Growth, Democracy or Climate Action?
The New Political Trilemma of Advanced Capitalism
Aidan Regan, Hanna Schwander, Cyril Benoît, Tim Vlandas
Governments face a conflicting choice between economic growth, democracy and tackling the climate crisis. They cannot achieve all three objectives simultaneously and the growing tensions between them are being played out in countries across the world. It is the new trilemma of advanced capitalist democracy.
The authors use this trilemma as a fresh analytic framework to conceptualize these trade-offs and tensions in the study of capitalist democracies. The type of democratic politics required to generate growth and prosperity within the ecological limits of the planet, they argue, has not been taken seriously in the study of comparative political economy and needs to be located at the heart of future research. Given the unprecedented scale of structural reform that governments need to implement to effectively tackle the climate crisis, the authors question whether the transition to carbon neutrality can be done within the liberal rulebook that has governed the politics of advanced capitalism for the past hundred years.
1. Introduction: the climate crisis as a political trilemma
2. The unsustainability of the status quo
3. The political impossibility of degrowth
4. The prospect of a big green state
5. The conditions under which we can escape
6. Conclusion
When it comes to economic growth, democratic legitimacy, and effective climate action you can't have it all. You can only get two at a time … The way out is a reinvigorated politics that puts citizens in charge of rebuilding an effective state. It's not going to be easy, but it is possible.
This lively and thought-provoking book lays bare the dilemmas facing democratic governments trying to address climate change.
A compelling framework … the authors show how green industrial transformation, strategic redistribution, and coalition-building can reconcile climate change mitigation with economic dynamism and democratic legitimacy.
