Green economic planning for rapid decarbonisation

Sustainable futures require deep social and economic transformations to address climate change adequately. The current landscape of intergovernmental and market-based coordination is not delivering this outcome. In response, political economic scholarship is congregating around the concept of the green state as a corrective to the status quo. In spite of this resurgence of interest in the green state, much research takes place in issue-specific silos without exploring synergies between them. Our contribution is to call for an integrative agenda focused on ‘green economic planning’, a form of state-led decarbonisation whereby the state designs and implements structural complementarities between macro-financial architectures, industrial policy, and private sector incentives. Our evidence for this approach is taken from historical cases of indicative planning in post-war democracies, contemporary cases of sectoral planning by states, and finally, planning by multinational corporations. We draw not only on political economy but also on scholarship in the fields of business, environment, energy and economic history. The upshot is a new research agenda focusing on state planning capacity in hierarchical coordination institutions and multinational corporations as research laboratories for the study of the organisational and technological infrastructure needed for state planning.