The environmental state and the glass ceiling of transformation

By Daniel Hausknost. Environmental Politics, 2020

151 citations recorded by the source corpus.

ABSTRACT What are the capacities of the state to facilitate a comprehensive sustainability transition? It is argued that structural barriers akin to an invisible ‘glass ceiling’ are inhibiting any such transformation. First, the structure of state imperatives does not allow for the addition of an independent sustainability imperative without major contradictions. Second, the imperative of legitimation is identified as a crucial component of the glass ceiling. A distinction is introduced between ‘lifeworld’ and ‘system’ sustainability, showing that the environmental state has created an environmentally sustainable lifeworld, which continues to be predicated on a fundamentally unsustainable reproductive system. While this ‘decoupling’ of lifeworld from system sustainability has alleviated legitimation pressure from the state, a transition to systemic sustainability will require deep changes in the lifeworld. This constitutes a renewed challenge for state legitimation. Some speculations regarding possible futures of the environmental state conclude the article.

Subfields: Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law, Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c78a6fa1f250ec8a67791a4003f699c5bc44f682

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In Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law

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Citations in the corpus

Welfare systems without economic growth: A review of the challenges and next steps for the field (2021, background): “Next, the “struggles of an organised working class” required the provision of social welfare, which was reflected in the development of a legitimacy imperative (Hausknost, 2019, p. 20).”
A systematic review of the evidence on decoupling of GDP, resource use and GHG emissions, part II: synthesizing the insights (2020, background): “A strategic turn towards sufficiency that involves reductions in overall consumption levels and may lead to a degrowing economy might therefore pose a fundamental challenge to contemporary states—and liberal democracies (Pichler et al 2018, Hausknost 2019, Koch 2019).”