‘green business’ and trade unions (Newell and Mulvaney, 2013). For instance, the
Just Transition Alliance (JTA) is a coalition of environmental justice and labour
organizations based in California, in the US. Together with frontline workers, and
community members who live alongside polluting industries, it seeks to create
healthy workplaces and communities. It focuses on contaminated sites that should
be cleaned up, and on the transition to clean production and sustainable economies
(JTA, 2011).
Third, the example of ‘auto-mobility’ above shows how powerful actors sought
to destroy one set of infrastructures and build another which ‘locked in’ use of
their preferred technology. In the current context we can see both how incumbent
regimes work hard to discredit support to niches around claims of their incom -
patibility with existing infrastructures, as the gas and nuclear industry is doing at
the moment with regard to wind and solar energy around claims of problems with
intermittency and transmission (Leggett, 2014), but also how an overriding com -
mitment to preserving a particular infrastructure of grid-based energy privileges
some energy providers over others, particularly the fossil fuel and nuclear industries.
Globalization
What is the significance of the fact that green transformations, if they are to take
place, will have to unfold in an increasingly globalized and integrated global political economy? By the mid to late 1960s pressure was mounting to reconfigure
the landscape of power between states and capital, and to renegotiate the Fordist
compromises between capital and labour around full employment and union
rights. The push was towards more flexible forms of accumulation in which the
social forces of production would be recast once again, this time along more
transnational lines aimed both at disciplining labour and accessing new sites of
accumulation (Robinson, 2004). The current neoliberal order subsequently
emerged from the late 1970s onwards, but whose project of monetary discipline
and global integration has deepened and intensified during the 1980s and 1990s
(Cox, 1994; Harvey, 2005). In terms of green transformations, what is significant
is the intensification of resource exploitation associated with the spatial and tem -
poral reorganization of capitalism, alongside which a disciplining of state autonomy
was required to lock in states to an integrated neoliberal world order, overseen in
particular by the hegemonic power of the US (Panitch and Gindin, 2012). As with
the Industrial Revolution before it, this required increasingly expansive and
efficient networks of commodity circulation, especially revolutions in the means
of transport and the competitive struggle to reduce the costs of circulation to an
absolute minimum.
The contemporary neoliberal context in which transformations have to occur
is significant, among other things, for its potential impact on the autonomy of states
to pursue green transformations. In particular, there is the obvious need for
regulation and steering at a time when many states have relinquished, or been forced
to relinquish, control over the key parts of their energy sectors (such as generation,
76 Peter Newell
Just Transition Alliance (JTA) is a coalition of environmental justice and labour
organizations based in California, in the US. Together with frontline workers, and
community members who live alongside polluting industries, it seeks to create
healthy workplaces and communities. It focuses on contaminated sites that should
be cleaned up, and on the transition to clean production and sustainable economies
(JTA, 2011).
Third, the example of ‘auto-mobility’ above shows how powerful actors sought
to destroy one set of infrastructures and build another which ‘locked in’ use of
their preferred technology. In the current context we can see both how incumbent
regimes work hard to discredit support to niches around claims of their incom -
patibility with existing infrastructures, as the gas and nuclear industry is doing at
the moment with regard to wind and solar energy around claims of problems with
intermittency and transmission (Leggett, 2014), but also how an overriding com -
mitment to preserving a particular infrastructure of grid-based energy privileges
some energy providers over others, particularly the fossil fuel and nuclear industries.
Globalization
What is the significance of the fact that green transformations, if they are to take
place, will have to unfold in an increasingly globalized and integrated global political economy? By the mid to late 1960s pressure was mounting to reconfigure
the landscape of power between states and capital, and to renegotiate the Fordist
compromises between capital and labour around full employment and union
rights. The push was towards more flexible forms of accumulation in which the
social forces of production would be recast once again, this time along more
transnational lines aimed both at disciplining labour and accessing new sites of
accumulation (Robinson, 2004). The current neoliberal order subsequently
emerged from the late 1970s onwards, but whose project of monetary discipline
and global integration has deepened and intensified during the 1980s and 1990s
(Cox, 1994; Harvey, 2005). In terms of green transformations, what is significant
is the intensification of resource exploitation associated with the spatial and tem -
poral reorganization of capitalism, alongside which a disciplining of state autonomy
was required to lock in states to an integrated neoliberal world order, overseen in
particular by the hegemonic power of the US (Panitch and Gindin, 2012). As with
the Industrial Revolution before it, this required increasingly expansive and
efficient networks of commodity circulation, especially revolutions in the means
of transport and the competitive struggle to reduce the costs of circulation to an
absolute minimum.
The contemporary neoliberal context in which transformations have to occur
is significant, among other things, for its potential impact on the autonomy of states
to pursue green transformations. In particular, there is the obvious need for
regulation and steering at a time when many states have relinquished, or been forced
to relinquish, control over the key parts of their energy sectors (such as generation,
76 Peter Newell