‘Treasury Control’ and the British Environmental State: The Political Economy of Green Development Strategy in UK Central Government

ABSTRACT

A growing literature uses the term ‘environmental state’ to refer to the new roles and institutional capacities that the modern capitalist state has acquired in relation to the environment and the unfolding ecological crisis. Green development strategies for the transformation of unsustainable accumulation models are an important qualitative and quantitative indicator of environmental statehood. Yet in Britain, the powers and policy priorities of H.M Treasury are proving a significant constraint on the articulation of such a strategy. I situate the Treasury's obstructive stance in the broader history of the internal politics of the British state, arguing that it reflects a long-standing tendency for the Treasury to assert a position of power vis-à-vis departmental rivals in ways that undermine their capacity to conduct interventionist industrial policies. I analyse the post-2008 context as a moment in which this regularity has re-asserted itself as the Treasury privileges a strategy of accumulation model repair over one of transformation. I illustrate the implications of this stance for the emerging British environmental state by examining two episodes: the containment and privatisation of the green investment bank, and recent incursions by the Treasury into energy policy. I conclude by considering the methodological and practical implications of the analysis.

KEYWORDS:

• Treasury control
• green industrial policy
• British political development
• recovery through regressive redistribution
• green transition

Acknowledgements

The author would like to express his thanks – with the usual disclaimers – to Tom Hunt, Tony Payne, Craig Berry, Dan Bailey, Colin Thain, Catherine Walsh, David Coates, David Powell, Dan Corry, Michael Jacobs and Robyn Eckersley for their advice, encouragement and comments on earlier drafts of this article, as well as to the reviewers for their helpful comments.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Martin P.A. Craig is a research associate at the Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute, University of Sheffield. His research touches upon various aspects of governance for green growth in the UK.

Notes

1 A ‘model of capital accumulation’ or ‘accumulation model’ is akin to Jessop’s notion of an ‘accumulation strategy’, referring both to a pattern of demand and supply that facilitates the profitable investment and accumulation of capital in a given spatial context, as well as to the supporting societal institutions that enable that pattern to be sustained (Jessop 1983). I say ‘greener’ rather than a ‘green’ in this context because it is far from clear that any accumulation model able to deliver publicly acceptable levels of income and employment can ever be sustainable in the long-term (Craig 2017).

2 Indeed, incoherencies among Treasury doctrines may also be a factor in its unconstructive stance towards development strategy, on which (see Kerslake 2017).

3 Claims by the Committee on Climate Change (2015b) that large-scale wind and solar power will be competitive with gas power after 2020 assume that the carbon price will be ‘target consistent’ path of £32 to £78p/t over the course of the 2020s. The same report in which these claims were made is less than optimistic that this will actually occur.