Decarbonising states as owners

Abstract

Environmental state debates focus on the governance and steering functions of politics. Concurrently, many states stand out as large global owners and investors in carbon industries. Via various investment vehicles, states control around half of all global oil and gas reserves as well as other carbon assets. We know very little, however, about where these states are invested; how they conduct their carbon investment; and what possibilities and constraints carbon-owning states have to decarbonise.Yet, these aspects -the geography, investment profiles and domestic state carbon capital dependence -are key to assess the possibilities and limitations of climate action states as carbon owners have.Based on new fine-grained firm-level data, we deliver conceptual and empirical insights into all three issues. Our intervention fills an important gap in our knowledge about the environmental state, while drawing the attention of researchers and policymakers to a blind spot, but also to transformation potentials of the carbon-owning state in the following decade.

Making space for the new state capitalism, part II: Relationality, spatiotemporality and uneven development

“…Future research could connect ecological political economy, the biophysical world and socio-metabolic processes to relational elements of state capitalism. This would open to a range of under-researched yet critical topics such as the place and limits of contemporary state capitalism in the energy transition ( Alami et al, 2023 ; Babić and Dixon, 2022 ; Bridge and Gailing, 2020 ; Sweidan, 2021 ).…”