Movements, Markets, & States: A Contextual Institutional Approach
Climate change is a rapidly growing global problem, causing not only ecological damage, but also human suffering. The sectors responsible for the largest share of greenhouse gas emissions tend to be highly regulated – such as electricity, agriculture, and transportation. As such, state intervention will be needed to restructure regulatory institutions and incentivize large-scale shifts in technology use. Research taking an institutional approach to the emergence and diffusion of sustainable technologies has typically come from distinct theoretical areas focused on different actors and aspects of the change process. At the earliest stages of sustainable technology change (STC), management and sociology scholars have explored how social movements facilitate the development of markets that diffuse technological solutions to problems caused by climate change. But despite the highly regulated nature of many moral markets, the role of the state and regulatory institutions has often played a limited role in this research. This has left underdeveloped our understanding of how moral market emergence and STC differs across state institutional contexts. At the other end of the STC process, political scientists have focused on the role of the state and how it can actively engage in the development of moral markets. While this research has given us a better understanding of the ways in which states facilitate STC, questions of how and why states decide to adopt green developmental policies remain largely unstudied. Bringing together research on social movements and markets with studies on green developmental states gives us the beginning and end of the STC process – leaving the middle steps an open and largely unanswered question. In this paper, we draw on the green developmental state literature and research on social movements and the emergence of moral markets to develop a theoretical framework that explains which movement strategies are likely to be most effective in generating the political impetus for green developmental state policies under different political systems.
With Gerhard Schnyder (Loughborough University London)