicago exchange in the US.

Amid this diversity, there is commonality. Achieving and replicating rapid transitions that are both far-reaching and unprecedented in terms of scale – which, as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C (SR15) suggests, are required to keep warming below 1.5°C (IPCC 2018) – means engaging with the deep politics of transition and transformation across different societal and institutional settings. As Hammond and Hausknost (Reference Hausknost and Hammond2021: x) put it: ‘Posing a systemic challenge to the very structure of modern industrial states – their fossil fuel dependent economies, their consumerist culture, their individualist, interest-driven model of democracy – the climate crisis in particular revealed the inability of previously successful “environmental states” to engender the social change needed to adapt to the reality of rapidly escalating climate change.’ I argue here that this implies supporting political and institutional innovations that disrupt incumbent power within and beyond the state and enable new actors and voices to drive socially just transitions. I suggest such innovations and disruptions are a prerequisite for effective innovations in technology and for rapid decarbonisation that does not entrench social inequalities (Sovacool et al. Reference Sovacool, Geels and Newell2022). This goes beyond questions of good governance and policy design for sustainability, which imply more incremental realignments of socio-technical systems, and centres instead questions of how to disrupt the dominant political economies that frustrate the possibility of both rapid and just transitions required by the Paris Agreement as well as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Not only do incumbent industries resist required changes; the speed and scale of interlinked shifts required also demand simultaneous changes in the larger social order and material base of society. This includes shifts in finance, production and technologies, consumption patterns, infrastructures, governance, social behaviours and culture. It reframes the debate from being one about environmental governance more narrowly conceived and instead centres it as a project of economic transformation: a reset of economic goals, institutions and values and the societies and political systems they create in their guise. Prescriptions for change cannot be formulaic, as it will take different forms around the world, where state capacity, the nature of markets and finance and the form of civil society engagement are diverse and uneven, suggesting the need to consider the scope and inter-relationality of change within an ecosystem of transformation. To complicate matters further, there are few direct historical parallels to turn to for answers about how to realise transformations of this nature. While transitions have occurred in specific sectors or regions that point to the possibility of rapid transitions (Newell and Simms Reference Newell and Simms2020), none have occurred at the speed and scale now required to keep warming below 1.5°C or even 2°C compared with pre-industrial levels (IPCC 2018) nor to live within planetary boundaries. In many ways, therefore, we are in uncharted territory.

Disruptive politics is a crucial dimension of both transitions and more transformative change and deserves more attention compared to the ongoing dominance of work on disruptive technologies and finance. It raises key questions of democracy and accountability which are the focus of Chapter 6. While recognising the central importance of technology and finance in rapid transitions, plugging in alternative technologies or mobilising new flows of finance is unlikely to produce the sorts of accelerated and transformational changes now required without rethinking the purposes for which they are deployed and without generating shifts and realignments in the distribution of political power and influence which keep an unsustainable economic order in place and continue to shape the direction and deployment of that technology and finance. A ‘plug-and-play’ approach reinforces and reproduces incumbent power: plugging in new technologies or energy sources, for example, but without disrupting the systems in which they are embedded (i.e., the way in which electric cars reproduce systems of auto-mobility where public transport is key), and thereby undermining our collective ability to attend to questions of inclusion and social justice that are prerequisites for lasting and deeper transformations (Newell and Martin Reference Newell and Martin2020). It reduces the challenge to one of technological substitutability rather than shifts in production, consumption and political power. As Pickering et al. (Reference Pickering, Hickmann, Bäckstrand, Kalfagianni, Bloomfield, Mert, Ransan-Cooper and Lo2022: 4) suggest:

This highlights the need to go beyond questions of institutional change and governance reform associated with the environmental state. It is about power shifts, expressed in part in a reconfiguration of the state: from an environmental state (which finds expression in the ecological modernisation of existing state structures), or broader transition state which increasingly adopts the goal of transition as a meta-project of statehood but without addressing the underlying drivers of unsustainability, to states of transformation where core state goals, functions and modes of operation are reimagined (see Table 1.1). Going beyond narrow questions of governance and the processes of aligning and steering key actors in critical domains brings us to the deeper politics and social relations which make governing possible and privilege some ways of organising politics over others. Despite recent advances, we continue to lack a deeper theorisation or examination of state practices or a fuller political, sociological or historical treatment of the state in the study and practice of sustainability transitions. This is important because existing governance innovations and incremental policy shifts are clearly not up to the challenge of bringing about transitions at the speed and scale required by the SDGs. This is partly about preventing further technological and infrastructural lock-in given that new projects and infrastructures approved today lock in decades of emissions growth and ecosystem depletion. But it is also about political lock-in and the reproduction of incumbency. Challenging this implies power shifts and more transformative change in the very modus operandi and core functions of the state.

The need for speed and acceleration called for by the IPCC (2018), or the ‘code red’ warning issued by UN Secretary-General António Guterres, does not just recentre the state; it also changes the conduct of politics. It is scientists, not revolutionaries, calling for ‘transformative’ and ‘systemic’ change within the next 10–20 years. But as Naomi Klein (Reference Klein2015) notes, it is unfortunate (to say the least) that at the height of our awareness about the severity of climate change, neoliberal ideology is paramount and governments in many contexts exercise only indirect control over their energy, transport and food systems that need to be transitioned. Hence, at the very time we most need the steering capabilities of states, the power (or perhaps more pertinently, willingness) to intervene has been diminished in many contexts (notwithstanding the glimpse of what state intervention could look like afforded to us by the pandemic). Ignoring, dismissing or dismantling democratic states as the primary arena for the negotiation of sustainable futures threatens to further delay transition and transformation.

Indeed, some of the greatest resistance to more ambitious climate action comes from fossil-fuelled autocratic states not subject to democratic pressures to act more responsibly. China, Russia, Iran, Venezuela and Saudi Arabia have been amongst the most laggard states when it comes to climate action and are, in many instances, actively seeking to delay the energy transition. But even in more established democracies, populist and reactionary groups have brought climate and ecological questions into the so-called culture wars through the spread of fake news and conscious, well-funded and increasingly internationally organised efforts to derail progressive social and environmental causes through front groups and industry-funded ‘astro-turf’ organisations posing as representatives of concerned publics (Beder Reference Beder1997; Jacquet Reference Jacquet2022).

The perspective developed in this book posits the state as neither an inherently good or bad actor nor an intrinsically captured one but rather as a site of conflict and an arena (one among many) of negotiation and social contestation. It is within the state that the demands of capital and the demands of a broader society produce contingent social frictions across what we broadly consider to be ‘the market’ (Polanyi 1980 [Reference Polanyi1944]; Burawoy Reference Burawoy2003) apparent in the tension between accumulation and legitimation (Paterson Reference Paterson2010). States in capitalist democracies balance this tension between industry’s demands for growth and collective concern for the environmental and social risks generated by that growth through a complex, differentiated and contested state apparatus – one that is not inherently reducible to any particular class or faction but is, at least partially, ‘open’ to political mobilisation (Prudham and Morris Reference Prudham and Morris2006). As Buch Hansen et al. (Reference Buch-Hansen, Koch and Nesterova2024: 79) suggest, while ‘the state facilitates the stabilisation and maintenance of the social order via its force, laws, regulations, curricula, resources and its discourses of legitimation … concrete state strategies are the results of the material and symbolic struggles and tensions between social forces within and beyond its institutional borders, which may take the form of contradictions between different state apparatuses and branches’.

The state is best understood then not as one, unitary, rational entity but rather a large web of governance relations and forms of authority, albeit with key foci, nodes and concentrations of power. Key decision-making sites within the state shift constantly as the agenda-setting, law-making and rule-implementing arms of the state respond to the pressure of non-state actors (including private individuals, interest groups and specific firms) as well as the specific political culture of the state (the norms, values and identities of a particular society), outsourcing and delegating governance tasks or extending their authority in new directions. The implications that flow from this view of the state are important for understanding how societies can pursue action across what I call ‘ecosystems of transformation’. Ecosystem here refers to interdependencies between multiple pathways to transformation – the intertwined routes to change mobilised by various segments in society, including the financial sector, the productive capacities of the ‘real economy’, civil society and the state. This provides a more circular and relational understanding of the ecology of change than the hierarchies of levers and agency implied by analysis of ‘leverage points’ (Meadows Reference Meadows1999) and ‘tipping points’ (Otto et al. Reference Otto, Donges, Cremades, Bhowmik, Hewitt, Lucht and Lenferna2020). It affords a more eclectic theory of change as befits the complex political landscape within which responses to sustainability challenges have to be conceived. In some settings, where civic space, a free media and a functioning legal system exist, direct efforts to engage and reform the central state might constitute the key route to change. Elsewhere, targeting cities or businesses directly or working through social movements to amplify voice below or beyond the state forms a more viable option. Questions of strategy and political manoeuvring always have to be guided by a sense of the chain reactions and multiplier and boomerang effects that might be achieved by triggering change in one part of the system in the hope that this leads to change elsewhere, including of course in the state. The windows of opportunity to effect such change are also shaped by political opportunity structures and the shifting ‘strategic selectivity’ of the state (Jessop Reference Jessop2016).

A more ecosystemic approach also recognises the polycentric and fractal nature of contemporary governance (Ostrom Reference Ostrom2010; Gadinger and Scholte Reference Gadinger and Scholte2023; O’Brien et al. Reference O’Brien, Carmona, Gram-Hanssen, Hochachka, Sygna and Rosenberg2023). Writing about oil politics in Africa, Phillips (Reference Phillips2018: 104) notes ‘the links between the sub-national spaces and transnational circuits of resource production somewhat defy a state-based territorial internal-external logic’. More helpful, he suggests, are ‘relational understandings of sovereignty’ that question ‘the presumption that state actors exercise agency in opposition to capital, describing instead conditions of hybrid or shared sovereignty made through the conditions that state and capital place upon one another to commodify resources and enable extraction’ (Phillips Reference Phillips2018: 104). Other work on transnational climate governance initiatives shows how sub-state and non-state actors that seek to reduce greenhouse gases (GHGs) have an important role to play in achieving just transitions by plugging governance gaps, creating novel linkages and generating momentum where multilateral efforts to mitigate climate change, biodiversity loss and many other issues are seemingly in gridlock and the current global political landscape far from conducive to ambitious action underpinned by radical innovation and experimentation (Bulkeley et al. Reference Bulkeley, Andonva, Betsill, Compagnon, Hale, Hoffmann and VanDeveer2014). These initiatives include networks of cities committed to climate mitigation, voluntary corporate reduction targets and disclosure processes and efforts to promote nature-based solutions and to rewild key ecosystems. Nevertheless, many scholars continue to emphasise nation-states and intergovernmental organisations as the primary actors capable of orchestrating such transnational governance initiatives. According to one estimate, this strategy accounts for nearly one-third of transnational climate governance initiatives, for example (Hale and Roger Reference Hale and Roger2014). Hence, there is a complex interplay of public and private authority across a muti-level governance system which presents a conceptual challenge for scholars but also reveals multiple entry points for seeding transformative change.

It is also important to reiterate that the state itself is in transition. In its wide variety of geographically and institutionally distinct forms, the state is not a static or universal entity. As part of broader ecosystems of transformation, states are intertwined with changes in technological, productive, financial and social movement arenas which they both create and are affected by. In helping to bring about socio-technical change, the state itself will have to oversee transformations in political institutions and shifts in relations of power. Indeed, histories of energy statecraft (Yergin Reference Yergin1991; Gore Reference Gore2017) show that particular forms of energy production and infrastructures (Bridge et al. Reference Bridge, Özkaynak and Turhan2018) require, or at times make possible, particular types of politics. For example, nuclear energy requires a more centralised and militarised state. Indeed, concerns around the ‘plutonium economy’ (Patterson Reference Patterson1984) and the ‘nuclear state’ (Jungk Reference Jungk1979) required a level of secrecy due to the nature of materials being handled which had the effect of reducing democratic control and crowding out alternative energy imaginaries (Sovacool et al. Reference Sovacool, Hook, Martiskainen and Baker2019).

Extending the argument to the materiality of resources and how this shapes statecraft, Mitchell’s work on carbon democracy shows how struggles over fossil fuel infrastructures played a defining role in the articulation of social democratic demands on the state (Mitchell Reference Mitchell2011), while the relationship between oil and authoritarianism and large bodies of work on the ‘resource curse’ (Watts Reference Watts2008; Ross Reference Ross2012) lend further weight to the notion that all aspects of statecraft are imbued with energy and resource politics. Selby (Reference Selby2022: 338) suggests: ‘Oil revenues have fed authoritarianism and militarism – what are often, if somewhat problematically, referred to as “rentier state” dynamics’ (see also Beblawi and Luciani Reference Beblawi and Luciani1987). While recognising the materiality of energy sources, it is important here to avoid resource determinism: ‘there is no singular model of how hydrocarbon rents affect state-building’ (Selby Reference Selby2022: 339). Indeed, as Phillips et al. (Reference Phillips, Hailwood and Brooks2016: 27) note, ‘Through associated policy prescriptions and interventions, the resource curse thesis has power not only as a set of management norms, but as an “economic device” that shapes how resource development is constructed’. In other words, energy shapes, but does not determine or proscribe, state politics. The desire by many states to maintain tight central control over energy systems in particular is seen by some as a form of ‘state paternalism’. Szabó and Fabok (Reference Szabó and Fabok2020: 4) suggest: ‘energy has been a centralised provision that has been foundational in the state pursuing and disseminating the idea of state paternalism’. Drawing on examples from Hungary and Poland, they suggest this is manifest in ‘growing the state’s ownership of key energy firms to maintain its paternal role in society’ (Szabó and Fabok Reference Szabó and Fabok2020: 5).

1.3 Just Transitions

Yet, despite growing attention to state transformation in debates about sustainability transitions, the state is often reduced to enabler, regulator and manager of transitions, without sufficient attention to the ways in which the state itself transforms as it attempts to disrupt and manage transformative change in technological and socio-political systems. Choreographing deep structural change on an urgent timeline calls for new distributional and procedural capacities in states to balance, mitigate and manage transition and its impacts across society. Distributional capacities must attend to the spatial and temporal dimensions of just transitions, given that transition initiatives in one community can redistribute risks and benefits in undesirable ways elsewhere in another: both locally and globally, through the uneven distribution of costs and benefits within and between countries (Newell Reference Newell2021a). Examples include the effect on food security of land grabs driven by the expansion of biofuel consumption and the demand for offset programmes (Fairhead et al. Reference Fairhead, Leach and Scoones2012) or scrambles for lithium and cobalt to sustain battery production for increased electrification (Sovacool et al. Reference Sovacool, Hook, Martiskainen and Baker2019; Soto Hernandez and Newell Reference Soto Hernandez and Newell2022). The need for managed and orderly transitions that can attend to some of these intra- and inter-societal injustices speaks to the need for coordinated and sequenced regional and multilateral responses – as proposed for example by advocates of a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty (Newell and Simms Reference Newell and Simms2019) – and the need for the strengthened global governance of just transitions (Newell et al. Reference Newell, Daley, Mikheeva and Pesa2023).

The disruptive and contested nature of transitions can have profound impacts on some social groups (Sovacool et al. Reference Sovacool, Hook, Martiskainen and Baker2019), underscoring how transitions can create new vulnerabilities or worsen existing ones if led by dominant incumbent actors and visions (Newell, Sovacool and Geels Reference Newell, Sovacool and Geels2022). Developing the distributional and procedural capacities needed to achieve just transitions requires greater participation and representation from civil society. Civil society operates at the core of ‘ecosystems of transformation’, often forming the connective tissue across sites and scales of contentious politics and uniquely positioned to pressure public and private sectors to propel forward mutually supportive and virtuous cycles of change around transitions. For instance, divestment pressures can trigger actions in both the public and private sectors, such as institutional investors excluding fossil fuel stocks from their portfolios and governments using procurement programmes to support non-fossil fuel products. These, in turn, can trigger larger shifts in global value chains, rendering fossil fuel leases ‘stranded assets’. Civil society can also hold the public and private sectors to account in pursuing desired justice-oriented outcomes (Newell Reference Newell2008b).

This raises the question of what constitutes legitimate participation in decision-making and who has a right to a seat at the decision-making table: a key challenge for the democratic state explored in Chapter 6. Strengthening procedural justice (fairness in decision-making) requires opening up what are often considered the domains of experts, bureaucrats and elected representatives to civil society, including lay people and those who represent groups historically denied adequate representation, or who will be disproportionately impacted by environmental change (such as Indigenous groups). More challengingly perhaps, this means creating de facto representation for future generations through governance innovations such as ombudspeople for future generations. Strengthening procedural justice also means ensuring basic protections for civil society, a significant challenge in the face of diminishing civic space (ICNL 2020). A civil society that is capable of autonomous action and provides subordinate groups the possibility of collective action lies at the core of democratic governance (Evans and Heller Reference Evans, Heller, Leibfried, Huber, Lange, Levy and Stephens2015). This, in turn, requires effective electoral competition to hold those who control the state accountable to electoral majorities. It also assumes basic rights to speech and social movement organising, which have come under attack in the face of attempts to delegitimise and criminalise protest movements (Brock et al. Reference Brock, Huff, Verweijen, Selby, Ockwell and Newell2018).

1.4 Structure of the Book

The remainder of the book is organised as follows. Chapter 2 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 first looks at how the state has been addressed to date in literatures on socio-technical transitions, before assessing broader analysis of the ‘environmental’ and ‘green state’ which helps to understand the potential and limits of a transition state and scope for more transformative state-led change. Finally, it draws on conceptualisations in disciplines as diverse as politics and political theory, political economy and international relations, geography, sociology and development studies which can be combined to provide a more multifaceted, historical, global and sociological and political account of the state in all its dimensions as they relate to the challenge of sustainability transitions. Thereafter, the book is structured around key aspects and dimensions of state power: the entrepreneurial state, the industrial state, the military state, the democratic state, the welfare state and the global state.

The choice of which aspects of the state to focus on reflects a conscious effort to foreground neglected dimensions of state power and practice which I argue are critical to appreciating both the potential and the limitations of the state as an effective and inclusive agent of change in accelerating just transitions and broader transformational change. I start with those aspects of the state that have received most attention in transition studies. Chapter 3 looks at the entrepreneurial state where the bulk of transitions scholarship has focussed to date. Chapter 4 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. This includes a discussion of the developmental state as one approach to securing the aims of the industrial state. Chapter 5 then moves on to the military state whose activities, power and influence over techno-imaginaries, resources and the ecological impacts it generates make it a central yet problematic actor in the politics of transitions. Chapter 6 analyses the democratic state, increasingly under strain from populist movements and the intensity and scale of challenges presented by the polycrisis but critical to including diverse citizen voices in transition pathways. Chapter 7 then explores the neglected role of the welfare state in providing social protection and advancing just transitions both within and between states. Chapter 8 goes beyond the national context to explore the global state: the state’s uneven imbrication in global networks, institutions and relations of power which shape and reshape transition pathways, currently inadequately captured by their categorisation in the transition literature as ‘landscape’ factors. I then conclude with overall reflections on future directions for the transition state and its potential successor as part of a project of ‘reimagining the state’ as a facilitator of more transformational change.

Of course, there are many other dimensions or typologies or categories of state which, though discussed in the book, could easily have warranted standalone chapters in their own right. These include, for example, the ‘regulatory state’ (Majone Reference Majone, Muller and Wright1994; Pildes and Sunstein Reference Pildes and Sunstein1995; Moran Reference Moran and Russell2002): an idea developed in a European context but subsequently applied elsewhere (Dubash and Morgan Reference Dubash and Morgan2012). This focusses on competition law, the redefinition of the state in the wake of privatisation and centring regulation as a distinctive mode of state intervention in the economy and society. Discussion of the ‘developmental state’ meanwhile is subsumed under the chapter on the industrial state but equally could warrant deeper enquiry since it is clear that proactive developmental states will be required to radically reorient economic development pathways towards sustainability. Each of these are covered in different chapters rather than analysed as standalone ‘state functions’. It is also the case that these aspects of state power analysed distinctly here are, in practice, deeply intertwined. Whether it is the overlap between the military and industrial state, captured in the notion of the military-industrial complex, or the ‘military welfare state’ (Mittelstadt Reference Mittelstadt2015), or imperatives to democratise the entrepreneurial state or to pursue ‘democratic defence’ (Tatchell Reference Tatchell1985), different state functions overlap, collide and converge in response to the multifaceted nature of the policy challenges they seek to address and the nature of the networks which run through the state, transgressing these distinct functions. This presents both analytical challenges for an adequate understanding of the transition state and its potential successor but also increased opportunities to intervene and reshape the ecosystem of transformation to generate positive change. It is to the conceptual and analytical challenge of understanding the state that we now turn our attention.