The Green State in Transition: Reply to Bailey, Barry and Craig

ABSTRACT

The contributions comprising this special section are part of a more general wave of research that is revisiting and/or re-envisaging the environmental state. They do so from the perspective of critical political economy. This article provides an assessment of their respective contributions while also reflecting on how those seeking to understand the greening (or de-greening) of the state from this critical political economy perspective might extend their critical theory to ‘critical problem-solving’ in ways that are attentive to the politics of transition. To this end, I play Bailey off against Barry and Craig to illustrate how critical problem-solving might be approached.

KEYWORDS:

• The green state
• degrowth
• green growth
• fiscal crisis of the state
• transition theory
• critical theory

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Robyn Eckersley is a Professor of Political Science in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne. She has published widely in the fields of environmental politics, political theory and International Relations with a special focus on the ethics, politics and governance of climate change.

Notes

1 The terms ‘environmental state’ or ‘ecostate’ are commonly used in sociological and empirical research on the environmental functions of the state (particularly, but not only, in North America Duit, Fiendt and Meadowcroft 2016, 5–6), while the ‘green state’ is more commonly used to refer to a critical and normative project of building ecologically responsible states to the point at which ecological sustainability is a central purpose of the state. However, this usage is not consistent and critical theories of the ‘green state’ combine normative theory with sociological and empirical research on the environmental state.

2 These include the competitive pressures of economic globalisation, the changing nature of work due to technological change, increasing inequalities in income and wealth within and between states, demographic change, and the need for further investment in aging public infrastructure.

Additional information

Funding

The background research for this article was funded by the Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Project funding scheme [DP11010069].