Climate change and international political economy: between collapse and transformation

The dynamics of climate change politics have thrown up two fundamental, and entirely contradictory, challenges for political economy in the last 10 years. On the one hand, the new science of ‘net zero emissions’ has produced a growing recognition that a world without fossil fuels is both absolutely necessary and utterly transformative. On the other hand, civilizational collapse (absolute declines in human populations, collapse of food production systems, collapse of social institutions) is now much more widely recognized as an entirely plausible trajectory for the world within living lifetimes. The stakes in climate politics have thus become radically sharper. This paper argues that IPE has some key theoretical arguments and substantive knowledge that it can contribute to understanding the crucial challenge of pursuing the transformative pathway and that the key challenge for IPE scholars is to deploy their knowledge accordingly.