Making and unmaking the actually existing hegemonic green transition

Abstract

• Mainstream anglophone debates focus on sociotechnical transitions. • The actually existing hegemonic transition globally is shaped by political economy. • Thus mainstream anglophone debates tell us little about the ongoing hegemonic transition. • Latin American debates juxtapose corporate and popular energy transitions. • They provide provocative entry point into critical and mainstream anglophone debates. Despite the applaudable reflexivity of transition scholars to include considerations of politics (among other things) in their frameworks, we argue that this is not enough, as the mainstream anglophone debates still suffer a fatal flaw: an inability to grasp the form taken by the actually existing hegemonic transition globally. This we contend, is shaped by two recent political economic developments: the concentration on capital in large pools (either under asset management or in Sovereign Wealth Funds) invested on financial markets on the one hand; and the “de-risking” Wall Street Consensus on the other. Because the mainstream anglophone transition debates still shy away from discussing the two (dialectically interwoven) main drivers of anthropogenic climate change – colonialism and capitalism – they remain unable to explain form assumed by the hegemonic green transition and what this means going forward. Scholars from the Latin America, particularly Argentina, in contrast, are confronted by the sharp end of financial markets and green extractivism. Their lived experience of the dark underpinnings of the green transition shaped by finance and extraction has sparked vibrant critical debates over alternatives to the dominant transition narratives that both act as a tonic to the de-politicised mainstream anglophone debates and offer provocations to more critical anglophone scholars.

Topics & Concepts