The Specter of State Discipline: Green Industrial Policy and Low-Carbon Development in France

Demands for decarbonization have triggered a renaissance of state intervention — or so we are told. Pointing to the rise of “green industrial policy,” social scientists now debate the return of economic planning in the name of reindustrialization and fossil fuel phase-outs. In this article, I outline an updated theory of what scholars of development term “state discipline” as a key heuristic for evaluating this state-led decarbonization. Through the crucial case of the French state and its relation to the global oil major TotalEnegies, I show how the efficacy of green industrial policy is a reflection of the state’s capacity to discipline firms. Drawing on a corpus of public documents as well as in-depth interviews with civil servants, lawyers, and activists, I trace the formation of this state discipline as (a) conditional incentives mediated by (b) the exogenous coercion of firm participation. Without the latter, states prove incapable of systematic discipline and industrial policy devolves, at best, into piecemeal interventions and, at worst, legally ambiguous partnerships enabling corporate welfare. This research reveals the contradictions between the policy instruments and policy autonomy of the emerging green state. While there is clear evidence that “post-neoliberal” regimes are now defined by a renewal of economic planning, I suggest this planning remains subordinated to the interests of highly globalized firms. And yet, given ongoing shifts in multilateral governance, space maybe opening for a reversal of this structural dependency.