Dr Jeremy Green: Moving Beyond the Growth Paradigm

Dr Jeremy Green is a professor of Political Economy at the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Jesus College. Prior to joining Cambridge, Jeremy was a lecturer at the University of Bristol. Jeremy is the co-founder and co-convener of the Political Studies Association Specialist Group in Comparative and British Political Economy. His current research examines the historical and comparative aspects of green economic transition. Previously his research focused upon the historical examination of capitalism with a particular focus on Anglo-American Finance and the post-war political economy. In this interview Dr Jeremy Green talks with Emma J. B. Sunesen about Green Capitalism, the productivist assumptions of the Green New Deal, the value of de-emphasising GDP as the dominate parametric in CPE and why we should attempt decoupling money from the debt-growth nexus. At its core the interview addresses some of the fundamental questions that surround green economic transition and the debate between green growth versus no-growth. 

What led you to pursue a career in academia?

I was primarily motivated by the possibility of intellectual freedom and having an institutionalised space for thinking about things without the constraints that you might experience in other professions. Additionally, the prospect of transmitting knowledge and ideas, and receiving it back from the students you engage with, was very appealing to me. Academia is a space where you can generate new ways of understanding the world – new ideas, priorities, and principles. With a problem such as climate change, academia affords you the opportunity to step back from the policy cycle that is engaged in working and thinking about the issue hands-on and have a more holistic and long-term outlook. There’s something that continues to be distinctive about the university as a space for thinking about these problems. It’s one of the few sites of intellectual freedom, where you have a secure income alongside a professional obligation to work, think and critique. I think the bureaucratic logics that creep into modern universities have eroded that space somewhat, but it still exists.

“When I am doing my work and research, one of the questions I try to ask myself is not what my peers or more senior colleagues expect me to work on, but what the generation behind me would (…) I am trying to write my research for the incoming generation”

You have chosen to change your theoretical focus away from a primarily historical examination of capitalism, in particular Anglo-American finance, towards green economic transition. Why have you chosen the path of academia instead of activism? Can the two be complimentary?

I've always been interested in how capitalism is constituted across time and space. And as a scholar, you need to be willing to evolve and develop your thinking in response to the way the world around you is changing. And us academics are currently living through a very profound shift in how we think about the relationship between human institutions and the environment. The social sciences and other fields ought to be sites of reflection and reconsideration of the foundational assumptions underlying our study of the social and economic. As I became increasingly aware of this, I felt it necessary to try and retool myself to help lead the shift towards a more environmentally grounded form of social science. Obviously, people have been doing this for a long time, but more on the marginal sites of political economy. One of the ways for those marginal arenas to become more predominant is for people who were previously outside of those debates to start incorporating them into their own work. I think that’s the sort of momentum that needs to happen right now. When I am doing my work and research, one of the questions I try to ask myself is not what my peers or more senior colleagues expect me to work on, but what the generation behind me would. What would they hope that I was working on? And what would they feel might be neglected in the way senior scholars are working? So, I am trying to write my research for the incoming generation. This is particularly important at the moment because many academics and disciplines run a path dependent trajectory, whereby so much experience, expertise, and prestige develop around pursuing a certain line of inquiry, which makes it very difficult to step back and ask these more foundational questions that might actually disrupt some of the core arguments and assumptions that informed previous work. As you become more advanced in your career it becomes harder to step back and ask those first order questions. And I feel that I’m still at a moment where I can do that. That said, I don’t think what I’m working on now contradicts the work I’ve done earlier. It just reveals that previously those environmental modalities were silenced and unquestioned theoretically, and that now I believe it’s important to bring them to the fore.

In the past, it was probably easier for academics to be both scholars and activists. But one of the unfortunate developments in modern academia is that there’s barely any space or time outside of doing the job. That makes it very difficult for a lot of academics to be engaged in activism. I also think activism and academia are quite different things. Activism is mainly about political persuasion and public education, whereas academia is mainly about understanding and explaining the world. Academia is therefore not as instrumental in persuading policymakers or people about how they ought to do green transition. But it can be a valuable part of what academics do. However, I don’t think activism should dictate the sort of questions academics are engaged in. Some of the best academic work may not be that useful if you want to be campaigning for Extinction Rebellion or the like. But it may be very useful if you want to transform your understanding of how we ended up here, historically. Or in terms of guiding the sort of questions we should be asking as social scientists. So, there are quite different requirements between being a good activist and being a good academic, but there’s definitely a productive possibility for overlap.

In your article ‘Comparative Capitalisms in the Anthropocene’ you argue that the conceptual insights of CPE (Comparative Political Economy) can be productive for analysing, theorising, and guiding green economic transition. What do you perceive to be the benefits of this macro approach in contrast to others, say, for example, a microeconomic approach focusing upon specific actors and institutions at the regional level? 

It's important to consider capitalism as a holistic system, and to think more broadly about responses to climate change and Anthropocene risks. Climate change cuts across different domains of society. So, while the micro level can be relevant for considering certain behavioural patterns and how to align incentives with behaviours, the green transition is a holistic project that requires holistic thinking. Green transition is about transforming society and economy to make it sustainable. And that is a really complex shift that requires mutually compatible adjustments across multiple different institutional sites. Because this has to play out across different countries, in ways that are likely not synchronised, then it becomes helpful and important to think about different scales of institutional analysis, commonalities and differences between countries, and how that might inform the way in which a green strategy needs to develop in each specific case. Although there are certain universal scientific requirements about what needs to be done to meet targets around limiting global warming, we know that any political economic trajectories are going to be articulated through already existing forms of institutional development with their own distinctive histories and logics. Therefore, green economic transition will not be an entirely universal or common experience. And in order to understand what might work better and where to apply pressure, we need some kind of comparative mapping that informs us how capitalism differs across time and space. 

Critics of methodological nationalism argue that nation-states might not always be the most rewarding frames of comparison, since even if jurisdiction advances at a national level, human interactions take place at a local level. Given that green economic transition requires such fundamental restructuring of our way of life, isn’t there a risk that the macro and institutional perspective of CPE neglects important human insight from daily life?

Clearly the sphere of cultural production and reproduction is extremely significant for determining how the current social order is reproduced through logics of consumption, consumer identities, and notions of affluence being entangled with material wealth and access to resources. That’s a totally legitimate domain of inquiry and reflection. However, coming out of a disciplinary lineage of thinking about comparative political economy, it seems to me that looking at different institutional sites and scales are quite helpful for developing a comparative methodology. The point I’m making in the article [Comparative Capitalisms in the Anthropocene] is not that we should be state-centric. In fact, it’s a call for comparative capitalism literature to become more diverse in thinking about scalar interactions, and that can be from the individual up to the scale of global governance. So, we need to think about states, corporations, cities, regions all being nested in these different layers of governance. With the Anthropocene, we have these earth system logics that entangle all of those different sites in different ways. Nevertheless, I do think the state is still central in the sense that the state is sovereign. That means that the various actors involved in the governance of climate change that are either pushing for green transition or resisting it work through an attempt to mobilise state power in their interests. So, when I talk about the state being the pivotal actor, I’m think about it quite literally as a sort of pivot around which other actors turn in trying to push for new legislation or regulatory adjustments. In this sense, the state is still central. Also, the narrative around climate politics is very individualised; it’s about recycling, eating less meat, and so on. This is very important, but ultimately the kind of transition that we need to achieve in the limited timeframe we have needs to capture state power and steer it towards viable, serious green objectives. I don’t think there is an alternative. That’s not to say there won’t be forms of local diversity in the politics of green transition, and that we shouldn’t encourage local diversity and different community projects. But a majority part has to be anchored through the productive use of state power.

I recently did an interview with Dr Matthew Sparkes who made the case that the state must attempt to provide meaningful lives for people so they can accept less consumption. In short, a restructuring of values and meaning away from productivism and consumption. To what extent is economic theory at the moment equipped to deal with questions of meaning-making?

Well, pretty poorly. I don’t think the question of meaning and intersubjectivity is really central to economic thought. In fact, economic thought is premised on a freezing of the subject as a kind of utility maximising individual. So, in a sense, the normative orientation of the subject, and the different desires or credible ends that the subject might want to pursue are always considered a kind of black box that shouldn’t be interrogated. And dissolving the category of Homo Economicus is a really important part of trying to move the social sciences into a more effective reckoning with the Anthropocene and the problem of green transition. I’m not sure that I would say that the state should play a role in generating meaning. That’s in my opinion slightly top-down. So, I think that communities need to feed into constructions of alternative meaning. I believe the role for the state is to put some institutional support behind alternative ways of approaching life and generating meaning. In other words, to create an institutional space where that can flourish. And to reduce the resource pressures and constraints that funnel us into reproducing the market. An example of that would be universal basic income. It’s something that can reduce the pressure of the cash-nexus, and potentially free up time and allow for other communitarian projects of generating meaning and thinking about a sustainable way of being beyond the logic of endless consumption and self-affirmation through consumption.

Everywhere we see people use capitalism and the climate in binary terms. From Naomi Klein’s book from 2014 called “This Changes Everything: capitalism vs. the climate” to Simon Hannah’s article “The fight against climate change is a fight against capitalism” in OpenDemocracy. To which extent do you agree to – what can be termed – an eco-centric perspective that portrays capitalism and the climate as conflicting? Is ‘Green Capitalism’ simply an oxymoron?

If we look at the historical evidence, then it does appear that capitalism has had a very deleterious impact on environmental vitality, on eco-systemic diversity and on levels of carbon emissions. And that’s to do with the expansionary logic of capitalism: the pursuit of new markets, new horizons of production and consumption, the competitive logic that to survive in capitalism, businesses have to expand and maintain or grow their market share or else they will face dissolution. And so, the question is whether that expansionary logic is reconcilable with the finer tune of planetary resources. So far, there’s little evidence to suggest that we can have a dematerialised logic of expansion that maintains the core features of how capitalism works, and yet conserves environmental conditions and resources in a way that facilitates a sustainable way of living. Most of the evidence suggests that economic growth is central to capitalism, because the larger the economy grows, the more opportunities for market exchange are there. Yet, all evidence suggests that growth is associated with environmental degradation. And the burden of proof is really on those that suggest green growth is possible. And thus far there isn’t a great deal of evidence to support this. This doesn’t mean that it’s just capitalism that causes the logic of environmental destruction. There may be something deep in the enlightenment itself and the constitution of the nature-society dualism with the idea that man’s role is to conquer nature and overcome human limitations through the exploitation of nature. We see this in the fact that non-capitalist projects like the Soviet Union have had very destructive environmental consequences too. So, these are also potentially built into modern technology and the associations that we’ve developed between freedom, forms of productivism and modern technology. Of course, it’s possible that you could move beyond capitalism but still have a very destructive relationship with nature. But I do think that capitalist logics of expansion have been pretty central to the story of how we’ve got to where we are. As for the role of fossil fuel energy, then it is possible to conceive of a scenario in which even if we had we not been living capitalism, then the historical arrival of the energy potential associated with fossil fuels may have led to very destructive entanglements with the environment anyway. That’s possible as a counterfactual. So, when we think about capitalism, and its modern history, we also have to think about the relationship to fossil fuel energy. Even if there was this expansionary logic inherent to capitalism prior to the institutionalisation of mass use of fossil fuels, then it is fossil fuel energy that gave it its enormous productive potential way beyond what, for example, a simple form of agrarian capitalism would have accomplished.

In your article ‘Comparative Capitalisms in the Anthropocene’ you argue that CPE encourages economic growth as a policy goal by making GDP the dominate parametric. What would be the effect both analytically and politically if we started arranging national economies according to other factors, such as emission intensity?

This is part of the shift that we should be undertaking. And that involves the question of how and why CPE has this preoccupation with economic growth structure analysis. When you look at comparative political economy you can see that this is absolutely central to how the discipline has developed over time. That wasn’t always the case. It actually tracks with the historical ascendancy of the growth paradigm in wider society. Yet, green transition should require us to decentralise that preoccupation with a particular metric. We should think about ecologically embedded indicators as ways to understand the current intensity of different sectors of economic activity, but also to articulate a different way of thinking about good and bad logics within the economy. We should remove GDP as the normative centrepiece for thinking about what good economic policy is and thereby situate sustainability as a crucial objective to raise it up in the hierarchy. Moving beyond growth is also thinking about other ways of considering sustainability and well-being. Of course, we need a certain amount of material prosperity to deliver wellbeing but by putting it at the top in terms of the goals and the metrics, without really thinking critically about why we're doing it, that’s a big mistake. Also, when we shift the indicators, and we instead look at emissions intensity, for example, it might be that countries that are not particularly significant in terms of the global hierarchy of GDP growth, are nevertheless extremely significant for thinking about green transition and the associated politics. Sometimes when we change the analytical categories, we see the problem in quite different ways. Here there may not be a link between where countries stand in the developmental hierarchy and how important they are to effecting green transition. If you think about Saudi Arabia, for example, it has very, very high levels of emissions and is obviously an integral place in the global fossil fuel industry. But it's not normally considered an economic powerhouse in the way that other ‘advanced’ capitalist economies are. Or think about Brazil. While Brazil wouldn’t figure much in conventional comparative capitalist metrics, it is critical for thinking about green transition at the global scale due to the Amazon rainforest. And so those sorts of indicators need to be foregrounded much more explicitly to have a green framework for thinking about comparative economic analysis.

In the same article, you make the hypothesis that “States (not firms) are the pivotal actors in the political economy of green transition” (p. 12). Yet one of the key issues in the debate on the regulation of carbon-heavy industries and firms is that over-ambitious regulation will simply move the production elsewhere in the world, thereby negating the intended environmental effect. Does this not emphasise the continued power of firms and the need for coordinated effort?

Firms are certainly very powerful. But of course, some of the biggest fossil fuel firms are also state-owned, so this kind of dichotomous rendering isn’t always accurate. Also, clearly not all states have equivalent power. So, regulatory initiatives undertaken by the United States, for example, are going to have much more global impact than regulatory changes undertaken by Jamaica, for example. But yes, I do believe that the problem of green transition requires global cooperation. And we need to consider whether it’s possible to do green transition in one country, or whether because of the global scale of the problem, there needs to be some level of synchronicity and coordination to prevent firms and big polluters from playing off different regulatory environments through a form of regulatory arbitrage. So, states are pivotal because they have sovereignty and because they have certain legal capacities to enact very rapid changes. But of course, their powers are constrained and limited by their interaction with other actors, such as, powerful corporations. And some states have more capacity than others.

In your article “Greening Keynes? Productivist lineages of the Green New Deal”, you argue that the Green New Deal suffers an incoherence problem by drawing upon Keynesianism economics’ reliance on productivism and high consumption. Why is it futile to use consumption-led growth to fund green investments?

There is this sort of deep tension with the Green New Deal arguments. They want to break free from the environmentally destructive logics of 20th century political economy. And yet they reproduce either explicitly or implicitly some of the productivist assumptions from that period. Ultimately, the problem of the 20th century was about escaping scarcity and unemployment and trying to generate abundance. The New Deal was in particular about escaping the Depression. Yet today the problem of climate change is unparalleled in terms of the economic and environmental challenges that we face. And so, I don't think that strategies that were used in response to the problems of the 20th century are necessarily appropriate for thinking about something this unique. In fact, what is most needed in the Global North at least is a stabilisation or reduction of consumption levels and the resource footprints of our populations. And at the moment, I don't find a lot of the Green New Deal thinking to be particularly persuasive. There’s a real sensitivity towards the political pragmatism of green transition, which is that it's probably easier from a position of affluence or with a sense that the transition policies can generate affluence and opportunity. However, it’s still overly defined in quite materialistic ways rather than a more kind of post-material idea of what affluence and wellbeing might look like. I also think that redistributive politics needs to be more prominent. This is the case within some of the more radical Green New Deal arguments, less so within some of the others. But for me, the redistributive emphasis as well as a more ambitious use of monetary technology to achieve climate objectives should be quite central.

Is it simply impossible to decouple economic growth from carbon emissions? What about the service economy?

Obviously, some sectors of economic activity are less resource and emissions intensive than others. But what we see in more ‘advanced’ economies that have transitioned towards service sector led growth is that the more resource and carbon emission intensive activities have simply been offshored to other countries. So, there's a rearticulation of the international division of labour, whereby the material requirements of workers and communities in the service sector industries are produced in other parts of the world. And while they’re no less resource intensive than they were previously, they no longer show up as emissions generated from the country where they're finally consumed or utilised. So, it's difficult when thinking about resource intensity, because when we look at measurements just on the scale of the nation state, we can miss this wider web of global supply chains and interdependencies. We could obviously just try and expand into a more service led economy. However, it's not clear how that would keep generating large scale growth. There might be a saturation point for how often we want our hair cut, or our nails done. Moreover, it’s not clear whether without energy intensive technological development we're going to be able to have continuous growth from service sectors. So, while it’s likely that the shift to a more dematerialised economic model like the service economy would be important and beneficial in breaking away from contemporary growth logics, it doesn't seem like it would generate long term growth in the way we've classically understood it.

“Money is the vital fluid of all economic activity. So, any discussion of green transition will need at its centre a rethinking of the purpose of money and how it's institutionalised. It is essential that it try to break the link between money and economic growth.”

One of the issues facing the zero-growth agenda is that our current debt-based economy is dependent upon continuedeconomic growth, since it’s the easiest way to manage private and public debt levels. This has led some to argue in favour of Modern Monetary Theory (See, for example, the think-tank Positive Money). To which extent do you view the transformation of our monetary system as a viable solution?

I am not certain about the viability of it because obviously none of the plans or policies to achieve climate stabilisation seem to be faring particularly well at the moment. But is it desirable and necessary? I think so. Money is the vital fluid of all economic activity. So, any discussion of green transition will need at its centre a rethinking of the purpose of money and how it's institutionalised. It is essential that it try to break the link between money and economic growth. So, can we have forms of currency innovation that re-invent our banking system and attempt at creating debt-free money to break the money-growth nexus? I think that would be desirable. If we look at the way central banks have already played a very prominent role in stabilising capitalism post the global financial crisis 2007/2008, we can already see that monetary innovation and transformation has been key to how capitalism has developed and reproduced itself in the 21st century. I am here thinking about quantitative easing and zero bound interest rates. However, that has been from a top down, technocratic point of origin that has benefited asset holders and intensified concentrations of wealth. It would be fruitful to use practices of monetary innovation, but in ways that decentralise and democratise them. So far, most strategies of discussing green finance ultimately leave contemporary power structures and hierarchies intact. They just try and repurpose them towards green objectives, such as, investments in green bonds and green activities, without thinking about this deeper question concerning the expansion of the money supply and its links to economic growth. Some innovative monetary ideas include having environmental indicators that guide the distribution of monetary resources through the economy and enable particular sectors to either expand or contract. There is research underway at the moment to consider these possibilities. There are also initiatives to try and create more local currencies that are used in in particular geographical areas, such as within a 50-kilometre radius, to try and incentivise consumption and production on a more local scale. So, when we're thinking about that kind of monetary change, we should also be thinking about potential diversification of locally scaled currency projects and then more regional or national forms of monetary design. You know, we're still going to need forms of trade and exchange internationally, that will probably require quite different payment systems compared to something that a particular city or region might want to undertake to achieve certain environmental objectives.

In a tweet you write: “As the global economy enters a new phase of stagflationary dynamics and sharpened geopolitical rivalry, the temptation to respond to intensified distributional conflicts through the salve of productivism must be avoided” (Oct 26, 2022). What would be your concrete policy recommendation? What should the British state do in response to stagflation?

What I'm trying to say is that there's a risk that dealing with the present political, economic, and geopolitical problems means that we sort of kick the can of trying to break from this productivist logic of economic activity further down the road. And that in doing so, we lose this vital time to try and stabilise our relationship to the Earth system and prevent the worst effects of climate change. The lesson is that these crises are different because we shouldn’t respond to them by rebooting low inflationary economic growth as a solution. Since that would just further entrench this environmentally destructive paradigm. We shouldn’t just have this uncritical discussion of growth that you see with the Labour Party at the moment. They are completely on board with this maximising growth narrative. And what other political parties would do is align with progressive social forces and start to lay the ground for thinking about what a lower growth society might look like, and how we might institutionally adapt to achieve that. Obviously, that’s difficult because we're living in a period of sharpened geopolitical tensions, where the size of your economy and the amount you can spend on military expenditure is important. One way in which this might be mutually beneficial is if we double down on renewables investment. Delinking the interdependence with major fossil fuel exporters, countries like Russia, but also putting in place the foundations for sustainable energy resources. So, while I don't have any concrete plans for what they should be doing to get out of this high inflation, low growth period, I don’t think the solution is to maximise growth. And really, we’re right back to the question about the fiscal dimension we talked about before. For how do you invest in the NHS if the economy isn't growing? If tax revenues aren't increasing? Of course, you can increase taxes, and there certainly is a lot of wealth in the UK. But potentially all of these public services could be more effective and sustainable if we managed to transform the monetary system and re-think how we understand money as a kind of socio-economic technology and how we put it to work towards certain social objectives.

To me it seems that the world is heading more in the direction of green growth policies as opposed to no-growth. Does history teach us anything about what it takes for citizens to rally behind radical institutional changes? 

I think, you're right about green growth. And that's because it’s a much less difficult adjustment than post-growth scenarios. Green growth is basically having your cake and eating too. History shows us that you need mass mobilisation of the population to achieve radical institutional change. But often conditions have to be very, very bad before that happens. And so, the problem with climate change is that if we only have that realisation at the point in which our everyday lives have already been completely undermined and impoverished by the effects of climate change, then it'll be too late to stave off the worst effects. This is therefore a peculiar political economic problem because it's very much shaped by scientific knowledge and understanding. And this knowledge doesn't necessarily connect with the aesthetics of everyday life in a way that a more materially impactful set of economic conditions would. That makes it really difficult. And history is therefore only an incomplete guide because it’s a unique, planetary problem. But looking at historical dynamics surrounding social movements, forms of voluntary institutional change is incredibly instructive. There is also somewhat of a link to discussions around socialist revolutionary strategy. Like, can you break from capitalism in one country only? Or does it have to be a global transformation? And how do big political economic transitions operate institutionally? How do you achieve transformation? And then, of course, the Soviet experience provides a lot of evidence about the perils of undertaking large scale rapid experiments and social transformation. It illustrates some of the dangers that are an incredibly important caution for thinking about some of the more extreme forms of climate politics that are entertained.

The issue of how to make the economy carbon-neutral is one of the most contentious political issues right now. Do you hope to see any political implications from your research?

I don’t write my research with the goal of it effecting political change, although it would be great if the research can be used for positive political consequences. However, to be honest, I am sceptical of the prospects of that coming true in the UK under the current government. So, if the current government was my primary audience, I’d be slightly disheartened. The purpose of the research is to provide inspiration for people who are thinking about these problems. So, I recently spoke at a conference held by the European Trade Union Institute, which is the research arm of the European Trade Union Confederation. They're currently very interested in these ideas about post-growth and thinking about green transition. So, there are audiences in civil society who are receptive to these sorts of ideas. And that's certainly encouraging. However, I don't believe research should be instrumental in that sense. I think research should be about asking deeper questions about how we understand political economy in the context of the Anthropocene and how we can retool ourselves conceptually and theoretically to navigate the world around us. It should also be about rethinking some of the histories on how we got here. Because unless we do that, it's not clear that we'll make good decisions about how to kind of reset our long-term trajectory going forward.