Green Keynesianism: Bringing the entrepreneurial state back in?
Jesse Goldstein and David Tyfield*
Jesse Goldstein, Department of Sociology, Virginia Commonwealth University, Founders
Hall, 827 West Franklin St. Richmond, Virginia, 23284, United States.
Email: jgoldstein2@vcu.edu
David Tyfield, Lancaster Environment Centre, Lancaster University, Lancaster, LA1
4YQ, United Kingdom. (*Corresponding author)
Email: d.tyfield@lancaster.ac.uk
Jesse Goldstein is an assistant professor of sociology at Virginia Commonwealth
University. His current research focuses on technology, innovation and entrepreneurship
in the green economy. He has most recently been published in the journals Antipode,
Theory Culture and Society, and the Annals of the Association of American Geographers.
David Tyfield is Reader in environmental innovation and sociology at Lancaster
University. He is Director of the International Research and Innovation Centre for the
Environment (I-RICE), Guangzhou and Co-Director of the Lancaster’s Centre for
1
Mobilities Research (CeMoRe). His research focuses on the interaction of political
economy, social change and developments in science, technology and innovation, with a
particular focus on issues of low-carbon transition in China, especially urban e-mobility.
Recent publications include articles in Theory, Culture & Society, Mobilities,
International Critical Thought and Journal of Responsible Innovation.
Abstract (117 words)
This paper critically investigates Green Keynesian calls for an ‘entrepreneurial state’ to
drive the fundamental economic transformations required to meet the challenges of
global climate change amidst secular stagnation. While not denying the need for largescale, coordinated efforts, we caution against looking to the entrepreneurial potential of
actually-existing states promoting currently-dominant models of innovation. Exploring
the co-production of innovation trajectories and states as dynamic systems of powerknowledge illuminates the problematic and strategically self-defeating nature of Green
Keynesianism. The key question regarding ‘green’ innovation is not simply one of
maximizing ‘innovation’ while taking the ‘state’ for granted, but one of carefully
assessing which specific trajectories of innovation are being enabled and to what effect
regarding forms of state.
Keywords: Keynesianism, Neoliberalism, Green New Deal, state, innovation, disruptive
technology.
Word count: 9,684 (excluding table); 10,003 (including table)
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Green Keynesianism: Bringing the entrepreneurial state back in?
Arguments about ‘avoiding’ climate change no longer seem to hold much
currency. Indeed, rising interest in naming this new climatological reality ‘the
Anthropocene’ (Steffen et al., 2011), a distinct geological period marking the end of the
Holocene and with it nature-as-we’ve-known-it, signals an indefinite future of continued
anthropogenic climate disruption. Growing recognition of environmental destabilization
and its threats has led to calls to adapt economically, socially and politically to this
strange, increasingly unpredictable and alarmingly unstable nature that modern
civilization has produced.
Alongside contemporaneous fears of secular stagnation (Teulings & Baldwin,
2014), many have interpreted this ongoing environmental crisis as an opportunity to
promote innovation of green technologies. A wide range of proposals have called for
massive programs of state-supported green innovation, meant to revive economic growth
while resolving the problems of environmental decline, and social inequity bequeathed by
a generation of neoliberal dominance. This position, referred to herein as ‘Green
Keynesianism’, interprets the crises of neoliberalism, including economic malaise and
financial crisis, as an opening for a more economically-active state to re-assert itself in
industrial, social and technological advance for the public good.
Green Keynesianism became popular in the wake of the financial crisis of 2007/8,
often promoted as a Green New Deal. Yet in 2015 it is clear that this path has not
substantively materialized. Rather than dismiss this missed opportunity as collective
idiocy or neoliberal conspiracy, we want to understand how Green Keynesianism has
been and continues to be articulated within a still-neoliberal context. If Green Keynesians
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implore us to “bring the state back in” we pause to consider what states are being hailed,
what exactly these states are capable (or not) of doing, and what futures these states could
be, and perhaps already are, incubating.
Though many of the proposals falling under Green New Deal (GND) banner have
explicitly social democratic intentions, we argue that Green Keynesian proposals
inadvertently provide a new means of legitimizing a strategic renewal of the neoliberal
project. This is accomplished through a shared focus on innovation, competition and
entrepreneurial dynamism led by the private sector, which is in turn coproduced with a
reshaping of the state itself. As a result, that pre-eminent locus of political power is being
reformed around the systematic advantage of specific, already-empowered social forces
(e.g. Micklethwait & Wooldridge 2014). Meanwhile, the likely long-term impacts of that
process on projects of equity and equality are simply not being acknowledged by these
Green Keynesians, much less challenged.
Instead, there is a seeming refusal to interrogate both the ecologically devastating
effects of actual-historical Keynesian developmentalism as well as the many ways that
the past half-century of neoliberalism has transformed this thing – the state – being
embraced as a potential ecological savior. This occurs, we argue, through a limited
understanding of Keynesianism, presented in binary opposition to an equally simplified
conception of neoliberalism, along with an uncritical endorsement of the ‘green’ or
‘clean’ technological innovations coming out of privately funded entrepreneurialism,
without ever pausing to consider the networks of power/knowledge relations that both
these states and technologies respectively are enmeshed within. As we will argue,
questions of socio-technological innovation and their constitutive power relations are
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crucially interrelated, making the reshaping of the state – still the primary institution and
system of social relations of collective government (Jessop, 2007) – a core but neglected
political, technological and ecological project of our time.
The paper, divided into three sections, proceeds as follows. First, we introduce
key examples of Green Keynesianism and overview the history and genesis of these ideas
to show how they selectively and problematically relate to their historical referent of 20th
century Keynesianism. We show how Green Keynesianism is inadequate descriptively
and theoretically, especially regarding the key concept of the ‘public good’. We then turn
to explore one strategic project that Green Keynesianism is actually enabling. Focusing
on the ‘entrepreneurial state’ we show how incumbent (but entirely neglected) power
relations are actually exploiting Green Keynesian discourses to push an agenda for
continued and accelerated development of commercially-focused, privately-developed
green technologies. In this variant of Green Keynesianism, there is a shift in legitimizing
discourses, away from a neoliberal frame that idealizes markets and demonizes states,
towards a new frame that idealizes innovation and demonizes wasteful (dirty and
speculative) capital, while still remaining faithful to the pre-eminence of markets. This
leads to a closing discussion on the profound political and epistemological challenges
facing not only Green Keynesianism, but more broadly all those concerned to develop an
equity-concerned politics of innovation suitable for the Anthropocene. At the crux of
these discussions are questions regarding society’s innovation agenda: who will create
our new technologies and social logics? Towards what aims? On who’s behest?
Green Keynesianism after the Financial Crisis
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It is not too difficult to understand what it is about Keynesian state-led
development that serves as such a potent historical referent. In this era of neoliberal
revanchism states have become profoundly beholden to (financialized) capital and a faith
in free markets. Within this context, a turn towards Keynesianism represents a safe,
‘realistic’ reprieve; the prospect of challenging the dominant neoliberal paradigm without
denouncing capitalism itself. If unencumbered free markets and the financial flows that
they support (a.k.a. “Wall Street”) are identified as the problem, then perhaps reining in
these flows and embedding them within a strong, state-supported regime of accumulation
is the solution (Cf Barnes, 2006; Brown, 2011).
Green Keynesianism is not just about ‘regulating’ financial flows, but also
centrally implies the ability of the state to provide direct infrastructural and material
support to the economy, to ‘prime the pump’ with initiatives meant to support the public
good. Historically, for Keynesian policies, this has meant job creation, public
infrastructure development, and regulations intended (supposedly) to empower labor and
to restrain employers. So why not extend these ideas into the present: green jobs, green
infrastructure, tougher environmental regulations and stronger pollution controls?
Green New Deal discourses gained steam in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.
With massive state bailouts required to save a financial sector that was ‘too big to fail’
the stage was set to explore the different types of active roles that states could and should
play in global economy. In 2008 the New Economics Foundation (2008) convened the
Green New Deal Group (comprised of economists, journalists and environmentalists) and
produced a comprehensive report outlining their proposed response to the dual financial
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and ecological crises. Central to their proposal, and to most subsequent proposals for a
green new deal, was an ambitious plan of state-led investment into renewable energy and
conservation technologies; including development of new technologies and
implementation of those already available.
Here, then, restraining and disciplining speculative finance capital is married to
support for infrastructural development (project financing) and new technology
development (venture capital); shifting investment back towards the productive economy
and in decidedly green ways. At their most radical, GND proposals reveal traces of 19th
century thinkers such as Proudhon and Saint Simon, advocating for a Credit Mobilier that
could provide low interest credit to entities acting in the public good (McNally, 1993).
But what would such an entity look like today? Who, where and what exactly
might constitute this alternative investment paradigm becomes a matter open for
interpretation. For instance, UNEP’s Global Green New Deal (2009) is fully committed
to a model of green growth, driven by “accelerated investment in a renewable energy
future.” The key to a low-energy future lies in creating the conditions whereby renewable
energy is cost-competitive with fossil fuels. This requires supporting ongoing
technological innovation directly, and through market supports. “The price of renewable
energy has not fallen fast enough to save the world from experiencing dangerous climate
change. Nor will it fall rapidly enough, on its own, to do so.” UNEP estimates that
US$100 Billion per year over 15 years of additional investment in renewable energy
technologies should be sufficient to scale up the industry and drop the price of renewable
energy to a sufficiently low point.” They argue that state support is necessary to ‘prime
the pump’ and accelerate technological development to the point where “private
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investment crowds in” and the state support is no longer necessary.
The UNEP report envisions a global network of ‘innovation centers’ and an
international green development fund to support green infrastructural projects and to
provide global price-supports for the renewable energy industry. Similarly, various
scientists and CEOs, including Bill Gates (Bennet, 2015), have independently proposed a
‘Manhattan project’ on climate change (King & Layard, 2013; Oreskes, 2013;) while the
Breakthrough Institute (Jenkins and Mansur, 2011), as we will see below, advocates for
the creation of a Clean Energy Deployment Administration (CEDA) through which state
support for early stage green innovation can be coordinated.
In all of the various interpretations of a GND, however, support for development
of renewable energy technology is pivotal and technological reform of the energy sector
is targeted as the primary means of transition. For instance, cleantech is central to
Edenhofer and Stern’s (2009) report, which advocates for public investments to support
such technologies through the post-Financial Crash credit crunch. They see the recovery
of green financing as a central concern, and propose a number of mechanisms meant to
stimulate innovation by incentivizing private capital to move into ‘green’ sectors of
investment. Their proposals include market and price supports such as feed-in-tarriffs,
renewable portfolio standards, tax credits and loan guarantees, as well as a suggestion
that G20 nation-states “should establish publicly financed venture capital funds that
target innovative clean-energy technologies and develop a G20 Strategic Energy
Technology Plan” (5).
As they go on to explain, such state-backed venture capital would be able to take
a more patient (and less risk-averse) approach than typical private venture funds, adding
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social and ecological goals to the need to realize adequate returns. China’s Environment
Fund and the UK’s Carbon Trust Venture Capital Fund are two examples provided. They
also support UNEP’s proposals for World Bank administered financial vehicles such as a
Clean Technology Fund that can provide this sort of state-support at an international
level.
The Breakthrough Institute has also been arguing that the “ethical and pragmatic
path toward a just and sustainable global energy economy requires… sustained public
support for the development and deployment of clean energy technologies” (AsafuAdjaye et al., 2015, 24). Self-proclaimed eco-modernists and champions of technological
innovation, they are quick to point out the central role that state funding has played in the
development of previous technological breakthroughs such as hydraulic fracturing
(Shellenberger et al., 2012). While “reject[ing] the planning fallacy of the 1950s”, they
advocate the development of green industrial policies to direct innovation and industrial
advance, and have proposed the creation of the aforementioned CEDA, which would
function as a central government funding agency that could provide financial support to
early-stage technology companies (Asafu-Adjaye et al., 2015, pp.29-30).
Many of these proposals offer compelling and what seem to be politically
‘realistic’ visions of a greener world. Against the continuing torpor of meaningful global
action, they also seem quite radically ambitious, and we do not doubt that massive state
projects of this kind could be massively effective, greatly preferable to the status quo and
even necessary (Custers, 2010; Jessop, 2012). But the continuing political improbability
of such policies suggests more is awry than simple lack of political will. In particular, we
call into question the ways in which adopting supposedly straightforward calls to ‘bring
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the state back in’ to stimulate (or re-orient) innovation are built upon simplistic and
strategically problematic conceptions of both the state and innovation, failing to
acknowledge the irreducibly historical and political, or power-relational, nature of each.
In the context of incumbent power relations that are not supportive of (and actively
hostile to) a reversion to the social democracy that historically accompanied
Keynesianism, the resulting essentialisms, even when deployed strategically, are not only
likely to fail in achieving their progressive aims, but can even lend credence to
perspectives that actually reinforce and revive the neoliberal growth machine (rising
levels of resource consumption accompanying rising inequality), just in new, greener and
more ‘innovative’ forms.
Some Problems with Green Keynesianism
The central narratives of GND proposals holds out hope that a turn towards Green
Keynesianism will, first and foremost, be good for the planet. This may be the most
faithfully Keynesian aspect of the GND. As Geoff Mann (2015) argues, Keynes was
primarily concerned with saving civilization from the destabilizing effects of capitalism.
In both Keynes’ context and still today with GND proposals, the most pragmatic path
towards civilizational/planetary salvation is envisioned to depend upon strong state
actions meant to stabilize and re-orient the capitalist economy. Hence the crux of the
problem is: what can we make of this Keynesian focus on preserving modern civilization
when saving life as we have come to know and appreciate it may increasingly need
saving the planet from (the inseparable environmental effects of) this modern
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civilization?
Immediately, some historical disjunctures emerge, especially when the specific
moment of Keynesian policies most often invoked, the mid-20th century New Deal
policies in the USA, are understood within their own socio-ecological context. While
Keynesianism as a set of ideas can certainly be separated from that particular socioecological context, it remains important to recognize that the specific Keynesianism most
often proffered as a model for ‘green’ growth was, in its actually-existing historical form,
inseparable from a massive influx of petroleum into the global economy – fueling what
we now call the ‘great acceleration’ and what Alan Schnaiberg (Schnaiberg and Gould,
1994) termed the treadmill of production.
Green Keynesians overlook how actually-existing Keynesianism was socioecologically and historically situated and unrepeatable. It was comprised of a
constellation of sociopolitical forces including a (family of) regime(s) of accumulation,
spatio-temporal fixes and political-cultural settlements and hegemonic common-senses
that together constituted the Keynesian National Welfare State (Jessop, 2002) that
dominated the post-war period in the re-established ‘core’ of the global North and in an
age before global environmental challenges. Re-evaluated along these lines, this history
calls into question whether ‘green’ and ‘Keynesianism’ can ever be functionally united in
any meaningful way (Cf Cato, 2013).
While most invocations of Keynesian ideals focus on state-supported public
works and the institutional infrastructure of social welfare provisioning, military and
Cold War spending was an equally, if not more, central (and certainly larger in terms of
total expenditures) aspect of the Keynesian growth model (Pivetti, 1989). This militarism
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not only led directly to economic activity and significant innovation (in the militaryindustrial complex), but was also a necessary means of securing global access to the
material and financial resources upon which first world prosperity was built (e.g.
Mitchell, 2011; Yergin, 2009). The Cold War provided a social and cultural politics of
legitimization for unprecedentedly generous state funding, which could be cast as a
defense of the ‘free world’ and even more specifically, a defense of a distinctly American
way of life predicated upon mass consumption. And yet, the intense dependence of the
Keynesian settlement, including its public provision of science & technology (Mirowski
& Sent, 2008; Solovey, 2001), on (Cold) war military spending is passed over with
‘arbitrary, rationalistic and willed’ (Gramsci, 1971, pp. 376-7) allusions to a new
Keynesianism that eliminates its dependence on warfare, or assumes it can be deployed
instead as a civilian “war on climate change” (Rao, 2015). Such hopes ignore the actual
geopolitical militarization and securitization already underway, including of climate
change, not least in the US where officials in the Obama administration now explicitly
frame climate change as a national security threat (Bonds, 2015; Jackson, 2015).
While at the point of production the Keynesian labor-capital accord was a means
of ensuring that the working class majority forwent labor militancy in exchange for
relatively high wages and decent workplace protections (Bowles et al., 1986), a broader
picture needs to consider the ways in which a new form of social reproduction was
central to this bargain. As Matthew Huber (2013) argues, the Keynesian labor-capital
accord was a means of using public resources to create a landscape of privatized wealth
(Aglietta, 2015; Davis, 2000). Direct state support for mass suburbanization, the
production of an interstate highway system, and the rise of consumer credit all helped lay
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the ground – financially, socially and concretely – for the rise of a neoliberal subjectivity
where entrepreneurial competition as opposed to market exchange could be seen as the
foundational pillar of society. Huber suggests that this compromise was very much about
insuring a petrol-regime over production and consumption – cheap oil fueling mass
industrial production, and therefore also mass consumer life (Urry, 2013; Mitchell, 2011).
As a result, despotism in the workplace was met with individuated suburban freedoms in
home life, at least for those making good white male wages.
It is important to see how Keynesianism laid the groundwork for neoliberalism
through the production of a socio-spatial landscape of oil consumption. Petroleum-based
products and infrastructure would become a ubiquitious, unquestioned dimension of
everyday life, as oil – the central and defining commodity of the 20th century – flowed
through almost everything (Urry, 2014). Huber sees this as a mode of social reproduction
so thoroughly tethered to the petroleum-based economy as to make any substantive
proposals for decarbonization farcical at best, and, at their worst, aggressively antiAmerican affronts to the freedoms of mass-consumer life. Simply put, the American way
of life was not – nor is it now – up for debate.
What we see happening with the invocation of Green Keynesianism is thus a split
history. On the one hand, the Keynesian miracle is seen as a product of state intervention
– whether through warfare or welfare – and neo-Keynesians want to see a return to this
sort of central authority to steer the economy the right way. But on the other hand, there
is an inseparable history of accelerating climate change over this same period, and
marked by many of the specific techno-structures (automobiles, airplanes, suburbia,
disposability, etc.) that were being engrained into modern industrial life by this actually-
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existing Keynesian regime (Rogers, 2006; Strasser, 2000). To a large extent, the
Keynesian miracle put in place the techno-social conditions for an utterly toxic and
unsustainable way of life – an infrastructure of waste-making at a planetary scale – and
form of the ‘good life’ (Gould and Schnaiberg, 1994).
To the extent that problems with original Keynesian initiatives and policies are
acknowledged, they are simply assumed to be analytically distinct and unfortunate sideeffects that can be rectified by greater attention, itself facilitated by historical hindsight,
rather than constitutive and deepening system dynamics. For instance, UNEP’s (2009)
proposal for a GND does not limit itself to Roosevelt’s policies as a model, but also looks
to the Green Revolution, where new agricultural technologies were spread across the
less-developed world, “notwithstanding its environmental and social drawbacks,… from
the hands of a few hundred scientists to millions of poor farmers… at a breathtaking
speed and scale” (pp.15-6). Instead of rapidly increasing agricultural yields (in
environmentally and socially devastating ways (Thompson, 1995)) the GND will instead
rapidly increase renewable energy yields – in environmentally and socially harmonious
ways. While they are thus careful to recognize the dubious ecological legacy of their
historical referent, there does seem to be a precautionary warning left unheeded here. The
rule of experts can – and historically has – gone terribly wrong (Scott, 1998), and the
complexity of contemporary cosmopolitized societies and system problems (Beck, 2008)
hardly suggests such planning stands a better chance of avoiding unintended negative
effects – especially when economic growth remains the sine qua non of successful
development policy.
The idealism and pragmatic political appeal of Green Keynesianism depends upon
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maintaining this analytically implausible split between two 20th centuries: one in which a
strong state, a virtuous state, creates conditions for affluent white middle class growth;
and another in which a treadmill of production (and destruction and warfare) enables this
affluence through the accelerated destabilization of world-ecology. In order for green
Keynesianism to remain logically coherent and politically compelling, the state
(abstractly understood) and its potential to act in securing the public good (socially and
now ecologically as well) must be insulated from the techno-social infrastructure of this
actually existing state’s historic creation.
The ‘Public Interest’ Redefined
Perhaps the most alluring aspect of a return to Keynesianism is the idea that the
state will be able to function primarily on behalf of the “public good”, as opposed to the
neglect of such concerns by an incumbent, globally-dominant and environmentdestroying neoliberalism. This contrast is crucial to the political appeal of a renewed
Keynesianism, as the most important and ready-to-hand foil against which neoliberalism
can (supposedly) be understood and countered. Green Keynesianism can focus on
rebuilding the social welfare institutions and regulatory frameworks that have been
targeted by neoliberal austerity politics and deregulation, setting them on a new,
environmentally responsible trajectory.
However, the supposed self-evidence – and achievability – of this familiar sense
of the public ignores the complex conceptual constellation of public and private in the
Keynesian period, rather than their simple opposition. Most obviously, as a renewal of
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liberal capitalism in the wake of two world wars, the defeat of fascism and the continuing
threat of socialism, the Keynesian ‘public’ was prioritized precisely in order to enable
(growth of) the ‘private’: a large social sphere incorporating private enterprise and work
contracts and the rights to a private domestic life, life-course and opinion that supposedly
characterized the ‘Free World’ (Aglietta, 2000).
The return to this publicly-minded statecraft is also belied by the unique
conjunction of socio-technical, political economic and cultural conditions that gave the
actually-existing Keynesian ‘public’ both its specific sense and its broad political
purchase. A non-exhaustive list would include: the dominance of productive vs. finance
capital, built around the new horizons of accumulation from the expansion of mass
consumerism and petrol- and plastic-based innovation; an emergent global hegemon itself
dominated by Keynesian political logics; and, perhaps most importantly, a class politics
of a strong working class of the Global North as bedrock and guard of the social welfare
settlement, themselves empowered by the threat of mass appeal of a more radical anticapitalist politics sponsored by actually-existing socialism (Jessop, 2002). These
conditions do not hold today.
Some of the recent political experiments in central and South America have
presented inspiring political transformations along these lines. The Bolivian government
has introduced a National Development Plan that encourages the integration of “local
technologies and ancestral knowledge” into a comprehensive innovation (Daza and
Pinero, 2012) and the Ecuadorian state has enshrined the rights of mother nature in its
new constitution. Yet the relentless context of neoliberalism and the economic realities of
survival in the 21st century have all but hollowed out many of these potentially and
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ideationally radical programmes (Burchardt & Dietz, 2013; Villalba, 2013). These
experiments have shown how radically-green transformations in the state-led regulation
and coordination of the economy will require states that can decouple from capital.
Against the purported political ‘realism’ of Green Keynesianism, however, this
decoupling would require, in most cases, an entirely different state altogether. Moreover,
as evidenced in Central and South America, these transformed states must still reconcile
with a recalcitrant global state-system that is likely to remain aggressively hostile to any
alternatives repudiating its geopolitical dominance. Even where such change could be
achieved in the future, we see these potentially revolutionary and global transformations
as a far cry from any new and improved Keynesianism and the politics of continued
economic growth, military expansion and mass consumption that it tacitly posits.
The way in which Green Keynesian arguments simplify and even fetishize what
the Keynesian state was and therefore could become, however, also depends crucially on
being pitted against an equally simplified, straw man version of the neoliberal state that
ignores the dynamism and ongoing coordinating capacities of this more recent social
formation. For just as the specific Keynesian sense and prioritization of the public good
emerged from a particular constellation of sociopolitical relations that no longer hold, the
prioritization and sense of public good have since been systematically dismantled and
replaced through a generation of neoliberal dominance. The neoliberal state continues to
shape policy and markets for the ‘public good’, yet this is a very different public than that
envisioned as the body governed by an ideal Keynesian state. The specific promise of a
straightforward return to a ‘public’-facing or -attentive regime that prioritizes ‘state’ over
‘market’ thus hinges on ignoring the complex and intimate inter-relations of
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Keynesianism and neoliberalism, conceptually or ideologically, and historically.
Conceptually, it is the gravest mistake to misread neoliberalism as a radical
preference for the market as against the state in the organization and coordination of
political economic relations. Rather, as an epistemic market fundamentalism, in which
the market is conceived as the best of all possible decision-makers (Mirowski, 2013),
neoliberalism is systematically agnostic regarding the state per se.
Indeed, the monopoly of legitimate coercion in the hands of the state is a crucial
political tool for neoliberalism in the (often heatedly rejected) marketization of all things
(Mirowski, 2013; Harvey, 2005). More generally, state power is needed for multiple
political projects of entrepreneurial and/or financialized profit-seeking and for the
oversight and regulation of markets. Furthermore, the state itself and its functions of
public support can be increasingly subjected to forms of (quasi-) market discipline. Even
in the archetype of the United States, the state has never stopped (and indeed has
massively increased) its support for R&D of commercial technologies (Block, 2008). Yet,
this has been conducted as a ‘stealth’ industrial policy because the discourse of ‘market
vs. state’ has proven a powerful means of delegitimizing the incumbent Keynesian
consensus from which it emerged (Mirowski & Plehwe, 2009). As such, understanding
neoliberalism in terms of this crude dichotomy has become a political strategy that allows
a neoliberal political project to divide and conquer: even those vying for the state against
the market are unwittingly supporting a state – staffed by increasing numbers of those
who have worked, or know they can work, for major corporations – that is itself
thoroughly marketized (Crouch, 2011), composed of agents, relations and institutions that
are increasingly locked into supporting not only the discourse of ‘the market’ but its
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manifestation as corporate and financial power (e.g. Fligstein, 2001).
The supposed dichotomous return to the public (vs. private) is no different in this
respect, especially when it is itself cast in terms of state vs. market. Neoliberal
governance has not abandoned the ‘public’, even as it systematically denigrates it in
political discourse and demolishes the social welfare institutions embodying the
Keynesian sense of the public good (Smart, 2003). Instead, neoliberalism has effected a
profound transvaluation, in which government’s role in defense of the public is to secure
(perhaps literally, via (possibly violent) accumulation by dispossession) the conditions
for unencumbered pursuit of the interest of a ‘public’ consisting of shareholders, property
owners, (debt-based) consumers and competitive entrepreneurs (Crouch, 2011).
To counter that this is just not what ‘public’ really means belies a refusal to admit
that one’s (perhaps quite legitimate) normative preferences do not trump, in and of
themselves, the prevailing operative understanding of one’s society and the system of
power-knowledge relations through which it is constituted. To be clear: we do not deny
or underestimate the profound political appetite today for an alternative to the neoliberal
status quo and its impoverished, economically uneven conception of the public. However,
when such criticism falls back upon a simplified conception of Keynesianism as the
paradigmatic form of not-neoliberalism, it fails to register the crucial political and
ideological continuity between the two and therefore fails to offer any meaningful,
strategic and potentially transformative alternative.
Sticking to surface dualisms – Keynesianism vs. neoliberalism, public vs. private,
state vs. market – conditions a largely superficial analysis that envisions discrete
regulatory regimes that can simply be exchanged at will, as interchangeable and
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replaceable skins to sheath the state in its management and superintendence of the
capitalist economy; as opposed to actually-existing social formations which have
irrevocably and thoroughly reshaped the social, economic, political – and of course
environmental – landscape, not to mention the very nature of what states are and can
become. Here we agree with Hae-Yung Song (2013), who argues that much left criticism
of neoliberalism ends up creating a fetishized, institutionalist (and neo-Orientalist) view
of the developmentalist state as that which capital captures. In other words, there is an
uncritical sense of the development state – a social democratic, statist view – that
imagines a strong state separate and distinct from society, from the market and from its
global environs, that is able to manage capital within its borders and according to its own
agenda. Such views, writes Song:
tend to neglect the contradictory and conflict-ridden capitalist characteristics of the
developmental state and state-led development, while celebrating its ability to plan
and achieve national development: productive, nationally oriented and state-led good
capitalism can and should be separated and safeguarded from speculative, financeoriented bad capitalism (1258).
Green Keynesianism fetishizes the state in just this way, as the forebear of a virtuous,
collectively rational (and implicitly national) project to protect - socially and
environmentally - the public good; the guardian of the public interest that temporarily and
regretfully (and largely inexplicably) lost out to neoliberal greed with catastrophic
consequences, but to which the deepening crises of neoliberalism will force a return, by
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way of a return to our collective reason.
The Entrepreneurial State
Despite the logical and historical inconsistencies reviewed above, Green
Keynesianism can and does still resonate politically. In a recent interview, Bill Gates
explains his somewhat hesitant endorsement of active state involvement in the promotion
of green technologies (Bennet, 2015), as least worst option. In evaluating positions such
as Gates’s we can reflect on some of the ways that Green Keynesian ideas are currently
being deployed, and on what these discourses may actually be able to accomplish in a
still-neoliberal context. This analysis shows how the political valence of Green
Keynesianism can - and is - being deployed in ways that are radically at odds with its
express purposes of social and ecological justice.
The ‘entrepreneurial state’ has attained lots of interest and high-profile media
coverage, especially across Europe, over the last few years. While, there is very little to
show for it in terms of meaningful effect on policy and political outcomes, at least in
terms of a ‘Green New Deal’ kind that it expressly advocates, we can still see how this
discourse recuperates Green Keynesian ideas into a new means of legitimizing both
neoliberal conceptions of the state and approaches to innovation.
By ‘entrepreneurial state’ we specifically refer to two distinct positions, of
Mariana Mazzucato in Europe and the Breakthrough Institute in the US. For Mazzucato
(2011), who coins the phrase, the entrepreneurial state emerges from a Schumpeterinspired approach, persuasively conceptualizing the innovation process as highly
21
uncertain and open-ended (e.g. Nelson & Winter, 1982) and thus dependent on risktaking agency and institutions. A conventional common-sense today would identify these
entrepreneurial agencies with the specialized capacities and resources of competitive
private venture finance, in contrast to a state that has been shown to be terrible at ‘picking
winners’. Mazzucato’s central argument, however, is that this is a grievous misreading of
both theory and the historical record. This affords an insightful critique of the neoliberal
innovation system and its financialisation and short-termism, and of the fiscal austerity
this position now counsels in order to ‘free’ the market. Conversely, she argues, it is
quintessentially the state, and only the state, that can (and has) take(n) on the large, shotin-the-dark risks of constructing entirely new systems and radical innovations that
promise significant public, but not yet sufficient private, benefit. This case is then
corroborated using many examples, including even supposed archetypes of private sector
innovation, like ICTs and the internet, and in the US.
While the prevailing neoliberal and ‘Austerian’ common-sense portrays the state
as a lumbering dinosaur as against fast-evolving, nimble venture financiers, for
Mazzucato the state is a lion of innovation to be compared with posturing pussycats of
private finance who actually will only bet on a sure thing once the state has supported the
hard initial work. Running with the argument that profound public-good innovation is
needed for the current predicament of economic stagnation and ecological risk, then, it
follows that the state alone can, and so must, take on this role to stimulate a political
economic and technological change that will not happen (in time) otherwise.
The US-based Breakthrough Institute, founded in 2003 by Michael Shellenberger
and Ted Norhaus, offer a similarly revived appreciation of the state’s necessarily active
22
role in promoting green innovations. Their work highlights the ongoing role that statefunded research and innovation has played in the field of energy research - the
development of hydraulic fracturing being a prime example (Shellenberger et al., 2012).
State support has and will continue to be essential to ongoing industrial innovation, they
argue, and therefore any new green economy will have to entail a state actively
committed to funding the right, green technologies that can transform modern society in
environmentally beneficial ways.1
Breakthrough differs with Mazzucato in the relative emphasis placed upon the
state as a creator of industrial policy. For Mazzucato the state can and should steer the
private sector towards its own, publicly-determined sense of what technologies are in the
public good. The Breakthrough Institute, conversely, is more inclined to see the state as
willing and largely unquestioning facilitator of given green innovation agendas in the
private sphere, providing the patient capital that can help de-risk new technologies as
non-diluting investorin the earliest stages, allowing them the time and (tax-funded)
resources to become viable investments for the private venture capital industry. Hence,
we might say that where Mazzucato offers a somewhat scathing indictment of the riskaverse nature of venture capital and the innovation agenda that forms around (and
despite) it, the Breakthrough Institute sees this risk-aversion as a market-failure for the
state to correct, facilitating and strengthening the venture-capital dominated innovation
agenda with targeted grants, loan guarantees and other transfers of public wealth into
private commercial applications. The entrepreneurial state is thus actually envisioned as a
venture financing state (Cf Janeway, 2012).
In their most recent publication, the Ecomodernist Manifesto, we learn that these ‘right’ ways consist
primarily of advanced solar technology and continued development of nuclear power.
1
23
Nonetheless, what we see in both is a subtle shift: visions of a transformed
economy form around a risk-taking state, now interested in the twin public goods of
mitigating both ecological change as a new and crucial techno-social domain and the
innovation risk that prevents venture investors from entering into the funding of new
technologies whose risk-adjusted rate of return simply can’t measure up to the market’s
expectations.
While addressed to different political contexts and debates (UK/EU vs. US),
neither of these visions opens up the question of which state – understood (by us) as a
dynamic system of power relations – is being asked to assume this central role. Yet this
black-boxing thereby overlooks how the ‘entrepreneurial state’ resonates with, and so
enables, important and relatively painless shifts in a strategically dominant neoliberal
positioning, compelled by the strategic challenges, in particular, of disorientation from
the Great Financial Crisis and the growing weight of evidence regarding ecological
destruction.
At the heart of this move is the figure of the entrepreneur. For a generation or
more, neoliberalism has told us that the market is the most important social coordinating
mechanism, and therefore that which should be embraced at all levels and in all
dimensions of social life, including the state. Yet markets have spectacularly failed in
recent years, most obviously – e.g. in ongoing dependence on QE stimulus – for the very
financialized power blocs that were previously neoliberalism’s most ardent and enabled
supporters. Waiting in the wings of this justificatory schema and political project,
however, the figure of the entrepreneur is imagined as an agent ready to combat these
market failures and help realize the market’s optimal (and optimally productive) socio-
24
political order. Neoliberal common-sense has sedimented innovation and
entrepreneurialism as unquestionable, self-evident goods (Szeman, 2015); an
individualized but also Promethean world-creating power mediated and rewarded by the
market, the latter of whose political currency has become increasingly tarnished.
Accepting the seriousness of contemporary ecological challenges makes ‘innovation’
seem unarguably both necessary and urgent, and the figure of the entrepreneur is heralded
accordingly, as society’s savior.
These trends come together as a discursive shift from markets to innovation as a
central organizing and justificatory concept (see e.g. Economist, 2015). The
overwhelming appeal and strategic enablement of this move, however, is that the latter
does not negate, but actually has the power to re-situate and re-legitimize, the former.
The entrepreneurial state is thus envisioned as an innovator, with the definition of
innovation as venture capital-led private sector entrepreneurship remaining hegemonic
and unqualified. It is both in support of this capacity to innovate – thus defined – and
upon the condition that the state itself is opened up and subjected to renewal by way of
the superior stewardship of these entrepreneurial change-agents that ‘bringing the state
back in’ attains its new justificatory significance. Jeb Bush’s (2015) presidential
campaign puts the matter succinctly: “Disrupt Washington to unleash the innovators!”
For neoliberalism, “nothing proves that the market economy is intrinsically
defective since everything attributed to it as defect and as the effect of its defectiveness
should really be attributed to the state” (Foucault, 2008, p.116). Hence the market serves
as a neoliberal fantasy or apotheosis that sutures the gap between real and symbolic
orders (Dean, 2008), providing a non-falsifiable (political) argument; the flipside of
25
which is to scapegoat the (implicitly Keynesian, planning) state as the source of all
imperfections and a permanent fetter upon realizing its most positive ideal of marketbased society. With the entrepreneurial state, by contrast, we see instead a new ideology
emerging that scapegoats ‘dirty’, corrupt, corporate capital and industrial polluters, along
with the parasitic and unproductive financiers and Big Government (to whom they are
connected by fast-revolving doors) supporting them, which has given rise to a destructive
pursuit of short-term profits and an innovation-killing patent system (Economist, 2015).
Setting itself up in explicit contrast, the alternative presented instead empowers clean,
productive, entrepreneurial capitalists, enabling this new group of industrial (now hightechnological) actors by entrusting them with the unique powers of the state,.
Of course, the idea of ‘Silicon Valley’, and its implicit contrast with ‘Wall Street’,
– which we understand in both cases to be locations, networks, and political/business
imaginaries – is crucial to this picture, and not just in the US. Silicon Valley’s message is
enticing, and strikingly resonant with the message of Green Keynesianism. We
characterize this discourse thus:
“Those vultures on Wall Street and the industries they support have ruined the
world for us. But have no fear. We networked humans [i.e. we Silicon Valley
entrepreneurs, in familiar premature universalism] are innovative and together we
can solve these problems. In fact, we represent the networks of innovation and
creativity that the world needs, we are the solution to these problems that they
have created. But we need the state to empower us to do so.”
In other words, the Venture Capital State is able to present itself as a radical
26
alternative to the Wall Street-backed, status quo neoliberal state. Now instead of “the
market can’t be wrong” and a political project of market fundamentalism we have
“Technology can’t be wrong” as part of a broader project of technological salvation, or
‘disruption’ (Morozov, 2014; Keen, 2015).
And instead of the state as political whipping boy, we have the new
unconscionable vice of Luddism, meaning any objection to, call for regulation of, or
caution regarding, any and all ‘disruptive’ technologies. Hence, the Breakthrough
Institute’s categorical admonishment of left environmentalism, which has, in their
assessment, taken on precisely this sort of anti-technological, and therefore politically
moribund position (Shellenberger & Nordhaus, 2004). They argue that environmentalists
must, to put it bluntly, recognize that technology will be central to any actually-existing
solutions to our climate problems, and must therefore be of central political concern.
In many ways we agree with this assessment - technology has played and will
continue to play a central defining role in the production and reproduction of our global
society, and questions of technology will be essential to any and all climate politics.
Where we find fault, however, is in the way that their use of this term, technology, allows
them to slip into an uncritical and wholesale endorsement of a very specific, venture
capital- (and military-) funded understanding of technology and the innovation agenda
underwriting it. Any inkling of a return to debates around appropriate technologies –
more often today understood through concepts such as degrowth, diverse economies or
buen vivir – are cast as neo-Luddism since they do not provide wholesale endorsement of
the specific technological agenda currently promoted by venture capital-funded
entrepreneurs and the masters of innovation. Technology ceases to be an ethical, political
27
and historically complex terrain of social creativity, and is instead (explicitly) narrowed
to reflect only the current trajectories of commercial viability, built upon an unquestioned
notion of market sovereignty and embedded in a naturalized conception of what
technology is and what innovation can, and cannot, become.
Here it is also worth stating what should be obvious: bringing Silicon Valley in
does not actually kick Wall Street out. It is simply a change in the predominant form of
access and mode of ecological dominance by (shifting sectors of) capital over actual
states, as systems of power/knowledge relations. Indeed, as Wall Street is evermore
constrained by public scrutiny and legislation and mutual mistrust, the ‘best jobs’ for
former Wall Street big names are increasingly in Silicon Valley – as with the move to
Google of Morgan Stanley’s Ruth Porat in March 2015 (FT, 2015).
The actually-emerging ‘entrepreneurial state,’ to the extent that these ideas hold,
thus appears to be taking shape as primarily subservient to the needs and directives of the
venture capital industry and the types of innovations that they deem potentially worthy of
consideration. Revitalized state direction is set in collaboration primarily with venture
capital, and therefore focused on the needs of ‘the market’ (i.e. financial corporations) as
much – if not more – than any ‘public’ or environmental needs that Green Keynesians
might be hoping the state would address. Calls for an entrepreneurial state are thus preeminently calls to allow already-privileged market actors to set the ‘state’s’, and thus our
collective, agenda for innovation and techno-social transformation; and now directly so,
not even through money and lobbying. If the Keynesian state is imagined to have done its
de-risking of industrial development for the people, this new green Keynesian state will
instead do its de-risking for Silicon Valley, while enabling the financiers and venture
28
capitalists of this privileged network of innovative capital to shape the very institutions of
the ‘state’ to their enduring strategic and financial advantage (Morozov, 2015). Crucially,
therefore, the entrepreneurial state is primarily a project of redefining the state, and
taking ‘innovation’ as given, as opposed to revitalizing, redirecting and redefining
innovation through some non-market, publicly-interested state agenda.
That Green Keynesianism de facto supports, or at least enables, this profoundly
inimical political project hinges on its strategically naïve and superficial analysis
(Blackwater, 2012). For instance, neither Mazzucato nor the Breakthrough Institute seem
to consider the interaction between processes of innovation and the state as a set of power
relationships. They have a vision of what the state could become economically, but there
is no real analysis of what the state already is politically. This shows a key missing
dimension, in turn, in their analysis of innovation and reveals a shortcoming of Green
Keynesian more broadly. The solutions posed are centered upon the specific economic
problem of stagnation along with the environmental problem of insufficient innovation to
mitigate emissions. And the solutions that arise all, in one form or another, depend upon
invigorating green growth. Technological change, interpreted to mean the acceleration of
already-existing market-endorsed technological trajectories, are placed at the heart of a
radical restructuring of the economy, without considering the possibility that a truly
radical transformation may, and likely will, require changes in trajectory and a
restructuring of power-knowledge relations first and foremost – i.e. ironically, precisely
what 20th century Keynesianism actually primarily achieved (see above); and so, in turn,
a radical revisiting of what technology can and should mean, how it can and should be
developed, who can and should be empowered to innovate, and, reciprocally, who will be
29
empowered or disabled by that innovation. Thus an intrinsically dynamic, relational,
strategic and meso-level perspective is required.
Unfortunately, then, to the extent that ‘entrepreneurial state’ has political purchase
within a still neoliberal context, it appears to lend credibility to a deepened dismantling
of the public-state apparatus, including especially of public funding for research and
innovation, by handing over the purse strings to a self-styled and thoroughly neoliberal
entrepreneurial class of VC and Tech CEOs, while also reframing the very legitimacy of
state institutions themselves primarily in terms of the extent to which they support this
specific, unquestioned political economic model of innovation (see Table 1).
Actually-emerging Green Keynesianism can thus be marshalled (more-or-less
unwittingly) to support ongoing neoliberal-framed efforts to steer the economy – in some,
‘smart’ ways – providing justificatory cover with a superficial populist idealism that has
flattened out the contours of history and pines for a return to simpler and more august
days, regulated days, days when finance was kept in check and the ‘real’ economy could
therefore flourish (e.g. Perez, 2009). The veneer of these golden days glistens brighter as
the distance between historical fact and present day fantasy widens.
Conclusion: Political Ontologies of Innovation and the State
While we have focused in the above analysis on the entrepreneurial state
specifically, our critique raises fundamental questions for Green Keynesianism more
broadly, insofar as this discourse accepts the depoliticized terms of debate regarding
innovation, the state and their inter-relationships. Attending to this issue reveals a far30
reaching challenge to the Left in general, not limited to Green Keynesianism.
Technologies are not neutral, nor is ‘innovation’. Which technologies are
produced, which technologies are maintained, and how, all matter deeply, and
increasingly so in an age of proliferating socio-technical novelty, risk and ontopolitics
(Tyfield, 2015). One cannot just assume that technologies coming out of a Silicon
Valley-funded innovation ecosystem are the ‘green’ or ‘clean’ or ‘smart’ technologies
that will best serve the public good. To reframe this in environmental terms, we would
stress as crucial public questions: which ‘green’ will shape our cities, our transit, our
energy supplies, and our food system, and which public will this serve and co-produce
(Viitanen and Kingston, 2014; Tyfield et al., 2015)? Will it be, as the Breakthrough
Institute advocates, a green built upon dense urban centers run on nuclear power, or
perhaps instead a green built upon a soft energy path that prioritizes dramatically reduced
consumption and what Larry Lohman calls ‘little-e energy’ (Lohman & Hildyard, 2013;
Milani, 2000). We do not intend to inveigh here on the specifics of these debates, but
wish merely to flag the necessity of having them. Setting a socially-determined
innovation agenda is not a purely technical matter. It is part of a larger struggle to define
what ‘progress’ can and should mean, and who or what that progress can and should
serve. And it is not just (specific) innovation(s) that is at stake, today in particular, but
the very shape of ‘politics’ and ‘government’, likely for a generation or more.
For, with both innovation and state understood in strategic relational and
systemic terms, a crucial contemporary terrain of political contestation and strategic
construction is opened up. Here, we don’t need to ‘bring the state back in’ – it never left
and in fact, in many ways has only grown stronger – but we do need consciously to
31
recognize and then engage in the ongoing struggle to shape the state, to assert other ways
that a pluralistic ‘we’ can and should coordinate our social production and reproduction,
not least through dominant forms of innovation in emergent positive feedback loops of
power/knowledge. What would it look like to engage the state without capitulating to it–
to build capacity to make collective decisions – to plan as states plan – to transform the
mechanisms of decision-making and planning that are at our disposal, and at every scale
imaginable? In other words, what is at stake is the need for collectively-expressed
strategic initiatives in learning to live well together; a practice of ‘conviviality’ (Tyfield,
2015). By contrast, with its largely uncritical endorsement of given technologies, models
of innovation and states, Green Keynesianism looks to (and presumes) a state that no
longer exists to do work that no longer makes sense, ultimately endorsing the funding of
innovation in a ‘public-interest’ that is inseparable from and mediated through the restarting and further acceleration of the engines of capitalist and resource-intensive
growth.
The key issue regarding questions of state, innovation and climate change (as well
as other global risks), in other words, is not simply organizing given innovation such that
the ‘right’ institution disburses the ‘right’ amount of investment targeted at the ‘right’
issues – i.e. to ‘solve’ the problems concretely defined. Not just because this presumes
what cannot be presumed (namely knowledge in each case of what ‘right’ means), but
also, and more importantly, because this framing systematically conditions neglect of the
key strategic and political challenges at hand. We can instead ask: what forms of
collective political institution(s) – which states – will support what forms of ongoing
socio-technical responses, with what uneven effects upon a diverse, already-scarred
32
socio-ecological world? This calls for study, in detailed, concrete and strategic
particularity, of how forms of knowledge (research and innovation, including in political
economy itself) construct and are constructed by specific forms of social order and their
asymmetrical power relations.
Abandoning the realist distinction of power vs. knowledge fosters a strategic
engagement with innovation in the present by working with a diverse set of thinkers,
makers and creators to reshape techno-social relations and political institutions in parallel
around a set of priorities – such as conviviality, degrowth or buen vivir – that are
fundamentally different than those aimed at saving the status quo from itself. Ultimately,
only an explicitly egalitarian and ecological politics of innovation, targeted at both
concrete issues of socio-technical change and the longer-term remodeling of political
communities and institutions, has any strategic hope of actively and self-consciously
building better states, better technologies and with them, brighter futures.
Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank the participants of the 2015 CPERI (Changing Political
Economy of Research and Innovation) Workshop, UC San Diego and the participants at
the 2015 Planetary Natures Conference, SUNY Binghamton for their helpful comments
and suggestions.
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Tables: (with captions, on individual pages)
Table 1: Contrasting construals of Green Keynesian discourses
Phrase
Green Keynesianism as neoromanticism, based on fetishized
state-as-public-servant
‘We need more state’
We need more publicly-funded
investment in the public-interest – to
tame capitalism
‘We need more
innovation’
We need more and bigger (‘good’)
innovation to ‘solve’ the multiple
problems facing ‘us all’
‘Innovation contributes
to the public good’
Innovation will solve public, nonpolitical issues, including those of
‘global risks’
‘Evident current
problems with the
market demand the
state steps back in’
Only the state can take on certain
roles in collectively rational decisionmaking, and these roles must be
reclaimed from the market
‘We need innovation
and a state that serves
workers’
We need more public investment in
public goods that will serve the
interests of the public as a whole,
including working classes.
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Green Keynesianism as revived,
transformed neo-liberalism, based
on existing dominant power
relations
We need the state’s unique capacity
for risk-reduction to be handed over
to ‘innovation’ experts – to revitalize
and relegitimize (at least amongst
those ‘who matter’) capitalism
We need more and bigger
(profitable) innovation to open up
major possibilities for further
financially-attractive
entrepreneurialism, as social
condition and permanent revolution
Innovation is a central moment in
the strategic project of shaping and
disciplining society so that it is
optimally conditioned for continued
capital accumulation through the
market, the supreme and suprahuman decision-maker.
The state must be reformed so that it
can serve what we now see as the
necessary task of co-ordinating,
fixing and shaping politics, including
an intransigent public opinion and
public action, so that the market can
be perfected, and thereby continue
to expand vis-a-vis the spheres of
socio-natural life over which it is
primary decision-maker
We need privately provided
innovation, hence the laws or
regulations that reward
entrepreneurs across the board,
from hi-tech start-ups to selfentrepreneurs taking on work no
matter how menial or disciplined,
and that penalise and exclude those
who don’t, can’t or refuse
temporarily (in strike action) to work