Building the Environmental State: Markets, Movements, Bureaucracies
Building the Environmental State: Markets, Movements, Bureaucracies
Tuesday, 8 July 2025: 11:00-12:45
Location: SJES030 (Faculty of Legal, Economic, and Social Sciences (JES))
RC02 Economy and Society (host committee) Language: English
Social scientists in multiple subfields are debating the possibilities of emergent green statecraft across the globe. As energy and green industry transitions unfold it seems the state is finally answering calls to action with a return to industry policy, green developmental strategies and planning processes. Theorists of macroeconomic policy (Gabor), innovation (Mazzucato), capitalism (Parenti, Wainwright and Manne) and statecraft (Thurbon) are making advances in political economy and geography subfields. Meanwhile, sociologists have recently focused in on the state's developmental contradictions (Rea and Frickel) and the state as necessary site of contestation for environmental justice movements (Harrison).
This panel invites conceptual and empirical papers that address the role of economic sociology in capturing the emergent possibilities of the environmental state in the Anthropocene.
- Can the state act on climate change?
- What roles (old and new) is the state playing for competing industries and corporations as 'green' transitions take hold?
- Are the institutions and bureaucracies of the state departing from historical legacies of developmentalism in the name of 'net zero'?
- What dilemmas and opportunities are opening for social movements seeking to transform markets and statecraft?
- How will intensifying climate change transform statecraft this century?
- What tools does economic sociology offer to our understanding of the environmental state?
Session Organizer:
Oral Presentations
Distributed Papers