Trading-off or trading-in? A critical political economy perspective of green growth’s policy framing

ABSTRACT

The trade-off policy framing has been a central feature of green growth since the 1980s, employed to frame the countervailing spheres of social, environmental, and economic policies purported to ensure the sustainable development of the global economy. This article argues that so central has this framing become that IPE scholars have tended to focus on different types of ‘greenable’ growth observable within capitalism, rather than question the prospect of greening growth itself. Far from value-free, the trade-off framing is ultimately determined by the structural imperative for economic growth, veiling the disciplines anthropocentric ontology in a normative or objective guise. To account for the tacit prioritization, the trade-in policy framing – the compromising of environmental objectives to accommodate the growth imperative – is advanced as an alternative framing. The trading-in of environmental policies is legitimized through political-industrial narratives, of which three, the (i) consequential, (ii) allay, and (iii) finance are outlined in this analysis.

KEYWORDS:

• Green growth
• GDP
• trade-off
• trade-in
• post-growth
• political economy

Introduction

The subject of climate change, whilst receiving growing attention in the international political economy (IPE) literature, has historically been a ‘blind spot’ for the discipline, occupying a relatively peripheral space amongst other analytical subjects (Paterson, 2020a). That is not to say that the literature is absent a critical perspective of capitalism’s relationship with nature (Bailey, 2018; Barry, 2020; Paterson, 2020b), but that the discipline is founded upon an assumed and often unquestioned anthropocentric ontology (Koch & Buch-Hansen, 2021). Prominent questions in the literature typically concern the greening of the monetary system (Svartzman & Althouse, 2020), the financial demands of the green transformation (Murau et al., 2023), or the ecological impacts of capitalist production and consumption (Katz-Rosene et al., 2020). On the subject of the environment, the preoccupation of IPE scholars is how to green the internal mechanics of capitalism in the pursuit of growth whilst largely avoiding the criticisms of the objective of growth (Jackson, 2021; Likaj et al., 2022). As a result, green growth, the present paradigm perceived to be sensitive to climate change, has become relatively uncontested within IPE.

Due to the fact that growth, measured by an increase in Gross Domestic Product (GDP), is the economic imperative of capitalism,¹ political economy scholars have focused on the types of growth, from export-led (Jackson, 2023), consumption-led (Kohler & Stockhammer, 2021), finance-led (Lavery, 2018), and debt-led growth (Barredo-Zuriarrain, 2019) to name but a few. This, in turn, is entangled with the varieties of and in capitalism prominent in the comparative political economy literature (CPE) (Bruff, 2011; Hay, 2019) and the types of crises and ideational distinctions that reside therein (Baker, 2014). Such is the analytical purchase growth has within IPE that scholars have only recently begun to question the objective of growth itself (Buch-Hansen & Carstensen, 2021; Hasselbalch et al., 2023) akin to that of scholars hailing from alternative disciplinary backgrounds such as ecological economics and political ecology (Hickel & Kallis, 2019; Koch, 2020; O’Neill, 2020).

Since the 1980s, green growth had been thought to have answered questions about capitalism's relationship with nature, framing the trade-off between social, economic, and environmental policies as wholly reconcilable through the sustainable development of national economies (Blair, 2016; Wiréhn et al., 2018, 2020). Yet, with global emissions having risen over the preceding 40 years (IPCC, 2022), ecological systems, and the decline in nature as measured by biodiversity loss to acidifying oceans (Paterson, 2020b), and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 2023 Synthesis Report warning it is now or never to change course it is clear that something altogether different from green growth is taking place (IPCC, 2023). That is to say that despite the pervasive narrative that surrounds green growth, the empirical evidence continues to contradict the notion that any such process is unfolding in any significant way. Such a backdrop presents a timely moment to consider whether it is not simply a case of refining the lens by which green growth frames environmental-economic relations within IPE, but instead question the very framing of this relationship itself.

In this article, I address this neglected feature of IPE by examining the extent to which the trade-off policy framing is an accurate one or whether it actually renders an inaccurate portrayal of capitalism’s relationship with the environment. The trade-off framing, I argue, is an anthropocentric epistemological framing that follows from the growth dependent ontology orientated around a society-nature dualism (Barry, 2020; Hickel, 2021). As an alternative, I propose the trading-in policy framing which denotes the compromising, or retrenchment, of environmental policies and objectives to ensure economic growth once environmental and economic imperatives are brought into opposition to more accurately empirically capture the process that unfolds. This alternative framing adheres to critical strands of political economy scholarship (Berglund & Bailey, 2023; Bruff & Ebenau, 2014), identifying the unsustainable, or unecological, disciplinary foundations built atop capitalism’s structural imperative for growth. It also alights upon how the trading-in of environmental policies is legitimized through a series of political-industrial narratives which in turn condition the prospect of shifting to a paradigm beyond growth.

To that end, this analysis is structured as follows. The following section outlines how the trade-off framing, central to the intellectual basis of political economy, has coalesced around the green growth paradigm. Section two details how this framing ignores the inherent determinism of green growth when presenting economic and environmental policies as countervailing political forces. Section three offers the trade-in policy framing as a means to examine the fundamentally unsustainable path dependencies of contemporary political economies more accurately. Section four outlines how the growth imperative is narrated in a variety of anti-environmental forms. Section five presents a framework by which scholars may move the discipline beyond the growth paradigm before concluding with an appeal for an epistemological re-evaluation of the discipline.

Where the trade-off policy framing resides within green growth

Narratives are a principal feature in the discipline of IPE and broader political science, for they allow for ‘political reality’ to be constructed according to ideas or basic views of what society should be (Death, 2024; Shenhav, 2006). There are of course both positive and negative implications of constructing and understanding the world through narratives, as they can separate normative or ideological commitments from empirical reality, but they nonetheless allow for the subjects to assemble disparate facts into a more coherent body of understanding (Clift and Kuzemko, 2024; Patterson & Monroe, 1998). As stated by Growth (2019), the very foundations of social sciences and other disciplines are the product of the narratives that flow from the precepts scholars derive from them. As a result, narratives are woven into the disciplinary fabric of IPE, present at it is most abstract and where it most analytically precise.

The narrative of concern here pertains to the idea that decision-making always demands a trade-off, one of the most commonly assumed and thus uncontested features of social science, from political science (Gulzar, 2021; Schneider, 2014; Wright & Bloemraad, 2012), economics (Alesina & Cukierman, 1990; Dobson & Ramlogan-Dobson, 2010) to indeed IPE (Cohen, 2019). As a policy framing or analytical heuristic, the notion of trade-offs has been advanced in many disciplinary perspectives to analyze countervailing policy spheres as equals, evaluating them objectively based on their relative merits towards predetermined ends (Weitz, 2019).

Typically, trade-offs are defined as a situational decision that entails compromising on the quantity, quality, or entirety of something, some value or functionality in order to make gains elsewhere. Trade-offs are said to be rooted in metaphysical limitations, wherein only a certain degree of objectives can occupy any given space (Campbell & Kelly, 1994). Inevitably, these limitations manifest differently across disciplines. In terms of the IPE literature, the trade-off might be thought of as manifesting in a multiplicity of ways, from the relationship between fiscal policy and growth (Jackson, 2021, 2023), international trade and debt (Gilpin, 1987), to environmental regulation (Paterson, 2020a) and the rate of profit to augment or fall (Kohler & Stockhammer, 2021; Svartzman & Althouse, 2020) to name but a few.

Aside from the more abstract conceptualizations of trade-offs, they are also thought to serve strategic or tactical purposes to frame the merits, or problems, of any given measure or objective. Of the interdisciplinary framings of trade-offs in question, economic trade-offs are otherwise known as ‘opportunity costs’, in which obtaining a product, service or experience is contingent upon sacrificing something, whether that be capital, time, other benefits or current resources (Philipson et al., 2014). Often this is linked to the ‘Pareto principle’ which emphasizes the objective of maximizing output whilst investing the least, or minimizing, input. As noted by Landman and Lauth (2019), trade-offs in the political science literature have received relatively little attention, contrary to scholars from various disciplinary backgrounds. But it nonetheless serves as an implicit function, used to explain, or rationalize, certain outcomes based on a common understanding of a wider objective.

In the context of green growth, the trade-off policy framing has been institutionalized through the paradigmatic view of sustainable development as the organizing principle of the economy since the 1980s (Mol et al., 2009). Sustainable Development has long since served as the political and economic expression, or the pathway, to green growth (Bartelmus, 2013). Coffman and Umemoto (2009) note that the trade-off is most overt in the idea of the ‘triple bottom-line’ or ‘triple pillar’ of sustainable development, that in the pursuit of green growth social, environmental, and economic imperatives must be mediated, balanced and a compromise negotiated or asserted in order to produce a configuration that works (Clark & Harley, 2020). This perception of capitalism aimed at producing sustainable development has consequently been institutionalized in international arrangements that govern the global economy, from the United Nations Envionment Programme's (UNEP) Green Economy, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's (OECD) Towards Green Growth, and The World Bank’s Inclusive Green Growth Framework to the United Nation's (UN) sustainable development goals (SDGs).

There are accordingly two common ways of viewing the trade-off policy framing within the green growth paradigm. The first is the idea that as part of the triple bottom line, green growth gives weight (but crucially not equal weight) to environmental, social, and economic considerations, such that it will produce optimum results for nature, society, and the economy (Mol et al., 2009). The second is that sustainable development is premised upon the presupposition that there is no tension between the imperative for economic growth and the ambition to reduce emissions but that any problems can be ‘decoupled’ principally through technological fixes (Mol et al., 2009). Since such time, green growth has presented what was once a contested dichotomy (win-lose) as a ‘win-win’ for environmental and economic policy (Mol and Spaagaren, 2000). Both interpretations speak to the idea that green growth could, or indeed had, assuaged the concerns of critical scholars who previously questioned the Limits to Growth.

There is a third, more sceptical, interpretation of sustainable development or green growth, however, one which contrary to the win-win presented by green growth scholars, states that the social, environmental, and economic objectives have always shared an uneasy relationship (Fletcher and Rammelt, 2017). That is to say that rather than a triple pillar, green growth faces a ‘trilemma’ of competing, incompatible and irreconcilable demands (Bailey, 2018). Elsewhere, an articulation of these internal tensions of green growth has been illustrated through Campbell's Triangle (1996) in which its namesake asserts that the pursuit of sustainable development is littered with conflict, contestation, and confusion. In Figure 1, I include the trade-off framing to Campbell’s formative illustration.

Figure 1. Green growth trade-off as per the triple pillar framing. Source: Campbell (1996).

Three tangent circle that illustrate the interrelating conflict between economic, social, and environmental policy spheres.

Similar to that of fellow critical scholars, Campbell asserts that green growth is contingent upon a romanticization of holism, wherein the centre of the triple pillar, which is the realization of green growth, cannot be reached due to its internal contradictions. Instead, he posits that due to the deep-seated conflict within green growth, sustainability must be redefined as something which both complements and is lexically second or inferior in terms of trade-offs to the economy. Whilst the future of IPE would benefit from an exploration of such an alternative, the concern here is to determine how, and ultimately why, trade-offs are an inaccurate framing of what takes place within the green growth discourse.

Acknowledging the structural imperative and the inaccuracy of green growth

Before outlining an alternative heuristic to the trade-off framing, it is important to first delve deeper into the problematic framing that prevails. Contesting the notion that the triple pillar of sustainable development inaccurately veils a trade-off is important for conceptual reasons, for it asserts that an accord or ‘balance’ is inevitably struck between environmental and economic considerations, but it is also a matter of greater empirical importance. Were it the case that such an accord was struck, then we might expect the objectives of the Paris Agreement to be in little doubt or that global CO² emissions had abated. Instead, global temperatures continue to rise as the IPCC increasingly warns of the disparity between environmental objectives constructed by political actors and the pace at which the economic model draws society closer to irreversible environmental breakdown (UNFCCC, 2016). Scholars have also long observed that economic crises, from the 1973 oil crisis to the 2008 Financial Crisis and more recently COVID-19, instigate a retrenchment or dismantling of environmental policy so that growth can be restored (Burns & Tobin, 2019; Nissen, 2021).

What explains these divergent realities, I argue, is the inaccuracy of the present policy framing as far as it fails to acknowledge that capitalism’s foremost consideration is the continued augmentation of economic growth, as measured by GDP. That is, what capitalism and those who provide intellectual and ideological support for it seek to sustain is a rate of capital accumulation that perpetuates growth. So embedded is this view that scholars often advance their respective orthodox and critical analyzes by narrating them in terms of their relationship to the abiding logic for growth. Such a deterministic, or reducible, view of capitalism has a longer intellectual lineage in the political economy scholarship than I intimate here. It can instead be found initially in a Marxist critique of capitalism, referring to the orthodox or logical prioritization of economic objectives as capitalism’s ‘structural imperative’ (Marx, 1993). Similar critique of capitalism can be found across a broad spectrum of ‘ecopolitical’ or ‘anti-growth’ schools of thought (Buch-Hansen & Carstensen, 2021), including degrowth (Hickel, 2021), post-growth (Jackson, 2021) and a-growth (Likaj et al., 2022), increasingly common amongst ecological and environmental economists (O’Neill, 2020). Critical perspectives thereby emphasize that while the mechanics of capitalism are complex, the engine that drives it, and its ultimate goal, is economic growth contingent upon expansion into ever-increasing corners of the environment.

Since the 1950s, the metric by which this expansion has been measured is GDP, quantifying the aggregate growth in the extraction, production, transportation and consumption of goods and services² (Schmelzer et al., 2022). And while alternative metrics, including productivity, inflation, the balance of payments and Gross Value Added (GVA) are used to illustrate the respective robustness of a given economic sphere, GDP is the ultimate indicator of national prosperity (Pilling, 2018). So much so that political capital, employment and whether the economy is experiencing a ‘boom’ or is about to ‘bust’ are tied to a single number (Lepenies, 2016). How economies account for this number, whether monthly, quarterly, or annually, therefore has the power to unseat political incumbents, alter the direction of economic policy and shape the material conditions of society (Jackson, 2019; Lepenies, 2016). What is being accounted for in GDP has incidentally also historically tended to be a disproportionate level of (fossil) capital flowing through the operational and functional apparatus of global capitalism (Dietz & O’Neill, 2013; Malm, 2016) otherwise referred to as the ‘capitalocene’ (Moore, 2015).

That this single number has been uncharacteristically low since the Financial Crisis of 2007–2008, the period known as ‘secular stagnation’, is subsequently instructive in helping to reveal the absence of trade-offs (Summers, 2016). During this time there has indeed been advancements made in the innovative technologies deployed for environmental ends, from electric vehicles (EVs), to wind and solar to name a few, but not only are they indicative of the green growth’s dependency upon technological fixes, but have also been undermined by wider shifts in economic policy. Therein the economic contractions over the last decade have seen environmental levies, demand-side stimulants and standards all being weakened as polities across the global economy have instead fetishized and performatively agonized over fiscal deficits rather than greening the economy (Bailey, 2018; Jackson, 2023; Paterson, 2020b). At moments of crisis, environmental objectives then become victims of the orthodox view of the relationship between fiscal policy and economic growth, insofar that it is assumed that economic growth precludes lower fiscal policy and vice versa.

The absence of a trade-off is only further evidenced in the loosening of monetary policy, as the decisions made by central banks and their supervisors since the Financial Crisis have only revealed the instincts of powerful economic institutions to trade-in ancillary objectives to restore growth (Bailey and Jackson, 2023). The asset purchases undertaken under the rounds of Quantitative Easing (QE) revealed an inherent carbon bias in which carbon-intensive organizations were inevitably prioritized because of their embeddedness within the political and economic status quo (Svartzman et al., 2021). Central banks’ reserves thus flowed indiscriminately to carbon-intensive assets, corporations, and sectors, compromising environmental and climate objectives, as the same facilities were not extended to low-carbon firms and sectors (Matikainein et al., 2017). The asset purchases following COVID were again disproportionately allocated to the oil, aviation, and automobile industries (Svartzman et al., 2021). However, unlike fiscal policy, the advent of QE showed that rather than countenance a trading-off of lower, but greener, economic growth, central banks and, by extension national governments, are willing to adopt unorthodox measures to achieve and then maintain elevated levels of growth, regardless of its climate consequences.

The tacit prioritization of economic objectives need not be considered an absence of environmental objectives. Indeed, environmental objectives have been brought to bear in the Paris Agreement and Net-Zero commitments since the Financial Crisis. However, as previously noted by Christophers (2021), achieving such objectives can only be justified under capitalism if it can make a profit and achieving those objectives does not threaten the basic structure of the economy. In the absence of such a reality, Christophers notes that capitalists will not invest in any such endeavour. Such decisions can, and indeed have, unfolded in opposition to the scientific evidence (Keen, 2021). Green growth is thus premised on the understanding that growth can be greened, but by no means can demand that it will or should be so. This paradigmatic view of trade-offs is aptly summarized by Nissen (2021) who states that with ‘market-based solutions, [the] environment can’t be saved at any cost, but [only] at the right price’ (p. 4; emphasis added). The trade-off framing has therefore presented this profoundly asymmetrical relationship in a normative or objective guise, serving as the epistemological extension of IPE’s anthropocentric ontology.

Contrary, then, to the inaccurate framing that social, environmental, and economic considerations form a triple pillar or bottom line, capitalism, to the contrary, has a single bottom line, that of GDP measured economic growth. Ultimately, the bottom line stops at the point at which the economy can be adjudged to have grown or otherwise. Fluctuations in the rate of growth are accordingly the appraisal framework by which political and economic actors rationalize, legitimize and ultimately narrate their decisions (Daw et al., 2015). This growth is the ‘currency’ of such political economic discourse, conversation, and negotiations. The triple pillar, and the trade-off attributed to it, are simply a constructed arrangement of policies all aligned towards the uninterrupted achievement of growth (Galafassi et al., 2017). Green growth has, therefore, ill-considered capitalism’s structural imperative and in doing so only tints the analytical lens through which to view environmental-economic relations, only slightly greener.

From trading-off to trading-in: adjusting the policy frame

To look more clearly into the future of IPE, an adjustment to the policy framing of trade-off is needed. To that end, I propose a trade-in policy framing to capture environmental-economic relations more accurately under capitalism. Unlike the trade-off noted above, a trade-in framing rejects the notion that social, environmental, and economic policies are equivalent considerations. Rather, it seeks to show that environmental ends are always the losers when they inhibit the growth imperative (Paterson, 2021). For clarity, the trade-in framing, like the trade-off framing, presupposes that there is a finite level of political, economic, industrial, or environmental output that can be achieved in any given policy dynamic. Similarly, it does not discount the notion that trade-offs take place under certain conditions, particularly during periods of relative economic equilibrium in which economic growth is maintained.

Where the trade-in policy framing, or analytical heuristic, departs from the trade-off framing is that it acknowledges the reality of green growth, that being that it is a political-economic project orientated, before all else, around GDP growth in the economy. The trade-in framing is an acknowledgement of the evidence that economic and environmental policies trade-off is increasingly problematic to maintain. Rather, then, that the nature-society holism purported by green growth scholars (Campbell, 1996), the trade-in recognizes that there is instead an acute nature-society dualism at play. Such is the primacy of growth as opposed to any per se ‘green’ objectives, that many of the green transformations to have emerged in recent years, from Green New Deals to Industrial Strategies, must be adorned in the discourse of growth, or fashioned from various political and economic tools towards this end. What is more, the need to grow, or demand that growth is not curtailed, is frequently used to occlude environmental commitments annually in the Conference of the Parties (COP) (Katz-Rosene et al., 2020). Rather than a compromise on the quantity or quality of any given element of the economic, social and environmental trilemma, as purported by the trade-off framing, the trade-in instead accentuates the deterministic reality of green growth, and indeed all economic policy within capitalism (Figure 2).

Figure 2. Trade-off vs Trade-in policy framing.

Fundamentally, then, to consider that economic, social, and environmental objectives can then trade-off is a misnomer. Indeed, the very prospect of not growing to reduce the impact on the environmental risks is the cessation of economic activity, reducing both aggregate supply and demands for goods as services. The financial contraction would, in turn, implicate the requirements for both labour and credit, drawing businesses and consumers alike to default on the debts upon which the global economy has come to rely. Such endemic illiquidity and insolvency would lead to systematic instability in the financial system, the inability to satisfy the terms on even the most innovative of financial instruments in the derivatives or repo (repurchase) markets, and thus the widening fiscal and sovereign indebtedness (and therefore stability) of economies. As a result, capitalism, then, by its very nature, cannot not prioritize growth.

By acknowledging that which is absent from the trade-off framing, the trade-in framing incorporates criticisms of its predecessor. Firstly, it follows Pralle and Boscarino’s (2011) critique of the trade-off framing insofar as that is generally a suboptimal framing with limited success, for it plays into the hands of opponents of a policy by revealing its problematic features. In the following section, how this critique could be better understood as a trade-in is shown by the instances in which opponents of environmental policies leverage the social dimension of sustainable development against them for economic gain. Similarly, it follows Dervisevic et al.’s (2021) contention that this ‘framing’ is problematic because it tends to emphasize the risks rather than the benefits of the policy. In building upon prior critique, the inevitable question that follows this adjustment of the policy framing is: how does the trade-in unfold?

Using political-industrial narratives to trade-in environmental policy

By proposing an alternative policy framing residing at the heart of green growth, I turn here to how and in what ways, and with what effects? The trading-in of environmental policies is narrated in ways that imbue the process with legitimacy and the guise of rationality. As noted, so foundational is the continuous increase of GDP to the stable functioning (and ideological legitimation) of capitalism that it operates as a form of ‘common sense’ akin to the long-held idea of neoliberal common sense found in the critical political economy literature (Harvey, 2007). So ‘centred’ has it become that it appears a value free objective, unencumbered by normative (or scientific) assumptions but existing as permanent and transcendent truth (Berglund & Bailey, 2023). Viewing the state of capitalism in this way is embedded in the socio-cultural realities of governments, businesses, financial markets, and voters alike (Hall & O’Shea, 2013). Just as the tacit prioritization appears then as common sense and logical, the opposite, which is to not grow, vis-a-vis appears illogical or delegitimate. As summarized by Jackson (2009) ‘questioning growth is deemed to be the act of lunatics, idealists and revolutionaries’ (p. 14).

As such, environmental policies are undermined in a number of ways, from a deprioritzation of greener technologies given their historically uncompetitive prices (Newell & Simms, 2020), their peripheralization on the political agenda for more immediate impacts of inequality, (un)employment or security (Barry, 2020), or dismantling to assuage the lobbying and donations from fossil fuel organizations (Paterson, 2020a) to name but a few. Yet, so ontologically embedded is the structural imperative, that it conditions the decisions of political actors before policies are conceived. That is, policy decisions are ‘framed’ by growth. It therefore manifests in the discursive ways that they narrate the purpose, objectives and fundamental design of policies. Scholars have previously noted how discourse has been used as a form of ‘message frames’ (Tomaselli et al., 2021) that overlay economic imperatives orientated around ‘discourses of climate delay’ (Lamb et al., 2020), now that climate denial is not as feasible as it once was.

What these perspectives share is the view that where environmental policies are thought to impinge capital accumulation, and by extension contribute to GDP, the trading-in of these policies can be rationalized by employing political-industrial narratives that frame them as antithetical to the structural imperative (Nissen, 2021). Attempts to delegitimize environmental policies can take three such forms, namely the (i) consequential, (ii) allay and (iii) finance narratives. This list is not exhaustive, and may likely be a site of contestation, but it nonetheless serves as the basis for an analytical framework for future IPE scholarship.

The Consequential narrative has been a prominent feature of IPE scholarship for decades, having taken root in the idea of market discipline of states, employment, and ‘costly’ environmental protections as reasons to move production elsewhere among many others (Cohen, 2019; Gilpin, 1987). It centres around the consequences of imposing environmental policies by highlighting the incurred economic cost, which is a threat to commercial viability, (un)competitiveness, financial instability/uncertainty, or the precipitation of stranded assets (Paterson, 2020b). Reflective of Dervisevic et al.’s critique of the trade-off framing, by highlighting the risk, or economic cost, of environmental policies, a consequential narrative pits environmental objectives against the social dimension of sustainable development, such as job creation or the increase in taxes from greater growth for the state to pay for public services. That is to say that rather than trade-off long-term environmental objectives with short-term economic gains, fears of the consequences of such policies for employment, borrowing costs or competitiveness are leveraged to ensure the stringency, immediacy or the objective entirely is traded-in.

Unlike the consequential narrative, the Allay narrative rejects the notion that any tension between environmental and economic objectives exists. This narrative is thus central to green growth as it came to reject the critical assumption of the ‘Limits to Growth’ (Meadows et al., 1972). Instead, it presupposes that the problematic features of capitalism do not require structural adjustment but could be addressed through the deployment of innovative technology and modest regulation and reform. Overt examples of the allaying narrative are tied into the prospects of ‘green hydrogen’, ‘light oil’ and ‘clean gas’, technological alternatives that are lent legitimacy by political actors (Dunlap, 2023; Arbatli, 2018). As I have already shown here, this framing, echoing Pralle and Boscarino’s criticism of trade-offs, is suboptimal and bears little resemblance with what can be empirically observed.

Finally, the Finance narrative is a compromise between the preceding two narratives, wherein organizations highlight the need to maintain carbon-intensive path dependencies to finance low carbon future alternatives. Newell and Simms (2020) have previously examined this issue by examining the speed at which transitions have unfolded. This narrative extends the time horizons of transitions as it places greater emphasis on the need to incrementally overhaul asset portfolios so as not to lead to stranded assets or sudden losses in value. In essentially operating halfway between the consequential and allay narrative, the finance simultaneously emphasizes the consequences of overly stringent environmental policies whilst also positing that such tension can be allayed through an incremental financial model that can be adjusted over time. The narrative acts to reduce the scale and urgency of climate change by presenting a ‘business case’ for climate, contingent upon financing a low-carbon future through the proliferation of the carbon-intensive present (Figure 3).

Figure 3. Political-industrial narratives of the trade-in policy framing.

Three adjoining text boxes that detail the process by which the consequential, allay, and finance political-industrial narrative legitimize the trading-in of environmental policies.

Rather than isolated political constructs, there are clear overlaps between these narratives, with elements of one prevalent in all. Nor are the narratives static rhetorical or political instruments, but can be deployed interchangeably, as well as change over time to negotiate and appropriately frame the trading-in of capitalist restrictions. For example, a consequential narrative may precede the deployment of a finance narrative, pushing back against policy constraints before bridging the divide on the terms consummate to fossil capital. A finance narrative may itself precede an allay narrative by diffusing any perceived tension before establishing the time horizons in the minds of policymakers. To move beyond the realms of abstraction, I turn here to two of the manifold examples presently unfolding in the global economy, the EV transition, and taxonomic frameworks. These examples are specifically pertinent to the analysis in that they not only demonstrate how political-industrial narratives have been deployed to delegitimize environmental policies, but also the iterative process by which such narratives proceed.

The stalling EV transition

Of the assorted ‘green’ transitions unfolding across the global political economy, EVs have become a prominent site of contention between traditional car producing countries, namely Germany and the USA, and countries looking to capitalize on the transition, particularly China. Automobile companies have typically employed the consequential narrative that accentuated the costs of EVs in terms of aggregate output, labour, and profit (Haas, 2021). Such a narrative has long placed concerns over the commercial viability, price competitiveness and profitability models above the technology’s capacity to reduce emissions and improve air quality (Berglund & Bailey, 2023). As detailed in Jackson’s (2023) focus on the differences between BMW, Daimler, and Volkswagen in Germany, such a narrative is still commonplace amongst certain manufacturers, even as others within the same polity undergo the process in earnest. Therefore, despite the growing attention paid to EVs, their progress continues to be impeded by narratives that place the consequences of their diffusion at the forefront of the debate.

Aside from the consequential narratives, automobile manufacturers have, at other times, employed allaying narratives to undermine EVs by arguing that advances made in the efficiency of carbon vehicles fuel economy constitute ‘clean vehicles’ when compared with prior output (Jackson, 2024; Haas, 2021). This narrative to a lesser extent remains present in the automobile sector’s persistent reiteration of the utility of hybrid (petrol/diesel + electric) or hydrogen vehicles as a precursor, or indeed alternative, to EVs despite growing concerns over their environmental benefits (IPCC, 2022). Attempts to obfuscate the EV process are not only the work of the automobile industry, but the broader allies amongst fossil capital, from oil suppliers to the financial markets.

A series of recent events have shifted the balance of state-business relations in favour of EVs. Not least China’s pursuit of EVs as a means to augment domestic production as part of a broader strategic objective to reposition itself in the global economy (Keil & Steinberger, 2024). Elsewhere, the diesel scandal (Diesel gate) preceded the EU’s adoption of a more punitive approach to associated automobile emissions in the form of new Emissions Standards (Jackson, 2023). COVID-19 and the supply-side shocks caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have likewise seen EVs become a central feature of the USA’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). Such events have further accentuated the prominence EVs enjoyed in the aftermath of the Paris Agreement. Latterly, the manufacturers have, in some instances, departed from consequential narratives of the impact of EVs towards more finance narratives. Indeed, manufacturers such as BMW, Daimler, Fiat, Ford, and Mercedes-Benz, amongst others, now employ a finance narrative arguing that the capital required for EV investment is contingent upon the continued sale of petrol and diesel vehicles.

These shifts have, however, not reversed the trading-in of environmental policies, but made EV investment contingent upon finance from carbon-intensive vehicles, as short to medium-term climate objectives remain secondary to the growth imperative. Again, this subjects climate ambitions to the logic of the structural imperative, for the EV market can only grow as long as it allows for the greater accumulation of capital (Keil & Steinberger, 2024). That is to say that no sooner are EVs, like any other transition, the subject of environmental policies that they too are the subjects of growth. For all the focus afforded to EVs in the last decade, it remains the case that they still account for, on average, 10–15% of the domestic automobile market in any given polity. Contrary to the perceived linear growth in the EV market, it has been curtailed by the entire array of trade-in narratives to ensure that the transition is, first and foremost, a means for growth.

Taxonomic frameworks for (non)green finance

The second instance pertains to the adverse climate and ecological implications of finance vis-a-vis the natural world. Although finance had, for a considerable time, been largely elided in the literature from the 1980s, it has moved incrementally beneath the critical lens of scholars from a variety of disciplines (Langley & Morris, 2020; Murau et al., 2023; Svartzman et al., 2021). Growing focus on the unsustainable practises of finance, and its associated organizations, is emblematic of the acknowledgement that whilst carbon-intensive processes are the material manifestation of capitalism, it is contingent upon financial activities occurring in altogether different spatial and geographic contexts (Burns & Tobin, 2019; Langley & Morris, 2020).

As this line of inquiry has intensified since the Financial Crisis, environmentally orientated typologies have pluralized, with green and sustainable finance, following notions of climate finance (Langley & Morris, 2020) and the frameworks within which they operate. None more so than taxonomic frameworks, methods of determining the credentials, sustainable or otherwise, of finance. Deploying a taxonomic framework as a means to channel finances into environmental policies has, however, proved problematic insofar as they are seemingly incorporated into the financial system at large. Whilst there has been some embrace amongst the corners of capital, particularly under the rubric of Environmental, Social Governance (ESG), they have equally received pushback from others who perceive such considerations to be beyond the purpose of finance, rending a significant gap between the rate of investment and that which is required (Murau et al., 2023).

One might assume that given the nature of the financial system, the constituent organizations would be well-versed in the financial narrative. On the contrary, various institutions which inhabit the system are far more fluent in consequential and allaying narratives. That is to say that, as demonstrated by Dusík and Bond (2022) financial institutions have tended to employ the consequential narrative when presented with taxonomies, for they fundamentally challenge the decision-making processes of organizations and the efficacy of their services. In other words, whereas pension funds, hedge funds and international investors are orientated around ensuring returns on investment, environmental expectations come as epistemological barriers to business-as-usual (Svartzman et al., 2022). This is apparent in the UK government’s ongoing delay of its green taxonomy, which soon came into conflict with carbon intensive financial assets that the City of London has long since honed its expertise (author).

Elsewhere, institutions tasked with designing the taxonomies have employed allaying narratives to provide a seemingly irreconcilable framework with a veneer of legitimacy. Symbolic of this process is the EU’s taxonomy for sustainable activities, serving as a classification system for investments aligned with the wider European Green Deal, allowing inherently contestable asset classes, namely gas, nuclear, biomass and bioplastics (Dusík and Bond, 2022). By implementing a framework, the very presence of that which had not yet existed serves to provide a boundary within which environmental and economic factors trade-off in the minds of investors. However, so broadly defined are the taxonomic parameters, that only slightly re-channel certain financial flows whilst reproducing the system that preceded them, they continue to trade-in notions of climate, sustainable or green finance for finance to continue unchanged (Figure 4).

Figure 4. Political industrial narratives in action.

Trading-in the growth imperative: towards a ‘green’ political economy beyond growth

Alternative political economy epistemologies

Remedying this epistemological affliction requires moving away from the traditional constructivist or rationale IPE paradigm that has been orientated around the growth (Koch & Buch-Hansen, 2021). Agnostic growth paradigms are not new phenomena but have been present since Limits to Growth some decades ago (Meadows et al., 1972). Indeed, alternative paradigms have been proposed as an ‘environmental’ political economy (Dryzek, 1996; Meadowcroft, 2005), an ‘ecological’ political economy (Craig, 2016) and a ‘green’ political economy (Barry, 2012). Any such paradigm for IPE will require a significant degree of epistemological reorientation as scholars rethink how they account for all-encompassing ecological, energy and natural resource and pollution underpinnings of trade, finance, production, consumption and all other facets of the discipline to which they have been blind (Fearon & Barry, 2022; Koch & Buch-Hansen, 2021), the macroeconomic models that quantify the impact (Tomaselli et al., 2021) and what purpose environmental policies serve in the typical accounts of sustainable development.

Abandoning the orthodox growth paradigm will appear provocative to scholars and policymakers (Hickel, 2021). Not least given that many of these approaches are born from critical, specifically Marxist, intellectual tradition (Buch-Hansen and Carstensen, 2021). But, as noted, these alternative paradigms are not abstract scholarly endeavours but an increasingly inescapable future for the discipline. The reality is that there are simply functional, scientifically determined reasons why the capitalist growth oriented economic order is unsustainable. It is the biophysical laws of nature, not simple anti-capitalist ideological views that IPE needs to integrate into its analyzes. At present, the most prominent such approach is degrowth or a circular economy. Degrowing the economy is not, as associated scholars assert, the aggregate reduction of all activity, but of certain sectors of the economy, namely fossil fuel extraction, chemical production, and consumption of single use plastics (Fearon & Barry, 2022). Degrowth scholars call for the growth of other industries, particularly renewable energy, public transport provision, meat alternative food production amongst many more. Circular economy scholars propose a model designed around core principles, normally of reuse, recycle, remake, return, and reuse (Remme & Jackson, 2023).

Before degrowth’s recent rise to prominence, the steady state economy was typically associated with Daly (2007; 1996) which argues for the economy to operate in a stationary state that does not grow. This itself followed Raworth’s (2017) ‘doughnut model’ that provided a framework to rationalize how the economy stays within planetary boundaries. Other frameworks have received less analytical development to now, from Jackson’s (2021) postgrowth to a-growth (Raworth, 2017; van den Bergh, 2011) which look to deviate from the critical positions advanced here. All such positions remained niche positions within and opposite to the capitalist-growth regime (Vandeventer et al., 2019). Degrowth, encompassing an array of political issues, incidentally, presents perhaps the most vivid example of trading-in, or at the very least de-prioritizing, the growth imperative (Barlow et al., 2022). The policy prescriptions that follow, and to what end they are designed, nonetheless remain an ongoing question in the degrowth literature, as indeed they do for other heterodox approaches.

Scholars from a variety of disciplines in and beyond IPE are increasingly coming to consider these questions and refining their policy proposals in turn. Building upon the history of critical scholarship, alternative growth paradigms need not necessarily be antithetical to one another but allow a broader non-growth paradigm to gain purchase in the literature (Hickel, 2021) and take shape in the political sphere. Such alternatives can take different forms, advance different definitions and be derived from diverse theoretical backgrounds. Returning to the case of degrowth, Schmelzer et al. (2022) have previously noted that as many as seven understanding can exist simultaneously and, to some degree, independently of one another. From a planned degrowth a certain sectors of the economy, to how it might be understood separately to a recession or a blueprint to a post-capitalist future, applications of this approach and understanding as to how it might work in practice inevitably vary. Where degrowth, like other alternative approaches, then bleeds into issues common in IPE, such as class, gender, race, development, finance, and trade to name only a few, their application will be reinterpreted, revised, and ultimately reimagined.

The process of paradigm shifts

What precise forms this takes is inevitably a subject of political and economic contestation, but as alighted upon by Overbeek’s (1990), and later by Buch-Hansen (2018), paradigm shifts unfold in three phases: deconstructive, constructive and consolidation. This process, as noted by Hasselbalch et al. (2023) may take a number of pathways, though still broadly confined to the phases detailed here. To this framework, the political-industrial narratives outlined above serve as useful adjuncts to further refine this framework with greater analytical precision. Taking the phases in turn, the first ‘deconstructive’ stage has already begun, as the growth paradigm, as detailed here, has come to be questioned and its constituent parts deconstructed to reveal the pursuit of the structural imperative to be ill-suited to achieving an ‘optimum output’, at least for nature or society. Deconstruction of the growth paradigm has taken root in institutions, including the Autonomous University of Barcelona, Doughnut Economics Actions Labs, and the Post Growth Institute. Critical perspectives, however, are too deconstructed, tied up in consequential political-industrial narratives, with reductions in economic activity portrayed as an induced recession (Hickel & Kallis, 2019) or unaffordable luxuries amidst broader economic concerns (Bailey, 2018) that open them up to contestation. No sooner are the internal logic of paradigms deconstructed than they are reinforced by the political and economic structure designed in their image.

To varying degrees, shifts in the paradigm have entered the second ‘constructive’ stage, at which point proponents make alternatives appear politically credible and normatively attractive. Taking root most notably in the recent wave of varying climate movements, including Extinction Rebellion and Fridays for Future, which themselves follow a longer tradition of climate movements. Perhaps more importantly, alternative paradigmatic views have been expressed by the IPCC who too now assert that the ceaseless augmentation of economic activity must be curtailed (IPCC, 2022), with explicit consideration given to degrowth and post-growth policy proposals (Barlow et al., 2022; IPCC, 2023). At present, these constituent features of the constructive stage have not attached themselves to an array of social forces that would be required to radically transform existing institutional arrangements (Buch-Hansen, 2018). Instead, reductions in aggregate economic activity broadly remain entangled within the technological capacities of alternative energy, transport, and food systems to reduce the material flow in certain sectors as opposed to halting the expansion of the economy at large. The constructive phase, therefore, appears to chime with the financial political-industrial narrative, insofar that critical perspectives are acknowledged as credible, but remain contingent upon economic as opposed to ecological time horizons. Furthermore, contrary to the analogous shifts in paradigms previously, such is the antithetic nature of this shift that whether social forces can enter into a truly constructive phase with the growth paradigm appears contestable.

The third and final ‘consolidation’ stage, in which the shift has taken place and paradigms have been supplemented by a new hegemonic regime, remains uncertain. Not least due to the absence of path dependencies from the non-growth paradigms of old (Vandeventer et al., 2019). What precise shape an alternative political economy takes and what constitution the ‘tripartite’ forces of the states, the market and society (Kish & Quilley, 2017) is an ongoing subject within the respective schools of thought themselves, notwithstanding the design and implementation of policies. Before any such event can occur the alternative paradigm, whether it be one identified here or otherwise, will need to manifest in and across variegated political spheres that percolate across social structures (Koch & Buch-Hansen, 2021; Paterson, 2020a). As the paradigm shifts the allaying narrative breaks down, but the consequential narrative continues to present alternatives fundamentally antagonistic to the dominant and suboptimal anthropocentric ‘commonsense’ paradigm of the present.

Whether a paradigm shift occurs, or these debates occur only at the periphery of IPE scholarship, remains to be seen. What ultimately comes to pass will not be independent of one another, but intimately entwined. That is to say that failure for degrowth, postgrowth or another approach to gain significant purchase in IPE will, in no small part, be due to the deeply entrenched ontological orthodoxy that has been of focus here.

Conclusion

Looking back at IPE’s intellectual engagement with growth, scholars have been primarily occupied by the types of growth, or indeed capitalism(s), as an object of analysis, whilst focusing little on the objective of growth itself. Looking forward, IPE would benefit from greater engagement with critiques of growth itself. The analytical focus on the types of growth has provided much analytical utility for IPE scholars, helping to develop the discipline far beyond simple issues of abstraction. IPE could now offer much to future examinations of the robustness of green growth, not least the conceptual and empirical consequences of an economy not growing. This intervention should contribute to the alternative critical growth approaches, such as degrowth post-growth or a model designed around circular and steady principles.

IPE cannot, however, remain blind to the empirical and scientifically verified reality of climate change and ecological collapse and, by extension, the fundamental faults of green growth. In this article, I have shown that an important aspect historically overlooked is the trade-in policy framing, institutionalized since the 1980s under the auspices of sustainable development, and the inaccurate portrayal of environmental-economic relations this has produced (Barry, 2020; Buch-Hansen, 2018). Instead, the evidence indicates that the extent to which environmental and social policies can trade-off with the structural imperative is overstated. The idea that green growth is predicated upon a triple bottom is fallacious, for capitalism, as shown here, has a single bottom line, simply that of growth and the consolidation of the economic status quo (Hasselbalch et al., 2023). That is not to say that trade-offs do not take place, to some degree, but that to present the environmental, social, and economic elements of sustainable development as equivalent does little to deepen our understanding of future environmental-economic relations. As capitalism continues to transgress environmental limitations in the pursuit of growth, it becomes ever clearer that too much will never be enough.

To reconcile this deeply problematic, yet persistent, framing of capitalism’s relationship with the environment, I have proposed the trade-in heuristic as an alternative policy framing. The trade-in policy framing has its roots in the critical strands of scholarship that are sceptical of the promises of green growth and sustainable development. This alternative framing is proposed to better capture the process that takes place once environmental and economic considerations are brought into opposition, as the notion of trading-off becomes difficult to maintain, and the economic imperatives always take priority over its environmental equivalents. Yet, as environmental policies are traded-in by those who seek to maintain growth by undermining environmental policies, the same actors simultaneously trade-in any possibility of green growth, no matter the political-industrial narrative to the contrary.

Acknowledgment

I would like to extend his thanks to Oscar Berglund, John Barry, Mat Paterson and Charlotte Burns and the wider Critical Political Economy Research Network (SPERN) team who provided important comments on drafts of this paper. Any mistakes are of course my own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

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Notes on contributors

James Jackson

James Jackson is a postdoctoral research associate at the Sustainable Consumption Institute, University of Manchester. His research explores the political economy of climate change from a variety of angles, from low carbon transitions, the role of central banks and post growth alternatives.

Notes

1 It must also be noted that growth is not only considered imperative to capitalism, but was an objective shared by countries adhering to communism during the twentieth century.

2 Despite the explanatory function of GDP, the creator of its preceding metric GNP, Simon Kuznets, warned against its utility as used in contemporary social science and policymaking. The intellectual development of GDP as a metric has indeed become a contested subject. For an overview of the debate see Pilling (2018) and Dietz and O’Neill (2013).