How to integrate the Global South into the ‘green state’ concept

Abstract

Globally, the state apparatus is increasingly used towards green ambitions. While the ‘green state’ concept captures this universal phenomenon, the literature on it is largely limited to Western countries. Here, I assess the green state concept’s ability to reflect the global plurality of potential green states. I do so by testing the two assumed preconditions that currently delimit the green state’s scope to the West: mature democratic institutions and high state capacity. Through a two-dimensional continuum of political institutions and state capacity, I present a dynamic and fluid framework of four categories, providing a theoretical scaffolding for broadening the scope to encompass the Global South. As a basis for the analysis, I distil the broad literature on the green state concept into a definition encompassing both a normative ideal that countries can strive towards as well as an analytical tool for assessing countries’ empirical green performance. From that, I show that green states can exist without either assumed precondition and that the literature therefore arbitrarily excludes the Global South from the green state concept. This finding gives impetus to an emerging research area that answers calls to move beyond Western-centrism and integrate the Global South.

Keywords:

• Green state
• environmental politics
• climate change
• Global South

Acknowledgements

I thank the participants of the session on ‘Environmental States’ as part of ‘TH14: The Political Economy of Climate Change’ at the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (SASE) 2022 conference for their constructive input and support for the manuscript. I also thank the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Though the term ‘green state’ is most commonly used, alternatives with different emphasis exist – for example, Mazzucato’s (2015) ‘green entrepreneurial state’, Meadowcroft’s (2005) ecostate, and Paterson’s (2016) ‘greening of the state’.

2 See Bäckstrand and Kronsell (2015, 7) for a discussion on how different definitions can be ­applied for analysis.

3 Please see Chandrashekeran et al. (2017) for a detailed overview and comparison of approaches.

4 Recognising the proliferation and variegated usage of the terms (Haug, Braveboy-Wagner, and Maihold 2021), for the purpose of this paper, the Global North is defined as economically ­developed and politically democratic countries and the Global South as all other countries. They refer to certain geographic concepts and are therefore capitalised. Still, as elaborated upon below, both economic development and political systems move on a continuum without fixed thresholds, meaning that countries dynamically move between categories. In general, definitions of the two terms differ by context but are commonly based on income per capita. ‘Western’ refers to the Global North minus South Korea and Japan.

5 The literature on relations between economic growth and political models suggest that while democracies have a narrow normal distribution and on average higher growth rates, authoritarian regimes have a wider normal distribution with many cases of both better and worse growth (Kudamatsu and Timothy 2008). Furthermore, there is a very strong correlation between the level of democracy and GDP per capita and human development indicators, with few exceptions of authoritarian regimes reaching high income levels (Acemoglu et al. 2015).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mathias Larsen

Mathias Larsen is Postdoctoral Research Associate at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International & Public Affairs. His research concerns the political economy of the role of the state in financing green transition, focusing on the case of China and other Global South countries.