Comparative capitalisms in the Anthropocene: a research agenda for green transition

Jeremy Green

Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

ABSTRACT

Climate change and broader Anthropogenic environmental risks pose existential threats to humanity. Human-driven environmental change has come to be understood through the concept of the ‘Anthropocene’. Anthropocene risks demonstrate that existing fossil-fuel intensive and growth-oriented capitalist development are unsustainable. The urgent need to transition towards greener forms of development is widely recognised. Comparative Political Economy (CPE) should be well placed to guide and evaluate green transition, yet it typifies a wider disconnect between political economy and environment. This article seeks to understand and transcend that disconnect. Developing a critical genealogy of CPE’s post-war emergence, the article examines CPE’s paradigmatic evolution and fitness for grappling with the Anthropocene. It argues that dominant theoretical paradigms (Varieties of Capitalism and Growth Models approaches) are grounded in a ‘nature/society’ dualism that treats national economic models as environmentally disembedded and causally independent from the Earth System. Economic growth is uncritically elevated as a dominant comparative metric, normative aspiration, and policy objective for capitalist development. These characteristics limit the capacity to engage with green transition. Embedding CPE within ecological considerations, the article selectively repurposes the field’s existing conceptual insights to develop hypotheses concerning comparative capitalisms and green transition in the Anthropocene.

KEYWORDS

Anthropocene, Comparative Political Economy, green transition, growth models, paradigms

Climate change poses existential threats to humanity. Our current trajectory risks a ‘Hothouse Earth’ scenario in which feedback loops within the Earth System trigger runaway warming and ecosystemic breakdown, heralding a planetary pathway inhospitable to human life. This scenario is possible even if the Paris Agreement target for keeping global warming to within 2 degrees Celsius is met (Steffen et al. 2018). Without large-scale efforts to rapidly decarbonise economies and promote environmentally sustainable practices, we face the possibility of civilisational collapse (Wallace-Wells 2019, Paterson 2020).

An expanding body of interdisciplinary scholarship comprehends this unique situation through the concept of the Anthropocene – a geological epoch in which human societies are primary drivers of climatic transformation (Steffen et al. 2011). More than a pseudonym for global warming, the Anthropocene represents a broader range of changing Earth System dynamics bearing the mark of human agency. Environmental consequences range from collapsing biodiversity prompted by industrial agriculture and rapid urbanisation, to the exhaustion of global fisheries and the reorientation of the Earth’s water, nitrogen, and phosphate cycles (Bonneuil & Fressoz 2016, p. 4).

Existing patterns of growth-oriented and fossil-fuel intensive human economic activity are unsustainable (Gough 2017, Raworth 2017). The need for a green transition towards a decarbonised and environmentally sustainable economy now has broad support. But the objects, actors, and goals of this transition remain ambiguous (Newell, Paterson & Craig 2020, p. 1). Comparative Political Economy (CPE) with its attentiveness to comparative institutional responses to common challenges and holistic theorisation of capitalism, should be well placed to guide and evaluate green transition. Yet CPE typifies the wider disconnect between political economy and ecological concerns, with climate change a troubling ‘blindspot’ (Paterson 2020). Even while environmental constraints on economic development become dangerously apparent, CPE remains silent on the ecological modalities of comparative capitalisms.

In this article, I critically interrogate CPE’s disciplinary foundations to assess its fitness for studying capitalism in the Anthropocene. Recognising the value of a comparative approach to green transition, I ask – how should we study comparative capitalisms in the Anthropocene? I argue that CPE’s theoretical foundations and research agenda limit its capacity to engage environmental issues. Ontologically and epistemologically, CPE is grounded in a ‘nature/society’ dualism that treats national economic models as environmentally disembedded and causally independent from the Earth System. Tracing the field’s post-war development, I show how this dualism is embodied by CPE’s elevation of economic growth as a dominant comparative metric, normative aspiration, and policy goal for capitalist development. The contemporary rise of the ‘Growth Models’ approach entrenches these disabling commitments at a time of heightened environmental crisis. These qualities render the field ill-equipped to grapple with the Anthropocene. Studying capitalism comparatively is, though, vitally important to guiding green transition. We need awareness of how institutional, sectoral, and holistic transformations within and between political economies can function in mutually beneficial and reinforcing ways. I propose that, despite the field’s unecological assumptions and uncritical entanglements with growth, existing analytical insights from comparative capitalism literature contain promising foundations and partial truths that can be environmentally embedded and productively reoriented to engage with green transition.¹ This requires leveraging transdisciplinary insights, from ecological economics to Earth System governance, to retool CPE for the Anthropocene. It necessitates an approach to the comparative evaluation of political economies that prioritises issues of energy, emissions, and environmental impact.

I begin by tracing the ontological and epistemological significance of the Anthropocene for the social sciences. In the second section, I explore entanglements between CPE’s post-war emergence and the parallel rise of the economic growth paradigm, demonstrating how anthropogenic environmental threats challenge growth’s continued viability and desirability and question its status within dominant theoretical approaches. The third section evaluates the field’s paradigmatic shift from Varieties of Capitalism to the Growth Models approach, highlighting the field’s thematic narrowing and environmental silences, while revealing the continuity of growth-affirming and unecological assumptions. In the fourth section, I outline alternative hypotheses to guide CPE research into green transition. I conclude by calling for CPE to decentre growth analytically and normatively.

Anthropocene ontology and the nature/society dualism

The Anthropocene is premised on a transformative ontological claim – human societies and activities should be understood as highly interactive drivers of a ‘complex, adaptive Earth System’ (Steffen et al. 2018, p. 8526).² This claim, supported by abundant empirical evidence linking socio-economic processes with environmental degradation, centres human agency within causal processes shaping the Earth System (Dryzek 2016, p. 940). How exactly human agency is imbricated within these processes is, nonetheless, sharply contested. Critics of the prevailing Anthropocene discourse have argued that it naturalises humanity’s destructive ecological imprint through a species-level analysis that elides sharply differentiated degrees of responsibility attached to sociologically and geographically distinctive social forces (Malm & Hornborg 2014, p. 63, Moore 2017, 2018). Despite disagreements over exactly who bears responsibility for generating anthropogenic environmental risks, there is broad acceptance that destructive interdependencies between human societies and the Earth System disrupt modernist ontological and analytical binaries between ‘nature’ and ‘society’ (Malm & Hornborg 2014, p. 62–3, Bonneuil & Fressoz 2016, Moore 2017, Kelly 2019, p. 1).

Accepting the ontological premise of the Anthropocene means recognising that human institutions depend upon the regulative stability of ecosystemic and biogeophysical foundations. This has significant implications for the social sciences. Many social science disciplines emerged during a period of rapid European economic development in which humans appeared unconstrained by ecological limits (Moore 2017, p. 596). Sociology, for example, was profoundly shaped by the historical coincidence between its disciplinary emergence and accelerated economic development (Catton & Dunlap 1980, p. 24). This led to the construction of social theories premised, often unconsciously, on an idea of ‘human exemptionalism’ that represented human societies as, ‘exempt from ecological constraints’. Modern economic thought has been similarly anchored in a cornucopian postulate of infinitely exploitable natural resources and limitless ecological horizons, framed geographically through their representation as new frontiers to be harnessed for economic expansion (Jonsson 2014).³

Unecological suppositions within modern social sciences leave extant paradigms ill-equipped to respond to the Anthropocene. We need critical genealogies that interrogate paradigmatic foundations of contemporary approaches, opening new paths of enquiry. Scholars have called for the development of new ‘environmental humanities’ and a shift from social to ‘socio-ecological systems’, recognising social relations’ deep entanglement and co-constitutive relationship with biophysical processes (Bonneuil & Fressoz 2016, Moore 2017, p. 598, Dryzek 2016, p. 941). A disconnect remains between Anthropocene scholarship highlighting the nature/society separation underpinning modern social sciences, and the orientation of prevailing paradigms.

Within economics and political economy, dominant paradigms continue to treat economy and environment as causally dissociated. This is true of CPE. Threats posed by climate instability and ecological deterioration are increasingly apparent, and their political salience has risen dramatically, yet the field’s recent evolution has not kept pace. CPE has moved from a focus on ‘Varieties of Capitalism’ (VOC) to a concern with ‘Growth Models’. The Growth Models approach transcends the supply-side preoccupations of VOC, rebooting Keynesian-Kaleckian macroeconomics to identify institutional drivers of aggregate demand across distinctive national economies (Baccaro & Pontusson 2016). But it continues to treat ‘demand’, ‘growth’ and the ‘economy’ as neutral analytical categories, conceptually uncontroversial and independent from environmental contexts. Both VOC and GM approaches overlook the relevance of energy sources and sectors to comparative capitalism. This despite the existence of longstanding traditions of ecological economics that reckon with the perils of fossil-intensive growth within a finite global ecosystem (Georgescu-Roegen 1971, Daly 1974, Costanza et al. 2015). What explains this disconnect between Anthropocene environmental threats, the widely recognised need for green economic transition, and CPE’s narrowing around an unecological problematique of national pathways to economic growth? The following section explores the parallel rise of the economic growth paradigm and the post-war emergence of CPE. I argue that CPE’s rise was conditioned by the emergence of economic growth as a hegemonic developmental framing, becoming increasingly focussed on understanding national pathways to maximising economic growth. This leaves the field unable to critically interrogate the idea of growth itself, along with its deeper analytical foundations.

CPE and the problem of growth

Contemporary ‘ecopolitical’ discourses of green transition diverge over the viability of reconciling growth with environmental sustainability (Buch-Hansen & Carstensen 2021, p. 2). Dominant green growth discourses, supported by institutions such as the World Bank, stress capitalism’s compatibility with sustainability, suggesting that stronger environmental protections can enhance growth (Jacobs 2012, Meckling & Allan 2020, p. 436). De-growth and post-growth perspectives, conversely, argue that continued economic growth and environmental stability are most likely irreconcilable and the growth paradigm itself is an obstacle to an ecologically restorative political economy (Kallis, et al. 2018, Hickel 2020). Despite their breadth and disagreements, prevailing green transition discourses entail consideration of the environmental and energy dimensions of economic growth beyond that provided by dominant CPE approaches.⁴ These approaches treat growth as an objective, environmentally independent, and largely uncontested comparative metric. Questions of energy, emissions, and resource intensity hardly register. A brief genealogy of the field’s post-war development helps explain the schism between emerging discourses of green transition, historical traditions of ecological economics, and CPE.

The post-war emergence of CPE as a distinctive subfield coincided with the consolidation of economic growth as a hegemonic development goal. The growth paradigm can be understood as an institutionalised way of thinking that represents economic growth as ‘necessary, good, and imperative’ (Kallis et al. 2018, p. 294). Its history is deeply entangled with the rise of the ‘economy’ as an object of analysis. Early foundations date to the birth of political economy from the eighteenth century in France and Britain. As part of the broader fracturing of the natural and social sciences, liberal political economists conceived the economy as a distinctive and self-regulating sphere with independent governing principles (Kallis et al. 2018, 294, Tellmann 2018, p. 3).

It was during the 1930s and 1940s, though, that the modern notion of the economy as a geographically bounded, self-reproductive system crystallised. The formation of a new statistical construct to measure total national economic output, Gross Domestic Production (GDP), played a central role. Pioneering work on the measurement of national income, led by Simon Kuznets’s efforts in the US and the work of Colin Clark, Richard Stone and Keynes’s within the UK during the 1930s and 1940s, shaped the emergence of GDP as a new statistical imaginary that constructed the modern economy as a measurable and governable entity (Desrosières 1998, p. 172, Coyle 2015, p. 12–7, Schmelzer 2016, p. 81–92). These measurements did not account for the depletion of energy resources nor other environmental damage caused by economic expansion (Mitchell 2011, p. 124, 140, Schmelzer 2016, p. 100). By the 1950s economic growth, indicated by increasingly sophisticated techniques of national income accounting, had emerged as a policy goal. A transnational network of Western economic practitioners worked through international organisations to internationalise national income accounts and standardise the primacy of growth (Schmelzer 2016, p. 94).

Growth’s prevalence as a political-economic aspiration underlay the emergence of CPE after WWII. Disciplinary histories trace the post-war revitalisation of CPE to a common source – Andrew Shonfield’s 1965 magnus opus, Modern Capitalism. Shonfield’s comparative study of economic development in the UK, France, Germany and the US, became a touchstone for subsequent generations of scholarship (Hall & Soskice 2001, Clift 2014, p. 7, Baccaro & Pontusson 2016, p. 176, Menz 2017, p. 38). The book persuasively applied the comparative method. Shonfield anchored his investigation into a range of contemporary themes, from planning to full employment, within appreciation of the specific institutional foundations identifiable across capitalist states (Clift 2014, p. 7).

Intellectual histories of CPE usefully establish common points of origin. But these accounts tend to naturalise an important feature of Shonfield’s study – its preoccupation with the drivers, metrics, and possible futures of economic growth. Modern Capitalism is a book shaped by the dominance of growth. Shonfield set out to understand how the stagnation of the Depression-era had been overcome via the sustained economic growth of the post-war period. It was this context of the ‘high prosperity and rapid growth of post-war capitalism’ within the West that motivated Shonfield’s investigation (Shonfield 1965, p. 4–19). He argued that three key factors helped explain the period of unprecedented prosperity during the 1950s and 60s. Firstly, that economic growth ‘has been much steadier than in the past’. Secondly, production had expanded rapidly over the period. Finally, the benefits of the ‘new prosperity’ generated by the growth of economic output had been ‘very widely diffused’ (Shonfield 1965, p. 61–2). This explanatory framework bore all the hallmarks of the growth paradigm’s newfound hegemony. Shonfield sought to explain the overall prosperity of the West, understood as the fruits of economic growth, by arguing that growth had been more stable, rapid, and evenly distributed.

National economic statistics helped bring comparative representation of discreet economic units into being, heightening the empirical and conceptual possibilities of CPE. The interlocking origins of CPE and the growth paradigm had important normative implications too. Shonfield’s study carries the imprint of a liberal cornucopian optimism that conjures visions of unending progress and unlimited resource frontiers. He optimistically opines that ‘continuing prosperity and uninterrupted growth on the scale of recent years are possible in the future’, and suggests that, ‘the underlying conditions in the second half of the twentieth century are more favourable than at any time in the history of capitalism’ (Shonfield 1965, p. 63–4).

Shonfield’s work was critical to the emergence of CPE, reviving the comparative method and identifying core themes of post-war capitalism. Viewed from the vantage point of the Anthropocene, though, this growthist optimism rests on an ontological nature/society dualism that dangerously disguises ecological harms incumbent to capitalist development. The rise of the ‘Modern Capitalism’ that Shonfield celebrated was linked, causally and chronologically, to unprecedented intensification of environmental deterioration. Economic growth was central to this process (McNeill & Engelke 2016, p. 132–54, Dryzek & Pickering 2018, p. 13). Three quarters of human-induced carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere occurred post-1945. The number of motor vehicles increased from 40 million to 850 million. The volume of annual plastic production increased from 1 million tons in 1945 to almost 300 million by 2015. Production of nitrogen synthesisers, predominantly for use in agricultural fertilisers, increased from 4 million tons to over 85 million tons across the same period (McNeill & Engelke 2016, p. 4). Earth Scientists refer to this period as the ‘Great Acceleration’ – a concept that captures the ‘holistic, comprehensive and interlinked nature of the post-1950 changes simultaneously sweeping across the socio-economic and biophysical spheres of the Earth System, encompassing far more than climate change’ (Steffen et al. 2015, p. 82). From the 1950s, there is clear evidence of major shifts in the condition of the Earth System exceeding the normal range of variability of the Holocene, and driven by human socio-economic activity (Steffen et al. 2015, p. 93–4).

The Anthropocene prompts a critical re-evaluation of the drivers of growth and prosperity. It raises grave doubts over the viability of present and future economic growth if we are to respond to and contain multiple, intersecting, environmental threats. While orthodox economic thought elevated growth to an uncontested status, a shadow tradition of ecological thinking, stressing finitude, entropy, and waste, developed alongside (Boulding 1966, Georgescu-Roegen 1971, Daly 1974). Ecological economists have long acknowledged the biophysical dimensions of economic growth (Gowdy & Erickson 2005, p. 218). Economic processes involve the conversion of energy and natural resources into ‘goods, services and waste’ (Kallis et al. 2018, p. 292). This has important implications for addressing the leading edge of Anthropocene environmental instability – rapid global warming driven by greenhouse gas emissions. There are firm grounds for scepticism concerning the prospects of decoupling economic growth from resource use and, critically, carbon emissions. Even when efficiency gains are made, their impact in lowering costs within a market-based system tends to lead to ever higher consumption of finite resources and associated increases of environmentally damaging pollution (Kallis, et al. 2018, p. 292).

Green growth arguments have gained currency in policy discussions (Meckling & Allan 2020, p. 436).⁵ These arguments rest on optimistic outlooks for the possibility of ‘decoupling’ growth from both carbon emissions and wider resource use (Jackson 2017, p. 87). There is some evidence to support claims for ‘relative decoupling’, whereby the emissions or material intensity of economic output declines relative to the rate of economic growth, signalling an improvement in efficiency. But meeting the Paris Agreement target of 2 degrees warming, in the context of continued economic growth, requires ‘absolute decoupling’ with regard to carbon emissions – an absolute decline in emissions while economic output continues to rise. There is no historical evidence of absolute decoupling on this scale (Jackson 2017, p. 84–90). Hickel and Kallis’ literature survey (2019, p. 1) finds that absolute decoupling of growth from carbon emissions is, ‘highly unlikely to be achieved at a rate rapid enough to prevent global warming over 1.5C or 2C’ (Hickel and Kallis 2020, p. 1). Evidence suggests that although absolute decoupling of carbon emissions from economic output is possible (and underway in some countries) it is very unlikely to occur fast enough to meet the Paris Agreement targets within a context of continued economic growth. The problem, the authors conclude, is growth itself. Growth leads to increased demand for energy, making the transition to renewable energy harder and leading to increased emissions from changing land use and industrial processes (Hickel and Kallis 2020, p. 12). Whatever our view on the viability or otherwise of green growth, the nexus between energy and emissions concerns needs to be given much greater prominence in assessing comparative capitalisms.

Environmental anxieties surrounding economic growth are not new. From Malthusian predictions about population in the eighteenth century to the ‘Limits to Growth’ report in the 1970s, concerns about pressures on finite natural resources and fragile ecosystems have shadowed confident prognoses of economic progress (Jonsson 2014, p. 14, Dryzek 2016, p. 939). Scientific evidence and understanding surrounding the ecological impacts of economic growth is stronger than ever. Why, then, has CPE moved further away from a critical appraisal of the prospects for capitalism and growth over recent years? To understand this paradox, I argue, we need to understand disciplinary patterns of knowledge production within CPE.

From VOC to Growth Models

CPE has evolved in response to major transformations within the global economy (Clift 2014, p. 7, Baccaro and Pontusson 2016, p. 176). Accelerated economic globalisation in the 1990s inspired the emergence of Hall and Soskice’s (2001) influential ‘Varieties of Capitalism’ (VOC) framework, exploring possibilities for continued national economic diversity in a context of heightened international competition. After the 2007/8 financial crisis, a contending framework emerged. The ‘Growth Models’ (GM) perspective pioneered by Baccaro and Pontusson (2016, 2020) addresses VOC’s limitations by highlighting neglected issues of inequality and distributional struggle. It has inspired a large volume of supportive scholarship (Perez & Matsaganis 2018, Amable et al. 2019, Bohle & Regan 2021, Rothstein 2021, Schedelik et al. 2021, Stockhammer 2021).

What are the core claims of these two approaches? I begin with VOC. Hall and Soskice introduced VOC in the early 2000s, during the high-water mark of globalisation. They rejected the premise that globalisation would drive comparative institutional convergence, seeking to demonstrate how distinctive forms of comparative advantage could be maintained. Hall and Soskice displaced CPE’s traditional focus on the state and positioned firms as the pivotal agents. Rational firms encounter specific ‘coordination problems’, with their capacity to deliver economic goods ultimately dependent on effective coordination with a diverse institutional actors, from employers’ associations to trade unions. Identifying five core spheres within which firms must overcome coordination problems, Hall and Soskice developed an influential twofold typology of ‘liberal market economies’ (LMEs) and ‘coordinated market economies’ (CMEs). Firms within each typology rely upon different mechanisms to secure effective coordination (Hall and Soskice 2001, p. 1–8).

Importantly, both types of economy could prosper under conditions of advanced globalisation, confounding expectations of cross-national convergence. This claim is underpinned by the notion of ‘institutional complementarities’ – whereby the presence of one institution increases the returns from/efficiency of another. Institutional complementarities lead to patterns of institutional clustering in response to the competitive pressures of international trade. Nations with specific forms of coordination in some spheres of the economy, ‘should tend to develop complementary practices in other spheres as well’ (Hall and Soskice 2001, p. 17). Complementarities generate self-reinforcing positive feedback loops incentivising further institutional alignment.

VOC dominated CPE from the early 2000s. Despite various critiques, VOC’s agenda-setting status endured. More recently, though, the paradigmatic centrality of VOC has been loosened. Scholarship has emerged utilising a new ‘Growth Models’ framework for comparative capitalism. The landmark contribution is Baccaro and Pontusson’s (2016) article, ‘Rethinking Comparative Political Economy’. They respond to a perceived fracturing of CPE scholarship during the post-crisis period – a division between those positing a common regressive developmental trajectory and others who claim that diversity endures. They seek to transcend this apparent division through greater sensitivity to both commonalities and differences between advanced capitalist economies (Baccaro & Pontusson 2016, p. 176)

Baccaro and Pontusson deploy a Post-Keynesian/Kaleckian macroeconomic perspective that emphasises the importance of different sources of aggregate demand, particularly exports and household consumption, as determinants of capitalist variation. Distinguishing between export-led and consumption-led models of growth, they associate each model with distinctive implications for inequality and distributive conflict. These growth models are both ‘more numerous’ and ‘more unstable’ than the VOC typologies. Emphasising the conditioning impetus of the post-Fordist period, they distinguish their view from the more deeply rooted institutional equilibria posited by VOC, hinting at greater (regulation school-inspired) sensitivity to transformations in capitalist production regimes (Baccaro & Pontusson 2016, p. 175-6, 186).

Exploring four cases, Germany, Sweden, Italy and the UK, they construct their model on observations of a cross-cutting post-Fordist decline of wage-led growth and an associated distributional shift in favour of capital and ‘high-income households’ (Baccaro & Pontusson 2016, p. 198). This presents a common puzzle for these economies – how can the ‘faltering wage driver’ of aggregate demand be replaced? How can economic growth be maintained in a context of secular wage decline? The divergent pathways of response to this common problem are the comparative crux for establishing patterns of continuity and variation across the cases. Germany, Sweden and the UK represent three different ‘solutions’ to the problem of how to generate post-Fordist growth, while Italy’s experiences of ‘sluggish growth’ and ‘overall stagnation’ cast it as a deviant failing case (Baccaro & Pontusson 2016, p. 176).

GM scholarship offers valuable correctives to VOC’s deficiencies. VOC’s technocratic and depoliticised representation of capitalism has been charged with ignoring crises and class struggles (Streeck 2010, Bruff 2011). GM literature counters VOC’s understatement of class and inequality through greater attentiveness to distributional dynamics. It also challenges the hallmark VOC distinction between LMEs and CMEs, which has been criticised for overlooking the unevenness of institutional development, neglecting the contingent and politically constructed nature of pressures for ‘convergence’ emerging from globalisation, and reifying ideal types into actually existing forms of capitalism (Brenner, Peck & Theodore 2010, p. 186–8, Hay 2004, p. 242–3, Hay 2020, p. 307). By contrast, GM scholarship highlights substantial degrees of variation within archetypal LMEs and CMEs across comparative variables such as inequality growth and household indebtedness (Baccaro & Pontusson 2016, p. 178–84).

The timing and content of this nascent theoretical shift from VOC to GM reflects both CPE’s sensitivity to changing structural conditions within global capitalism and the selectiveness of that sensitivity. The success of the GM perspective is attributable to VOC’s failure to depict actually existing capitalism. Post-2007/8, VOC’s depoliticised, supply-side vision of institutional dynamics no longer resonates with advanced capitalist economies characterised by rising inequality, divisive legitimation crises, and large-scale macroeconomic intervention. The GM approach substantively incorporates these themes. Simultaneously, though, it evades a critical question facing contemporary capitalism – how can advanced economies implement rapid and large-scale green political-economic transition in response to anthropogenic environmental instability? Despite the urgent need for decarbonisation, the GM approach continues VOC’s exclusion of energy, emissions, and environmental profiles from its typological representations. While opening to broader macroeconomic traditions, GM literature reproduces VOC’s neglect of ecological economics and green economic thought.

What explains this selective engagement with contemporary themes in global capitalism? Why are some traditions of economic thought leveraged while others are ignored? What determines issue hierarchies in the construction of theory? Social science paradigms shape future research patterns by identifying theoretically significant facts, creating a hierarchy of research questions, and determining appropriate forms of evidence (Geddes 2003, p. 7). Academic disciplines are highly networked communities guided by specific rules about ‘admissible’ work, norms about how research should be conducted and results presented, and frequently, ‘a clear sense of where disciplinary boundaries reside’ (Rosamond 2007, p. 235). These insights render CPE’s neglect of anthropogenic environmental threats intelligible. Despite notable differences between VOC and the GM perspective, foundational theoretical continuities hamper the field’s potential to engage green transition. Core background assumptions underpin CPE’s paradigmatic development. These assumptions delimit specific parameters about what constitutes a legitimate object of enquiry, permissible dimensions of comparative analysis, appropriate methods, and plausible assumptions regarding capitalism.

Two foundational continuities, defined in Figure 1 below as first order theoretical assumptions, situate both VOC and the Growth Models perspective within the growth-affirming lineage of CPE post-Shonfield. Firstly, at the ontological level, both perspectives maintain a nature/society dualism that represents capitalism as a bounded an internally self-reproductive system independent of environmental entanglements. Capitalism is understood to be exogenous to environmental considerations, with the analysis of how capitalist institutions change over time isolated from consideration of Earth System dynamics. These unecological assumptions are not confined to CPE. They form an often unconscious background to the majority of the social sciences (Catton & Dunlap 1980, p. 23). Holocene conditions of relative Earth System stability ensured that political and economic institutions could assume the continued stable presence of the ecological systems that support human society (Dryzek 2016, p. 938). Secondly, in a normative/analytical sense, GDP growth functions positively as a guiding aspiration and primary axis of comparative differentiation for evaluating capitalism.

These assumptions shape the primary research questions and understanding of capitalist development. VOC asks which economic policies can enhance economic performance, focusing on increased institutional efficiency geared towards ‘higher rates of growth’ as an explicit objective (Hall & Soskice 2001, p. 2). GM literature relies on a normative/analytical binary between ‘successful’ and ‘failing’ growth strategies. Institutional characteristics of national economies are considered with regard to their propensity to threaten or unbalance economic growth (Baccaro & Benassi 2017, p. 85–6). Italy is considered as a deviant case due to its inability to secure high levels of growth (Baccaro & Pontusson 2016, p. 176). GDP is elevated as the dominant comparative metric and normative standard for evaluating economic development. Ecologically embedded indicators of capitalist development – central to ecological economics – are excluded. This prohibits recognition of potentially positive environmental and social impacts of displacing growth’s centrality.

Regarding second order foundations, the VOC approach identifies rational firms as primary agents. The economy is viewed as a sphere within which, ‘multiple actors develop competencies by devising better ways of coordinating their endeavours’ (Hall & Soskice 2001, p. 45). This neglects the environmental foundations of economic activity. From the firm to the macro-economic scale, specific assumptions about ‘efficiency’ and ‘complementarity’ are constructed outside of environmental considerations of energy intensity, waste, or emissions (Hall & Soskice 2001, p. 17, 32, Soskice 2007, p. 89, Iversen, Soskice & Hope 2016, p. 171). A Ricardian premise of efficient national economic responses to international trade competition, via comparative institutional advantage, naturalises unecological assumptions about economic efficiency by ignoring the environmental preconditions and consequences of trade and specialisation. In rare instances where the VOC framework has been mobilised to engage issues of climate change adaptation comparatively, its unecological foundations are left unquestioned (Mikler 2011, Mikler & Harrison 2012).

GM literature assumes a more macroeconomic vantage point and centres distributional struggles between social forces. The governing macroeconomic assumptions of CPE are shifted from a New Keynesian (VOC) to a Post-Keynesian (GM) axis. This move enhances recognition of aggregate demand’s impact on long-term productive potential, increases awareness of class power as a distributional determinant, and enables more optimistic views on the scope for, ‘growth-enhancing policy interventions’ (Baccaro & Pontusson 2020, p. 17–22). But it too treats core analytical categories such as consumption, demand, income and production as environmentally disembedded. It posits a set of logical macroeconomic interrelations independent of environmental context or consequences and fails to consider ecological constraints on aggregate demand management (Baccaro & Pontusson 2016, p. 182).

Ultimately, the principal disagreement between the two perspectives is fairly minor. It centres on the prospects for macroeconomic intervention to positively enhance long-term wage growth and employment. VOC’s New Keynesian origins lead to a more pessimistic reading, while the GM perspective leverages Post-Keynesian/Kaleckian insights to generate more auspicious conclusions. In reaching these contrasting conclusions, both theories explicitly draw inspiration from strands of twentieth century macroeconomic theory. Mainstream economic theory, from neoclassical to Keynesian, has systematically excluded ecological costs of economic activity, conceptualising the economy as an extra-natural system divorced from ecological foundations (Mitchell 2011, p. 136–41). The rise of Keynesian economic thought, a common lineage for both approaches, is causally imbricated with the Great Acceleration. Keynesian assumptions about the capacity to boost demand and attain full employment through increasing economic output discount the ecological foundations of capitalism (Mann & Wainwright 2018, p. 243–4). Energy and emissions considerations do not feature as constraints on the prospects for growth. This common theoretical inheritance severely limits the capacity of contemporary CPE to think ecologically about political economy. Ecological economics and Earth Systems scholarship provide more fertile transdisciplinary resources for CPE to engage with green transition.

Problematising CPE’s environmental silences is not sufficient to develop a comparative research agenda for green transition. Nor should we entirely discount achievements of prevailing approaches, which have been highly productive for understanding comparative capitalisms. Instead, we should consider how existing analytical insights might be repurposed to equip CPE for the Anthropocene. This requires reviewing additional conceptual deficiencies characteristic of the field. Firstly, concerning institutional dynamics, scholars have challenged VOC’s narrow, rational-functionalist, understanding of institutions that reduces the motivations of institutional development to efficiency gains, squeezing out the role of political struggles, accidental/unintended outcomes, and cultural or ideational causes (Watson 2003, p. 232, Hay 2004, p. Streeck 2010, p. 27, Clift 2014, p. 101–13). VOC has further been criticised for relying on a ‘punctuated equilibrium’ model that understates incremental institutional development (Streeck & Thelen 2005). Secondly, VOC’s methodological nationalism produces a truncated sense of the spatio-temporal parameters of capitalist development that reifies national territorial boundaries, obscures the unevenness of economic development, and occludes the relevance of different scalar determinants of institutional transformation (Peck & Theodore 2007, p. 738–40, Brenner, Peck & Theodore 2010, p. 187–8). Shallow historical contextualisation neglects longer-term developmental dynamics, including sources of crisis and instability, as well as the formative impact of deep-rooted historical antecedents such as distinctive trajectories of industrialisation (Jessop 2014, p. 48, Coates 2014, p. 173). Thirdly, critics have questioned VOC’s rationalist firm-centred ontology and a related down-playing of the importance of state capacity. Assuming rational firms exaggerates functional, utility maximising motives, and disregards cultural and contingent determinations of institutional development (Hay 2005, p. 111). By examining the firm-centred micro-foundations of capitalism, VOC offers an underdeveloped sense of macro-political structures (Hancké et al. 2007, p. 14–6). Finally, VOC has downplayed the importance of sectoral differences, determinants, and comparisons within and across states (Hay 2005, p. 110, Crouch, Schröeder & Voelzkow 2009, p. 656–7).

Owing to the field’s paradigmatic convergence around an increasingly demarcated research agenda, some of these limitations shape the GM perspective too. Conceptually, GM’s spatio-temporal coordinates are comparably narrow. The approach shares VOC’s methodological nationalism, treating coherent macro-economic models within territorial states as privileged units of analysis. GM’s scalar deficiencies render it similarly inattentive to subnational unevenness (Clift & McDaniel 2021, p. 2). In terms of historicising capitalism, Baccaro and Pontusson (2016, p. 176, 2020, p. 24) posit the post-Fordist transition of the 1970s, and the resultant decline of wage-led growth, as a common stimulus prompting divergent comparative responses. But the heavy reliance on macro-economic theory, with its ahistorical ontological foundations, ensures little attention is paid to the historicity of institutions.

Yet GM scholarship also transcends conceptual weaknesses of VOC to provide firmer foundations for engaging green transition. Regarding institutional dynamics, Baccaro and Pontusson draw on the ‘power resource tradition’ to foreground how competing social blocs and electoral coalitions shape institutional outcomes. A Gramscian conception of political hegemony gives greater scope for ideational determinants of institutional change too (Baccaro & Pontusson 2019, p. 1–3). Enhanced attentiveness to sectoral components of growth models provides clues for how we might examine green transition comparatively. Departing from VOC’s firm-centric foundations, Baccaro and Pontusson construct a broader ontology grounded in distributional struggles between distinctive socio-economic coalitions and sectoral interests.⁶ This enables a stronger foundation for considering the variety of actors that might shape green transition.

Despite their environmental elisions, then, CPE perspectives contain partial foundations for a comparative approach towards green transition. Existing scholarship often focuses narrowly on carbon markets (Newell & Paterson 2010, Bryant 2019), or the agency of particular actors (Wright & Nyberg 2015), without assessing comparative institutional variation and continuity. Literature on socio-technical transitions shares CPE’s institutionalist ontology and emphasis on path dependency, but lacks a wider macro understanding of comparative political-economic dynamics (Unruh 2000, Lockwood et al. 2017).

A CPE approach enables comparative assessment of national economic profiles, institutions, and sectors to inform specific pathways for green transition. Policy interventions required for green transition vary with the institutional characteristics, sectoral composition, and supply/demand drivers within political economies. For example, export-led (Germany) and consumption-driven (UK) economic models will likely have distinctive modalities of environmental impact. Understanding trade and payments interdependencies between countries, linked to comparative specialisation, enhances possibilities for mutually reinforcing and coordinated green transitions. Identifying comparative drivers of environmental harms can differentiate between multi-scalar clusters of institutions that produce negative environmental effects, and those that generate ecologically restorative prosperity. Comparative modelling could facilitate policies that identify and promote ecological complementarities – whereby the existence of one green institution/sector increases the ecological benefits available from another – between institutions and sectors. For example, enhancing sustainable, local non-meat agricultural production and promoting vegetarian offerings within the hospitality sector.

As I show in the research hypotheses below, theoretical insights from existing perspectives can be leveraged directly, or productively inverted, to equip CPE to engage with green transition. These hypotheses attempt to illuminate a path beyond the nature/society dualism within CPE and, correspondingly, to decentre the analytical primacy of growth while maintaining valuable insights from CPE scholarship to examine ecologically embedded variables.

Studying comparative capitalism in the Anthropocene

Capitalism in the Anthropocene no longer operates within Holocene conditions of benign climatic stability. Socio-economic institutions must be conceptualised in relation to a broad set of ‘Anthropocene risks’ related to different forms of environmental instability. They emerge from human-driven (anthropogenic) processes, demonstrate interactive patterns of global socio-ecological connectivity, and display ‘complex, cross-scale relationships’ (Keys, et al. 2019, p. 668). Acknowledging these risks has important implications for CPE, which situates institutional analysis at the core of its intellectual agenda (Clift 2014, p. 16). It makes sense, therefore, to begin our hypotheses with a consideration of institutional dynamics.

Hypothesis 1: Pathologically path dependent institutions drive environmental instability and face greater pressures for transformation

CPE emphasises path dependent institutional development (Clift 2014, p. 101–6).⁷ Within VOC, feedback mechanisms arising from ‘institutional complementarities’ shape path dependent development towards typological termini (Hall & Soskice 2001, p. 1, 17, Soskice 2007, p. 89, Iversen, Soskice & Hope 2016, p. 164). GM scholarship shares a conviction in path dependency (exemplified by two prevailing post-Fordist growth models), but views institutional development as more politically contingent. Path dependency is central to the political economy of green transition but must be properly integrated with environmental dynamics.

Path dependent processes of self-reproduction allow powerful institutions, from fossil-fuel companies to state agencies, to reassert dominance and propagate environmentally damaging behaviours. Dominant institutions maintain growth’s hegemony despite destructive environmental consequences. Dryzek and Pickering (2018, p. 23) describe these processes as ‘pathological path dependency’ – disconnecting human institutions from Earth System dynamics by privileging economic imperatives over ecological awareness. Such processes do not reflect a benign logic of environmentally neutral and efficient capitalist development as envisaged by VOC. They are ecologically embedded and dangerously disrupt Earth System dynamics (Dryzek 2016, p. 937, Dryzek & Pickering 2018, p. 23). Recognising pathological path dependency disrupts the nature/society dualism by highlighting the ecological foundations of institutions. Pathological path dependency is a critical comparative variable with material and ideational determinants. The institutional embeddedness of the growth paradigm itself is a pathologically path dependent force and an object for comparative evaluation.⁸

As scholarship on ‘carbon lock-in’ demonstrates (Unruh 2000, Seto et al. 2016) dominant capitalist institutions, social practices, and technologies are embedded in and (re)productive of environmentally damaging logics. CPE can connect these insights to a holistic, critical, assessment of comparative capitalism. Pathologically path dependent institutions, firms, sectors and economic discourses, those that are most carbon-dependent and environmentally damaging, will face greater transformative pressures and more contested institutional trajectories. National capitalisms with stronger environmental political coalitions and lesser dependency on pathologically path dependent energy sources, sectors, and accumulation strategies will likely respond more quickly and effectively to Anthropocene challenges.

Hypothesis 2: The Anthropocene stretches spatio-temporal determinants of capitalist development

The Anthropocene transforms spatio-temporal parameters of capitalist development. Temporally, the Anthropocene stretches diachronic determinants of institutional change (Malm 2016, p. 26). Imperatives for institutional change are determined by responses to historically rooted Earth Systems shifts and an anticipatory approach grounded in longer-term assessments of future environmental trajectories. Once effects of global warming, natural resource depletion, and ecosystemic exhaustion impinge radically on the functioning of capitalist institutions it will be too late for ameliorative action (Jackson 2017, p. 16). Goals for institutional development are increasingly shaped by scientific consensus (exemplified by IPCC reports) grounded in a broader temporal framing than typical calculations of business leaders, investors, and politicians. Concretely, temporal elongation manifests as comparatively distinctive time-frames and strategies for decarbonisation and infrastructural transformation, exemplified by national plans for reaching ‘Net Zero’ carbon emissions.⁹ These tendencies will likely generate common but differentiated movements towards extensive future-oriented and state-directed developmental goals across national capitalisms.

Temporal reconfigurations are linked to variegated spatial dynamics. Anthropocene risks are shaped by global socio-ecological connections and multi-scalar relationships (Keys et al., p. 2019). Responding to these threats also has multi-scalar dimensions. Scholarship on technological transitions demonstrates the multiple levels of infrastructural and social change involved in decarbonisation (Geels 2002, 2014). Politically, responses to Anthropocene risks are increasingly articulated through multiple, interdependent, governance scales evidenced by the emergence of ‘transnational climate change governance’ (Bulkeley et al. 2014). Globally, UN climate conferences increasingly shape national economic policies around green transition. At regional and national scales, discussions of Green New Deals emphasise supranational and state capacities in pursuit of decarbonisation and wider sustainability goals. These scales are also increasingly interwoven. A genuinely multi-scalar approach to CPE, rather than exclusive prioritisation of the national, is required to engage with the different levels of agency involved in the political economy of green transition.

Hypothesis 3: States (not firms) are the pivotal actors in the political economy of green transition

The emergence of VOC displaced the state’s centrality from CPE. GM scholarship has restored Keynesian convictions in effective state intervention (Baccaro & Pontusson 2016, p. 178). Both approaches understate state capacity as a comparative variable. Green transition relies heavily on the political power, coordinative capacity, and infrastructural reach of states (Johnstone & Newell 2018, p. 72–3).¹⁰ Although interactions among multiple actors are involved in green transition, from corporations to social movements and individual consumers, these actors will likely pivot around attempts to contest legal, regulatory, and fiscal conditions underpinned by sovereign state authority. The urgency, scale, and complexity of activity required to effectively decarbonise and reorient economies within the prescribed time-frames requires the authority and coordinating capacity of states. This is exemplified by different proposals for Green New Deals, all of which rely on the fiscal, monetary, and legal-regulatory capacities of states to enact rapid transition away from fossil-fuel intensive economic models. Globally, inter-state bargaining within climate negotiations increasingly establishes (aspirational) parameters for national economic development.

State capacity is a critical determinant of comparative pathways towards green transition. Pre-existing modalities of state intervention are likely to condition national responses to environmental challenges. For example, the tradition of ‘Treasury Control’ within the UK has thwarted green developmental initiatives and propagated the dominant financial accumulation regime (Craig 2020). States are also pivotal sites for the political contestation of environmental issues by distinctive social forces and to the embedding of environmental concerns within public, legal, and regulatory institutions. Historically distinctive models of state authority facilitate differential degrees and forms of engagement with environmental movements (Dryzek et al. 2003). Growth Models’ Gramscian-inspired rediscovery of links between economic models, political coalitions, and legitimation strategies opens paths towards a more politicised understanding of the state that recognises the importance of environmental politics.

Hypothesis 4: Sectoral compositions and characteristics shape modalities of environmental damage and condition trajectories of green transition

Sectoral characteristics of national capitalisms are critical to producing (and ameliorating) Anthropocene risks. In aggregate, national capitalisms have distinctive environmental impacts dependent upon their sectoral make-up and specialisation within the global division of labour. For example, export-oriented economies characterised by strong manufacturing sectors are likely to have different energy and resource requirements, as well as waste and emissions implications, than consumption-led and services dominated economies. Industrial economies tend to have higher raw materials usage and physical imports compared to the lower material footprints of service economies (EU 2016).

At the level of analytically modelling comparative economies, GM’s focus on the sectoral and geographical orientation (export-led vs consumption-led) of demand drivers should be integrated with comparative environmental indicators. Measurements more commonly employed by ecological economics, such as Domestic Materials Consumption and Total Resource Consumption, should be central to CPE. This would facilitate understanding of which sectors must be contracted, or usefully expanded, in pursuit of ecological stability. Sectors may have disproportionately large environmental impacts relative to their contribution to growth, making them more salient for comparative analysis.¹¹ Encouraging ecological complementarities between sectors can promote environmentally beneficial development.

Some sectors matter more than others. The absence of energy considerations from the typologies developed by VOC and GM literature signifies CPE’s environmental neglect. Whether or not different national capitalisms are powered by coal, oil, nuclear or renewables is a crucial variable for understanding patterns of cross-national continuity and difference in the political economy of green transition. For example, Germany has committed to much less ambitious targets for coal phase-out than the UK, due to the greater power of coal unions and companies (along with supportive energy-intensive sectors benefiting from low energy prices), as well as greater employment in the coal sector (Brauers, Oei & Walk 2020). Petrostates and those dominated by the coal industry are particularly significant, producing disproportionate CO2 emissions relative to GDP.¹² Recognising that economic size alone does not accord with the importance of a national economy for green transition deprivileges GDP’s ordering of national economies’ analytical importance.

Given the vast investment requirements of green transition and the power of finance, financial sector characteristics are critical. The reluctance of powerful asset managers to endorse environmental shareholder resolutions suggests that considerable political mobilisation is required to harness the commanding heights of finance for green transition (Buller & Braun 2021). Agricultural orientations are significant. Environmental harms and emissions produced by the ‘industrial grain-oilseed-livestock complex’ point to the significance of livestock farming and meat consumption in environmental degradation (Weis 2013, p. 66). In large meat producing countries such as Brazil and the US, curbing these sectors is critical. National strategies and timeframes for green transition will be shaped by the environmental modalities of leading sectors, the relative power of social forces that standing to lose/benefit from curbing environmentally damaging sectors, and the relationship between energy sectors and the wider economy.

Conclusion

The arrival of the Anthropocene profoundly unsettles the modern social sciences. Theories grounded in the nature/society dualism are unsuited to reckoning with proliferating environmental risks and destructive interdependencies between socio-economic institutions and Earth Systems dynamics. Across the social sciences, critical genealogies of incumbent paradigms and new interdisciplinary perspectives are required to equip scholars for our rapidly changing environmental context. CPE has both an important responsibility for engaging in this project and much to offer if it does. Given the causal complicity of fossil-fuel capitalism in the making of the Anthropocene, and the centrality of economic transformation to ameliorating its effects, those of us who take capitalism as our object of study have a special responsibility to engage these issues. In a more concretely institutional sense, scholars of CPE have much to offer as a framework for understanding, evaluating, and guiding comparative pathways of green transition.

In this article, I have begun a critical genealogy of CPE’s modern development with the intention of appraising and encouraging the field’s capacity to engage substantively with the challenge of green transition. Retracing the field’s historical development, I argued that CPE’s post-war emergence alongside the crystallisation of growth’s hegemony instilled scholarship with an assumption of the environmental neutrality of economic development and an uncritical disposition towards growth. Appraising the more recent emergence of VOC and Growth Models approaches, I examined CPE’s paradoxical narrowing around an uncritical orientation to growth maximisation despite mounting environmental threats and heightened awareness of the links between capitalism and climate. In the penultimate section, I developed provisional hypotheses intended to tentatively recalibrate CPE scholarship towards fuller engagement with environmental issues. These hypotheses need to be evaluated through comparative empirical assessments of diverse national plans and pathways towards green transition.

I have made the case that ‘climate issues’ are not simply another empirical domain to be incorporated into existing CPE approaches, but rather require reconsideration of our approach to studying comparative capitalisms. I finish by calling for CPE to rediscover the conjunctural sensitivity and responsiveness that is a hallmark of the field, rather than succumbing to forms of intellectual path dependency that limit its analytical horizons and practical applications. Recognising capitalism’s environmental embeddedness requires rethinking theoretical foundations and decentring CPE’s preoccupations with economic growth. What we might establish as a comparative analytical metric and normative goal in place of growth, or whether indeed we should seek a direct substitute for GDP’s role, remains an open question requiring further consideration by scholars of CPE.

Notes

1.

Karl Polanyi’s (1944) concept of embeddedness offers a promising ontological foundation for this effort.

2.

Earth Systems science understands the Earth as a holistic complex system that contains subsystems, such as the atmosphere and biosphere, that are ‘pervaded and connected by constant flows of matter and energy, in immense feedback loops’ (Bonneuil & Fressoz, 2016).

3.

Jonsson (2014, p. 2) also draws attention to a shadow history of economic thought that recognises ecological ‘limits’.

4.

A recent ‘state of the art’ CPE contribution to the journal Socio-Economic Review makes only one, footnoted, reference to climate or environmental issues in its synopsis of ‘New approaches to political economy’ (Amable et al, 2019).

5.

Green growth perspectives range from Green Keynesian emphases on green investment’s employment-enhancing potential to Schumpeterian convictions in a new clean energy revolution (Jacobs, 2012, Meckling & Allan, 2020).

6.

Much like VOC, though, there is still a functionalist sense that Growth Models call forth their own self-reproduction (Clift & McDaniel, 2021, p. 6).

7.

Path dependency refers to the declining reversibility of institutional trajectories over time. It is driven by ‘positive feedback’ – the self-reinforcing nature of specific institutional arrangements (Pierson, 2004, p. 18).

8.

Contributions of ideational or discursive political economy, identifying how goals and policy framings for comparative economic development are socially constructed, are particularly salient here (Clift, 2014, Hay, 2016, Schmidt, 2008).

9.

Linear notions of temporal development are also likely to be disrupted by the triggering of potential ‘tipping points’ prompting disruptive step changes in Earth Systems dynamics (Spratt & Dunlop, 2018, Steffen et al., 2018, Keys et al., 2019).

10.

The state’s importance to green transition has been recognised within long-standing debates over the characteristics of the ‘green state’ and the ‘environmental state’ (Paterson, 2016).

11.

Food and drink, for example, have large environmental impacts across the value chain (European Commission, 2019, p. 5).

12.

Saudi Arabia, Iran, Indonesia, and Russia all feature in the top ten carbon emitting countries due to their large oil, gas, and coal industries, despite not figuring in the ten largest economies in the world (climatetrade.com).

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