The state in the transformation to a sustainable postgrowth economy

ABSTRACT

The limits of the environmental state in the context of the provision of economic growth are addressed by applying materialist state theory, state-rescaling approaches and the degrowth/postgrowth literature. I compare state roles in a capitalist growth economy and in a postgrowth economy geared towards bio-physical parameters such as matter and energy throughput and the provision of ‘sustainable welfare’. In both cases state roles are analysed in relation to the economy, welfare, and the environment, as well as state spatiality. Finally, I address the state in a transition from a growth economy to a sustainable postgrowth economy. I argue that materialist state and sustainable welfare theories are capable of informing state-led ‘eco-social’ policies that, if integrated in a comprehensive policy strategy, have the potential to overcome the growth imperative in the economy and policymaking and break the growth-related glass ceiling of the environmental state.

KEYWORDS:

• Environmental state
• materialist state theory
• degrowth/postgrowth
• steady-state economy
• sustainable welfare
• eco-social policies

Introduction

The ‘environmental state’ is normally defined in line with ecological modernisation approaches (Duit et al. 2016). These discuss the ability of the state to make environmental goals compatible with other policy targets while simultaneously providing economic growth. Despite the unquestionable merits of the environmental state – for example in managing pollution, health and safety issues, and local environmental issues – there are serious doubts about its capacity to initiate a comprehensive socio-ecological transition that would lead to a sustainable society and a re-embedding of production and consumption patterns in planetary boundaries. I address the limitations of the environmental state and hypothesise that, within the framework of ecological modernisation, a ‘glass ceiling’ (Hausknost 2019) of the environmental state is reached at the point where the pursuit of ecological goals begins to contradict the overall growth orientation of state action. In other words, the capacity of the environmental state is dependent on the extent to which environmental performance can be decoupled from GDP growth. State-led environmental policies are feasible as long as these do not undermine the overall growth orientation and are therefore largely reduced to the provision of ‘green growth’.

However, recent comparative empirical studies of the link between economic growth, carbon emissions, and ecological footprints indicate that attempts to decouple economic growth absolutely from material resource input and carbon emissions have hitherto largely failed (Pichler et al. 2017). On the contrary, current Western production and consumption patterns as well as material welfare standards have turned out to be incompatible with environmental limits and IPCC climate targets and are not generalisable to the rest of the planet (O’Neill 2015, Fritz and Koch 2016). If non-linear and irreversible changes that may have fundamental consequences for humans and other species are to be avoided (Steffen et al. 2015) – and to allow for ‘catch-up’ development in poor countries – the economy, corresponding production and consumption norms, as well as the welfare standards of the rich countries, would need to be reviewed and scaled back. This is especially emphasised in degrowth/postgrowth approaches: To bring their environmental performances, especially their matter and energy throughputs, in line with ecological thresholds and to reach UN climate targets (IPCC 2018), rich countries would need to ‘degrow’ (Asara et al. 2015).

I take an analysis of state roles in a capitalist economy as a starting point for a conceptual exploration of the possibility of breaking the growth-related glass ceiling of the existing environmental state. I compare the roles of the state in an economy primarily geared towards monetary growth or exchange value and a postgrowth economy geared towards bio-physical parameters such as matter and energy throughput, use-values, and sustainable welfare. Bringing together and applying materialist state theory and state-rescaling approaches, the degrowth/postgrowth literature as well as recent sustainable welfare approaches, I first analyse state roles in a capitalist growth economy in terms of rule of law, welfare state, environmental state, and in relation to state spatiality. In this section, I also address the ways in which these roles are linked to economic, social and environmental policies and examine materialist state theories in relation to the issue of whether and to what extent existing state structures including the environmental state may be used to initiate a wider ecological and societal transformation. Subsequently, I turn to the general principles according to which state economic, social, and environmental policies would be modified and rescaled in a stable-state and sustainable welfare context. Finally, I discuss the potential role of the state in a transformation from a largely unsustainable growth economy to a sustainable post-growth economy. Can materialist state and sustainable welfare theories inform state-led ‘eco-social’ policies that, if integrated in a comprehensive policy strategy, have the potential to overcome the growth imperative in economy and policymaking and, at the same time, break the growth-related glass ceiling of the environmental state?

The state and the provision of sustainability in a growth context

Here, I discuss three key roles of the state in a capitalist growth context (Table 1). First, I address general features of the relation between capitalist growth and the state. Second, I turn to the different spatial levels on which states may be active in regulating capitalist growth. Third, I compare welfare and environmental states.

Table 1. State roles in a capitalist growth economy.

Economic development: Monetary growth (exchange value orientation)	State spatiality/spatial target	Economic, social and environmental policies
Rule of law: Guarantees private property, principle of equivalence, legal security of economic subjects Welfare state: Legitimises social inequality and maintains a minimum of social inclusion Environmental state: Addresses problems of externalisation of environmental costs	Delicate structure subject to de- and re-scaling processes New multi-scalar structures of state organisation, political authority and regulation keep emerging National scale after World War II	Macro-economic management/intermediation of corporatist processes Social policies de- and re-commodifiy labour power Environmental policies facilitate the achievement of’green growth’

Capitalist growth and the state

In capitalism, processes of production and wealth creation are structurally separated from the political processes of exercising coercive power and administrative control. Marx, in particular, linked the autonomous existence of the state to the structural prerequisites of an economy based on the circulation of commodities. In order to exchange goods, individuals must ‘recognize one another reciprocally as proprietors’ (Marx 1973, p. 243). This includes a ‘juridical moment’ since exchange relations are only possible as long as the acting individuals are not prevented from entering them, for example, by feudal rule. Appropriating commodities through the use of force is equally not a legal or legitimate course of action. Therefore, respect of the principle of equivalence in exchange relations depends on a formally independent institution that guarantees the legal and economic independence of the owners of commodities: their equality, legal security, and protection. In the case of an advanced division of labour, this guarantee cannot be ensured in accordance with common law but must be institutionalised in an independent third party that, above all, monopolises the legitimate use of physical force (Weber 1991, p. 78): the modern state.¹ Hence, under the rule of law, the state guarantees private property, the principle of equivalence, and the legal security of the economic subjects.

Exchange relations, however, are not reduced to the swapping of use-values. They also reproduce social relationships that involve power asymmetries and inequalities. The latter originate in different societal domains and take the form of class, race, religion, linguistic, or gender characteristics. In a social structure based on a dynamic plurality of exploitative and exclusionary relationships, the state is the main location for the political regulation of conflicts and for the maintenance of social order (Offe 1984). Since, without regulation, such society risks disintegration, another general state role is the maintenance of a minimum of social cohesion and, at the same time, the legitimisation of remaining inequalities. Related to this is the state’s indispensable capability of temporarily harmonising conflicting group interests. Materialist state theory does not picture the state as simply following the interests of dominant classes and groups but as a social relation in which also the interests of the dominated are to some extent reflected. Specific state structures and activities as well as corresponding modes of governance are linked to ‘social forces, practices and discourses, the (changing) societal context as well as the contested functions or tasks of the state in societal reproduction’, including that of ‘existing societal nature relations’ (Görg et al. 2017, p. 9). In this context, Antonio Gramsci (1999, p. 509) highlights that the state creates and ‘educates’ consent: It ‘urges, incites, solicits, and “punishes”’ to make ‘a certain way of life’ legitimate. This may include moral and punitive sanctions for the deviant.

Materialist approaches further construct the state as a relatively autonomous political sphere, where social classes and groups represent their interests in indirect and mediated ways. As political parties and interest groups raise variable issues such as religion, age, and the environment, these interests and issues are sometimes in the focus of government action, only to be superseded by others at later points in time. As a corollary, state policies cannot be reduced to the strategic interests of single actors, but rather develop as a result of the heterogeneity and changing dynamic of social forces that influence state institutions. Once such a coalition of relatively powerful actors has been formed and has managed to influence the general direction of state policies, however, it takes on the character of a relatively homogenous social force and appears to ‘act’ as if it were a single actor: the more socially coherent the coalition of forces that influences the state, the less the contradictions across its policies. To underline the state’s role in securing and stabilising wider societal relations and to characterise the process during which various social struggles and power asymmetries are expressed within the material state apparatus and its subsequent actions, Poulantzas (1978) uses the term ‘condensation’. The state is an object of agency of the ‘relationship of forces’ or socio-political coalition that creates and recreates it, and, at the same time, a powerful actor, whose policies shape a range of societal fields. To borrow Bourdieu’s terms, it is ‘structured’ and ‘structuring’ at once.

On the one hand, the state facilitates the temporal stabilisation and maintenance of the social order via its force, laws and regulations, material and immaterial resources, as well as its discourses of legitimation. The growth imperative, for example, is not only inherent in the capitalist mode of production and associated consumption relations (Koch 2018), but also amplified by state competitive strategies that prioritise the provision of economic growth over other parameters and policy goals. On the other hand, however, materialist state theory identifies the tensions as well as the material and symbolical struggles between societal forces that also characterise a given state and may take the form of contradictions between its different apparatuses and branches. Different state apparatuses may in fact address problems in different ways: while one may ‘promote growth and the use of fossil energy’, another one may attempt to ‘reduce carbon emissions by reducing the use of fossil energy.’ (Brand et al. 2011, p. 162) In principle, social movements can use such contradictions within the state to further their interests and turn their particular projects into general and hegemonic ones. If successful these indeed become ‘state projects’ (Görg et al. 2017, p. 10).

Bourdieu (2015, p. 368) distinguishes between the ‘left hand’ and the ‘right hand’ of the state. These ‘hands’ are in constant struggle. The ‘left hand’ is oriented at social inclusion and associated with public education, health, housing, social welfare, and employment regulation, while the ‘right hand’ is charged with enforcing discipline – e.g. via budget cuts, fiscal incentives and the penal system. This finds its equivalence in Gramsci’s differentiation between the ‘political’ and ‘ethical’ state. Not only does Gramsci (1999, p. 526) highlight the ‘positive educative function’ of the school system as opposed to the ‘repressive and negative educative function’ of the courts, but he also conceives it ‘possible to imagine the coercive element of the State withering away by degrees, as ever-more conspicuous elements of regulated society (or ethical State of civil society) make their appearance.’ (Gramsci 1999, p. 532) In summary, Bourdieu and Gramsci highlight the possibility that the battles between the ‘right’ and ‘left’ hands or the ‘ethical’ and ‘political’ aspects of the state result in a political conjuncture that initiates social change beyond the capitalist status quo. This may include a structural move towards environmental sustainability. Especially, Poulantzas emphasises that the necessary structural pre-condition for such a re-orientation of state policies is bottom-up mobilisation in the wider society.

State spatiality

The historical development of markets and capital tends to dissolve previously isolated communities and to regroup their inhabitants according to new spatio-temporal structures. The spatial dimension of state regulation is permanently subject to rescaling processes in the course of which new, multi-scalar structures of state organisation, political authority and socio-economic regulation emerge (Kazepov 2010). State institutions are foremost in what Brenner (2004, p. 453) calls ‘spatial targeting’: attempts to ‘enhance territorially specific locational assets, to accelerate the circulation of capital, to reproduce the labour force, to address place-specific socio-economic problems and/or to maintain territorial cohesion’. Similarly, the notion of ‘spatio-temporal fixes’ has been developed to reflect the fact that particular growth regimes correspond with particular scales of regulation or spatial boundaries (national, transnational, local). Spatio-temporal fixes are associated with policy frameworks that target specific jurisdictions, places, and scales as focal points for state regulation in particular periods of time (Harvey 2003). For example, the Fordist growth model, with its focus on the national level, came under pressure not only through various processes of deregulation and re-regulation but also through rescaling processes that led to ongoing shifts in the sites, scales, and modalities of the delivery of state activities. In what Jessop summarises as ‘Schumpeterian workfare post-national regime’, intervention and regulation other than at the national scale has increased in importance. The result is a tendency towards watering down the national state apparatus whose tasks are reorganised on ‘sub-national, national, supranational, and translocal levels.’ (Jessop 2002, p. 206)

In the post-Fordist context, foreign agents and institutions become more significant as sources of domestic policy ideas, policy design, and implementation. Because the increasingly transnational processes of capital accumulation require regulation that extends beyond the borders and capacities of individual states, governments – somewhat in compensation for the loss of scope for intervention at a national level – attempt to create or strengthen regional and global regulatory systems. Far from being made redundant by the emergent international and European order, national governments are among its key architects. With the notion of ‘second-order condensation,’ Brand et al. (2011) apply Poulantzas’ concept of the state as ‘condensation’ of societal forces to internationalisation processes of the state and to shed light on the emerging division of labour across regulatory scales. International institutions appear then as the ‘condensation of the power relationship between competing “national interests” which are themselves shaped by domestic social struggles and compromises.’ (Brand et al. 2011, p. 162) Similarly, Ourgaard presents the international regulatory sphere as a ‘multi-scalar and poly-centred system of governance’, where states and international organisations interact. Though there is no ‘international state’ that would hold the ‘global monopoly on the legitimate use of violence’, this international system has nevertheless ‘stake-like features’, which are ‘unevenly and partially globalized’ (Ougaard 2018, p. 129). That the interests of the rich countries have hitherto largely managed to define the rules of the international system is exemplified in its ‘environmental fix’ (Castree 2008), which has until now allowed for the externalisation of the global North’s socio-ecological costs to the global South.

Welfare and environmental states

Historical struggles such as those between rivalling feudal lords in the context of the dynastic state crucially shaped the internal structure of the state and led to the continuing differentiation of what Bourdieu (2015) calls the ‘bureaucratic field’. One result of later struggles between trade unions and associated social-democratic parties and management was the build-up of the modern Western welfare state, which defines the extent to which labour power is ‘decommodified’ (Esping-Andersen 1990). In providing institutional protection of workers from total dependence for survival on employers, welfare regimes take different forms and vary, above all, in terms of the particular division of labour of private and public provision (Arts and Gelissen 2002). Relatively generous welfare regimes with a correspondingly high level of ‘decommodification’ tend to strengthen the position of workers and facilitate the setup and maintenance of institutionally coordinated industrial relations, while less generous regimes often coincide with weakly coordinated and more ‘individualised’ industrial relations systems. However, recent developments indicate trends towards recommodification and workfare even in countries, such as Sweden, shaped by the social-democratic welfare regime (Koch 2016).

A further historical step in the internal differentiation process of the state in the affluent world has been the establishment of the environmental state. Paralleling the development of the welfare state, the creation of the environmental state can be traced back to struggles between environmental groups and initiatives vis-à-vis business and state interests. Duit et al. (2016, p. 5) define the environmental state as a ‘set of institutions and practices dedicated to the management of the environment and societal-environmental interactions’ including environmental ministries and agencies, environmental legislation and associated bodies, dedicated budgets and environmental finance and tax provisions as well as scientific advisory councils and research organisations. Meadowcroft (2008, p. 331) stresses that the environmental state takes on ‘somewhat different forms in varied national contexts.’ The co-existence of the environmental state alongside the welfare state and other state apparatuses means that the concrete tasks and contents of an environmental state and an environmental policy regime are co-produced by developments on other institutional terrains such as trade policy that may create restrictions for explicit environmental policies.

Although there are certain parallels between the historical developments of welfare and environmental states, institutional, political, and economic contexts – as well as the composition of supporting and opposing social groupings and associated ideational constellations – differ significantly (Gough 2016). Esping-Andersen’s welfare regime approach has nevertheless inspired debates on the environmental state. According to Dryzek et al. (2003), for example, social-democratic welfare states are better placed to manage the intersection of social and environmental policies than more liberal market economies and welfare regimes. One reason Dryzek mentions is the discourse of ‘ecological modernisation’, which he regards as especially widespread in the Nordic countries: the idea that environmental policies can be good for business, and that ‘green growth’ presupposes the governance capacities of coordinated markets. Rather than trusting in the invisible hand of the market, social-democratic welfare regimes would generally make a ‘conscious and coordinated effort’ and regard ‘economic and ecological values as mutually reinforcing’ (Gough et al. 2008, p. 334–5). Yet the claim that social-democratic welfare regimes that are least unequal in socio-economic terms would also perform best in ecological terms and gradually turn into ‘eco-social’ states’ could not be verified in comparative empirical research (Koch and Fritz 2014, Duit 2016, Jakobsson et al. 2018). Rather than welfare regimes, it is the level of economic development measured in GDP per capita that turned out to be most responsible for countries’ ecological (under-)performance measured in carbon emissions per capita and ecological footprints of production and consumption. However, this does certainly not rule out the possibility that the institutional potentials of social-democratic welfare states and coordinated market regimes to initiate eco-social policies and, eventually, build eco-social states may have as yet been under-utilized. Though coordinated varieties of capitalism have not yet achieved better ecological results than uncoordinated ones, governments may nevertheless be in a better position within the former institutional set-up to initiate a social and ecological transformation based on a de-prioritisation of growth (Gough 2017).

Tasks and scales of the state in a steady-state and sustainable welfare context

While ‘ecological modernisation’ discourses claim that the pursuit of economic growth can be made compatible with environmental limits by building on existing (welfare) institutions, ‘no-growth’, ‘post-growth’ and, especially, ‘degrowth’ theories and ecological economists view economic growth itself as the problem (Khan and Clark 2016). Both fundamentally question both the synergy hypothesis of the welfare and environmental dimension of the state and the ‘green growth’ policy option that follows from it. The policy implication from comparative studies (O’Neill 2015, Fritz and Koch 2016), according to which material welfare standards and the environmental performance of a country is largely a reflection of its development in economic terms, is that GDP growth would need to be deprioritised across the advanced capitalist world if planetary boundaries were to be taken seriously and in order to allow for efficient environmental policymaking to achieve ecological sustainability. In this section, I envision a major shift away from established developmental paths associated with the traditional environmental state or, in the terminology of sustainability transformation research, a ‘qualitative system change’ (Nalau and Handmer 2015, p. 350). Moore et al. (2014, p. 55) consider the scale aspect and postulate that transformational change must be identifiable at ‘multiple scales and to multiple elements’, even though these may have started ‘at a single scale concerning a single element’. Finally, most theorists of transformational change start from the ‘basic expectation’ that the ‘new state can be known’ and corresponding ‘planning and policy responses can be undertaken’ (Nalau and Handmer 2015, p. 351). Though an agreement on ‘what exactly needs to be changed and how’ is doubtless crucial, it is somewhat surprising that the transformational change literature has as yet hardly engaged with the possible role of the state (Görg et al. 2017). In what follows, I not only discuss some general principles of a sustainable post-growth economy but also state roles and associated processes of state rescaling in such systemic change.

Principles of steady-state economics and sustainable welfare

The most significant shift from a growth to a post-growth economy would probably be from a monetary growth or exchange value orientation to bio-physical parameters and use-value as a basis for steering the economy (Tables 1 and 2). I use Herman Daly’s ‘steady-state economy’ (Daly 1972), the most cited vision of an economic system that functions within ecological boundaries, as an approximation for the ‘new state’ (Nalau and Handmer 2015) of a sustainable post-growth economy. It is a model of an economy that does not grow in the sense that it keeps the level of ‘throughput’ – the ‘extraction of raw materials from nature and their return to nature as waste’ (Farley 2013, p. 49) – as low as possible and ideally within the regenerative and assimilative capacities of the ecosystem. This goal does not imply abandoning growth in all sectors of the economy but an overall deprioritisation of economic growth in policymaking. Since Daly’s steady-state economy serves here as a broad direction for and goal of transformational change, the dispute about whether steady-state economics may underestimate structural power relations or even serve as a neoclassical Trojan horse within ecological economics (Pirgmaier 2017, Farley and Washington 2018) is secondary. Due to space limitations, I do not refer in detail to the societal struggles that would doubtless be necessary to achieve this new state and defend it against the powerful social forces that presently benefit from the capitalist growth economy.

Table 2. State roles in (a transformation to) a post-growth economy.

Economic development: (Increasingly) seen as bio-physical process (use-value orientation)	Spatial target	Economic and eco-social policies: Needs and sustainable welfare orientation
State ensures that production and consumption do not exceed environmental limits Defines limits for economic and social inequality Steers governance of public, collective, communal and private property forms	Global and local levels Global: Identification of thresholds for matter and energy throughput These delineate the leeway within which national and local economies may evolve	Macro-economic management of mixed and steady-state economy ensures provision of sufficient need satisfiers Eco-social policies facilitate ecological and social transformation

The deprioritisation of growth is also a hallmark of the emerging ‘sustainable welfare’ approach (Koch and Mont 2016, Fritz and Koch 2019) that has been developed to complement steady-state and degrowth economics with a welfare theory. If environmental limits were to be respected, the distributive principles underlying existing welfare systems would be extended to include those living in other countries and in the future. In addition to universalisability and intertemporality, the satisfaction of human needs is central to the concept of sustainable welfare and post-growth/degrowth research in general (Koch et al. 2017, Büchs and Koch 2019). The central welfare concern is not ‘wants’ or the unlimited provision of material riches for the ‘happy few’ in Western societies but the satisfaction of basic needs for all humans now and in the future. Needs differ from wants and preferences in that they are non-negotiable and universalisable and that failure to satisfy these produces serious harm (Gough 2017). Hence, needs do not vary over time and across cultures but only in the ways in which a specific culture at a particular point in time attempts to satisfy them. If a transformational change strategy were needs-oriented, critical thresholds for the universal provision of human needs or for a ‘minimally decent life’ would constantly be (re-)defined in light of the advances of scientific and practical knowledge. This also concerns the degree to which anything more than the satisfaction of human needs can be provided on a finite planet. While the exact kind and amount of need satisfiers that future peoples will require is certainly unknown, economic systems could nevertheless be assessed according to their ability to produce a critical minimum of appropriate need satisfiers. As a guideline, Gough (2017, p. 174) suggests that needs of the present ‘should always take precedence over the basic needs of the future’ but ‘basic needs of the future should take precedence over the extravagant luxury of the present.’

Tasks and spatial targets of the state

The original concept of a steady-state economy was not developed at the global level. Yet environmental threats such as climate change are global issues, since it does not matter from which part of the globe greenhouse gases are emitted. The ecological footprint and the associated matter and energy throughput of the whole planet would need to shrink if global production and consumption norms were to respect ecological limits. However, partially due to massive differences in economic development and unprecedented socio-economic inequality (Piketty 2014), such a re-embedding of global production and consumption patterns would imply different challenges for different regions and nations. The fact that already the ‘developing’ countries assembled in Fritz and Koch’s second poorest cluster (Fritz and Koch 2016) live beyond their ecological means has repercussions for the scales that states primarily target – from the national towards global but also local levels. In global governance networks, where states would play key roles, thresholds for matter and energy throughput would be defined in accordance with natural science expertise. These limits would delineate the leeway within which national and local economies may evolve. For the case of greenhouse gas emissions, Baer et al. (2009) have tabled a ‘greenhouse development rights’ proposal including the conclusion that any efficient global decarbonisation would involve substantial transfers from rich to poor countries. A new division of labour between the various regulatory levels is envisioned by Kothari (2018, p. 254) who proposes assigning ‘a minimal set of matters’ to the global level, while the bulk of decision-making would ‘go to the most local level feasible’, where he assumes that diverse approaches to meeting collective goals are most ‘accepted and encouraged.’

Such a new division of labour across scales would in all likelihood mean a lesser role for, and a stricter regulation of, market forces than currently. Though the allocative efficiency of markets is accepted in most steady-state concepts, these would operate in much narrower limits, given the primacy of global sustainability and intergenerational justice. Instead, a ‘steering state’ would at various levels be primus inter pares in a mixed economy and a governance network of public, collective, communal and private actors. New combinations of state and common ownership may be developed in relation to the governance of socio-natural resources such as energy and water. This downscaling of regulatory power from national welfare and environmental institutions to local levels is addressed by several contributors to steady-state economics, degrowth and social enterprises. These highlight the need to replace the current global production and trade systems with economies based on cooperative principles and oriented towards local production and consumption cycles (Dietz and O’Neill 2013). Some local and voluntary grassroots initiatives have proven quite efficient in environmental terms even though they often face difficulties in sustaining themselves over time (Howell 2012). Soper (2016) expects the chances of achieving long-term success to increase where (local) governments and governance networks support voluntary and civic bottom-up initiatives. Kothari (2018, p. 253), reviewing various experiences especially from Asian and Latin American countries, puts forward the novel notion of a ‘communal’ or ‘plurinational’ state that accommodates ‘channels of communication and delegation’ of empowered grassroots communities that influence provincial and national decisions. Though ‘common values and visions of well-being from indigenous peoples, local communities, and civil society’ can in principle enrich policymaking on national and global levels, he acknowledges the challenge to ‘scale up these small, scattered initiatives without losing their site-specificity, to cultivate synergies, and to link them to form a broader global network … ’ (Kothari 2018, p. 259)

In relation to the national level of state regulation, Buch-Hansen (2014) argues that present institutional diversity is likely to affect degrowth trajectories as well as the concrete shaping of national steady-state economies and corresponding state apparatuses. Just as contemporary capitalist societies are diverse, so would steady-state economies take many different forms in different countries. In this context it appears promising to not only build on ‘systemic change’ (see above) but also incremental change approaches. Mahoney and Thelen (2010), for example, demonstrate that change rarely takes the form of an abrupt and clear-cut break with the past. More often, change is gradual so that existing institutional principles and practices would be preserved in some form and synthesised with steady-state principles. This resonates with Dryzek’s observation that ‘institutions can vary in their degree of path dependency, such that we can envisage institutions in the Anthropocene that are able to adapt to a rapidly changing (and potentially catastrophic) social-ecological context.’ (Dryzek 2014, p. 942) This variety also relates to the capability of institutional reflexivity, of learning processes from ‘best-practice’ countries. Comparative research into wellbeing, prosperity and environmental performance of existing countries relative to GDP/capita (Fritz and Koch 2016) suggests that there are better than average performing countries in each part of the world (for example, Switzerland in Europe, Costa Rica and Uruguay in Latin America) that could be singled out for in-depth institutional analysis. However, Dryzek (2014, p. 94) makes the crucial point that institutional reflexivity may well have to go beyond ‘adaptive capacity’ and move towards ‘ecosystemic reflexivity’, defined as the ‘incorporation into human institutions of better ways to listen to ecological systems that have no voice’.

State roles and eco-social policies in the transformation to a steady-state economy

Here I apply the materialist state perspective to the issue of how existing states could assist and initiate a transformation from a capitalist growth economy to a sustainable post-growth one. Raising this issue is somewhat against the growth-critical mainstream since neither state theories nor policies are especially popular in post-growth/degrowth circles. In fact much green thought has tended to view states as part of the problem rather than as the solution (Cosme et al. 2017). Yet Cosme et al. also demonstrate that most concrete policy proposals tabled by growth-critical scholars are traditional ‘top-down’ and state-led measures rather than ‘bottom up’ and community-led. I would argue that this contradiction – between conceptualising the state as an external power, incapable of initiating change in an ecological and social direction, and politically appealing to it to do precisely this – can be overcome through an application of materialist state theory. In particular, Poulantzas’ concept of ‘condensation’ of wider societal struggles within the state indicates that the political actions of the state are far from independent of what goes on beyond it. If mobilisation by socio-ecological and growth-critical groups reached a critical momentum (Buch-Hansen 2018), the existing state apparatus could be used to initiate a transition that breaks the glass ceiling of current environmental states. This would require a combination of bottom-up mobilisations and action and top-down regulation, resulting in a new mix of property forms including communal, state, and individual property and a new division of labour between market, state, and ‘commons’. The top-down aspect of this transition would presuppose an ‘active interventionist “innovation state”, with substantial public investment, state banking, subsidies, and other incentives to private investment and greater regulation and planning’ (Gough 2017, p. 197). A range of policies concerning taxation and/or caps on wealth and/or income to offset regressive impacts on lower-income groups would be required to reverse growing levels of inequality that are likely to accompany an economic retraction (Buch-Hansen and Koch 2019). At the same time, the investment functions of social policy would need to be enlarged and reconciled with environmental investment. If integrated into a comprehensive strategy, the following state policy initiatives could facilitate the transition to an economy beyond the growth imperative.

A global re-embedding of economy and society in environmental limits would imply a critical review of Western production and consumption patterns. Accordingly, the focus of the state’s macro-economic management would need to shift from the provision of monetary growth towards ensuring that production and consumption processes do not exceed critical thresholds for matter and energy throughput. The state’s welfare role would particularly address the ‘double injustice’ (Walker 2012): the poorest household groups are least responsible for environmental damages such as the climate crisis and are in the worst position to cope with and afford mitigation and adaptation. This is possible if state policies were informed and guided by need and sustainable welfare theories. Gough’s ‘dual strategy’, in particular, can provide a collective and critical way of distinguishing needs from luxuries (Gough 2017, p. 169). Accordingly, citizens, ‘experts’, and government representatives work together in democratic forums to identify the goods and services necessary to satisfy a given need and the level of this satisfaction within particular social, cultural, national and local contexts.² One application of the dual strategy is ‘social tariffs’ that could adjust energy tariffs in line with energy need (Gough 2017, p. 140). These would recognise the basic need component of the first block of household energy as well as the choice element in successive units. While the total average price of domestic energy would continue to rise over time, much of the financial burden would be directed towards high-consumption households. In light of the ‘double injustice’, ecological investment, for example into retrofitting houses, only has a chance of being perceived as legitimate, if it is accompanied by countervailing social policies that, for example, assist homeowners in paying for ecologically useful measures. Beyond the energy sector, governments can stimulate a recomposition of consumption. Again, need theory may be applied to develop a safe ‘consumption corridor’ (Di Giulio and Fuchs 2014) between ‘minimum standards, allowing every individual to live a good life, and maximum standards, ensuring a limit on every individual’s use of natural and social resources’ (Gough 2017, p. 197–198). Governments can encourage certain ways of consumption (for example, vegetarian diets, local holidays, use of public transport and cycling) and complicate others (for example, meat consumption, holidaying in distant locations, car and plane use). Such state engagement may be facilitated by a growing dissatisfaction of the public with the consumerist lifestyle and its negative side-affects such as time scarcity, high levels of stress, and traffic congestion (Soper 2016).

Further proposals, where states could support civil society initiatives for a social and ecological transformation concern policy areas such as that of macroeconomic steering, minimum incomes, carbon rationing, working time reduction and work life balance, the role of commons, as well as alternative monetary systems and local currencies (Büchs and Koch (2017, p. 112–119). To finance these, and to sustain a post-growth economy and the associated sustainable welfare system, a new globally coordinated and wealth-related (rather than income-related) architecture of taxation would be necessary. However, Bailey (2015, p. 795) argues that the revenue surplus resulting from such reforms may not compensate for the tax losses that the rich states would face in the absence of GDP growth. In fact, reduced ‘levels of (taxable) economic activity’ threatens the ‘public sector funding base of welfare states’ and impedes ‘the state’s traditional mechanisms of “crisis management”’. Hence, if traditional and national growth–tax–expenditure models are no longer viable, democratic policy-auditing practices would need to delineate how welfare and environmental states may be recalibrated – and in all likelihood downscaled – to meet human needs within environmental limits. Smaller ‘eco-social’ states may be acceptable as long as these are embedded in an economic system that provides relatively egalitarian outcomes and costs related to inequality, (unhealthy) work-life balances, and environmental deterioration.

Conclusion

Recent comparative studies indicate that attempts to decouple economic growth absolutely from material resource input and carbon emissions have been largely unsuccessful. Against this background I set out to analyse the ‘growth imperative’ – the priority of providing economic growth in policymaking – as being a glass ceiling of the environmental state and a structural limit to its capacity to engage in societal and ecological transformation. The comparison of state roles and scales in an economy oriented towards monetary growth and in a post-growth steady-state economy oriented towards bio-physical parameters demonstrated that, in the former economy, the main spatial target of the state is the national level, while, in the latter, it is global and local levels. In the former model, the growth paradigm delineates the limits for state action in economic, social, and environmental domains to a significant extent, since environmental policies are feasible only as long as these do not undermine the overall growth orientation. Hence, state action is largely reduced to the provision of ‘green growth’. In a post-growth context, by contrast, the policy priority of achieving economic growth is replaced by the goal of re-embedding production and consumption patterns into planetary limits. In these circumstances, state economic, social, and environmental policies are oriented at minimising matter and energy throughput and maximising sustainable welfare, specifically the provision of sufficient need satisfiers for all people now and in future. While state capacity to act in the environmental domain would increase significantly if the growth proviso were replaced by a sustainability proviso, state power would be used to build transnational networks and to act as primus inter pares together with various private, semi-private, and non-profit actors to ensure the respect of ecological limits in production and consumption patterns.

The materialist state theory perspective taken here suggests that states are not only at the receiving end of ‘economic’, ‘global’ and otherwise ‘dominant’ forces. The contributions by Gramsci, Poulantzas, and Bourdieu point to the conclusion that existing state apparatuses can play a constructive part in an ecological and societal transformation. The discussion of state-induced eco-social policies has confirmed this ‘structuring’ dimension of state action. While this result resonates in many ways with older definitions of the ‘green’ state according to which ‘a deep and lasting resolution to ecological problems can … only be anticipated in a post-capitalist economy and post-liberal democratic state’ (Eckersley 2004, p. 81), it also points to the capacity of state action to bring about this type of change in present contexts. Future research efforts should be dedicated to the theoretical and practical development of the as yet fragmented eco-social policy proposals and to their integration into a coherent transformation strategy for the economic, political, and ecological restructuring of the advanced capitalist countries and their re-embedding within planetary boundaries. It is difficult to see how this could become reality without the intervention of an active state.

Acknowledgments

I thank the editors and two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on earlier drafts. This contribution benefited from funding from the Swedish Energy Agency (Energimyndigheten) project ‘Sustainable Welfare for a New Generation of Social Policy’ (project no. 48510-1).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Energimyndigheten (4850-1).

Notes

1. Bourdieu (2015) adds to Weber’s famous definition that in advanced societies the state also holds the monopoly of the legitimate use of symbolic violence including the ‘official definition of identities, the promulgation of standards of conduct, and the administration of justice.’ (Wacquant 2016, p. 116).

2. See Dryzek (2014, p. 947) for the case of ‘deliberative democratization of climate science’.