Review of International Political Economy

ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rrip20

Climate change and international political

economy: between collapse and transformation

Matthew Paterson

To cite this article: Matthew Paterson (2021) Climate change and international political economy:
between collapse and transformation, Review of International Political Economy, 28:2, 394-405,
DOI: 10.1080/09692290.2020.1830829

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09692290.2020.1830829

Published online: 20 Oct 2020.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 2491

View related articles

View Crossmark data

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rrip20
REVIEW OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL ECONOMY
2021, VOL. 28, NO. 2, 394–405
https://doi.org/10.1080/09692290.2020.1830829

SPECIAL ISSUE ON “BLIND SPOTS IN IPE”

Climate change and international political economy:

between collapse and transformation
Matthew Paterson
Department of Politics, School of Social Sciences, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK

ABSTRACT
The dynamics of climate change politics have thrown up two fundamental, and
entirely contradictory, challenges for political economy in the last 10 years. On the
one hand, the new science of ‘net zero emissions’ has produced a growing recogni-
tion that a world without fossil fuels is both absolutely necessary and utterly trans-
formative. On the other hand, civilizational collapse (absolute declines in human
populations, collapse of food production systems, collapse of social institutions) is
now much more widely recognized as an entirely plausible trajectory for the world
within living lifetimes. The stakes in climate politics have thus become radically
sharper. This paper argues that IPE has some key theoretical arguments and sub-
stantive knowledge that it can contribute to understanding the crucial challenge of
pursuing the transformative pathway and that the key challenge for IPE scholars is
to deploy their knowledge accordingly.

KEYWORDS
Climate change; decarbonization; collapse; transformation; economic growth

Introduction
It would not be fair to charge IPE with ignoring climate change. There have been
many strands to the substantial body of work done by IPE scholars on climate
change (see Paterson & P-Laberge, 2018 for a full survey). This has included work
on transnational corporate power in climate politics (Levy & Newell, 2005;
Meckling, 2011; Newell & Paterson, 1998; Wright & Nyberg, 2015); on neoliberal-
ism and climate politics/policy (Bailey, 2007; MacNeil, 2017); on the financializa-
tion of climate change (Helleiner & Thistlethwaite, 2013; Lohmann, 2012; Paterson,
2001; Thistlethwaite, 2011); on carbon markets specifically (MacKenzie, 2009;
Paterson, 2010, 2012; Stephan & Lane, 2014); on North-South inequalities as
‘unequal ecological exchange’ (Jorgenson, 2012; Roberts & Parks, 2009); and more
recently on fossil capital and carbon democracy (Altvater, 2009; Malm, 2015;
Mitchell, 2013). There have been occasional attempts to synthesize this work into
broad analyses of capitalism’s relationship to climate change (Koch, 2012; Newell &
Paterson, 2010; Pelling et al., 2011).

CONTACT Matthew Paterson [email protected] Department of Politics, School of

Social Sciences, University of Manchester, Oxford Rd, Manchester, M13 9PL, UK.
ß 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
 REVIEW OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL ECONOMY 395

It would however be fair to assert that climate change has been a blind spot for
IPE in two important ways. First, it has simply been a relatively marginal concern
within IPE to date – a blind spot in terms of ‘what we focus on’, in the terms set
out by the editors of this Special Issue (LeBaron et al., this issue). This is amply
demonstrated by Seabrooke and Young (2017), Katz-Rosene (2019) and Green and
Hale (2017). Second, and more importantly, IPE’s blind spot regarding climate
change is that it has failed to come to grips with two absolutely fundamental shifts
in climate politics in the last decade and what it means for the theory and practice
of IPE. The first of these is the recognition of the depth of the social transform-
ation entailed in addressing climate change adequately. The second is the increas-
ing recognition of the catastrophic costs of failing to do so – at least the
spectacular expansion of human misery and degradation, and potentially the col-
lapse of human civilization per se. Transform or collapse is now the stark choice
for the future of the global political economy. But only a handful of scholars in
IPE have engaged in using the field’s knowledge to think about these transforma-
tions (Newell, 2019b). In this sense then, climate change is radically a blind spot
for IPE regarding ‘how we analyze’ it (LeBaron et al., this issue).
IPE is not unique in failing to recognize these shifts and starting to think them
through: many academic fields are similar. Denial in the strict psychological sense,
as analyzed by Norgaard (2011), might be one reason for this – the implications of
both shifts in understanding produce discomfort from which we may reasonably
recoil. But in IPE it may be compounded with the onset of the financial crisis and
resulting crash, followed by austerity and the rise of populism, which has come to
crowd out space for other concerns, financial crises being a long-standing core con-
cern for IPE, even one of its ‘founding’ concerns (Kindleberger, 1973).
However, IPE needs to get to grips with this transformed situation for at least
two reasons. First, IPE does have a set of conceptual tools that can help societies
understand the dynamics that will drive both whether we collapse or transform,
and what sorts of transformations or collapses might unfold, with what consequen-
ces for human flourishing, inequalities, violence, power relations, and possibilities
for democratic political life. And second, neither transformation nor collapse is
unlikely to leave the central theoretical and normative commitments of IPE
unscathed. Leaving aside the (very real) possibility that organized intellectual pro-
duction as we know it may no longer exist as an effect of societal collapse, the
world is unlikely to look sufficiently similar to our various current understandings
of states-markets-firms, globalized capitalism, professional networks, imperialism,
or whatever other underlying set of premises we base our IPE on. I focus however
on the first of these challenges in this paper, with only occasional allusions to
the second.

Transformative climate change

Climate change is now widely understood as a challenge that, in Naomi Klein’s
(2014) apposite phrase ‘changes everything’. Indeed it changes in fact much more
than she suggests: her vision is for a revitalized and greened social democracy, but
not really a thoroughgoing transformation of the entire socio-technical and polit-
ical-economic fabric. Through to 2007, the predominant view was that global GHG
emissions needed to be reduced by around 80% to avoid ‘dangerous anthropogenic
396 M. PATERSON

interference with the climate system’ (United Nations, 1992, Article 2). By the
IPCC Fifth Assessment Report in 2014, echoed in the words of the Paris
Agreement of 2015, this had shifted to being a need to get to ‘net zero emissions’
globally and to do so by around 2050. The difference between 80% and ‘net zero’
is more dramatic than it might appear. 80% could probably be achieved by decar-
bonizing electricity, electrifying ground transport, radical improvements in energy
efficiency, some technical improvements in things like steel and cement production,
and probably some reductions in ruminant agriculture. Already a challenge of epic
proportions. Net zero means that you need to do all of that, much more quickly,
but probably eliminate ruminants (dairy as well as beef or lamb), create radical
breakthroughs for production of cement, steel, and plastics, and probably to elim-
inate flying entirely. You also need to develop radically new ‘negative emissions
technologies’, on which more or less all IPCC scenarios to keep warming within a
2
C limit depend, and which, apart from afforestation, no one has much of a clue
about which ones, of the various speculative options that have been ventured,
might have a chance of actually working, and could be deployed within a plausible
timeframe (Anderson & Peters, 2016; Grubler et al., 2018).
The shift in this technocratic vision towards this transformational frame has
been accompanied by a parallel radicalization of social movement activism on cli-
mate. From the mid-2000s onwards we have had a distinct shift to such radicalism,
mostly articulated via discourses of ‘climate justice’. These have a trajectory from
anti-globalization protests in the Hague COP in 2001, to Plane Stupid, Rising Tide,
Climate Camp, anti-pipeline protests, fossil fuel divestment and 350.org, to name
just a few. The most recent wave of these, since late 2018, has been the school
strikes inspired by Greta Thunberg, and Extinction Rebellion. These groups have
typically articulated a transformational approach to climate change than more trad-
itional climate change NGOs.
Most political economists will recognize that this sort of transformation is
utterly unprecedented in human history, and speaks to some of their core interests.
Peter Newell and I claimed in 2010 that ‘Never before has humanity as a whole
embarked on a project to radically transform the way its societies work’ (2010, p.
1). That claim still holds, but in a much starker and more dramatic fashion.
Everything about how the global economy works, from the minutiae of daily life to
the operations of global economic governance and strategies of global businesses,
will be disrupted by the transformation, and in many ways is already being so.

Climate collapse
During the same time period, the stakes entailed in failing to effect such a trans-
formation have become dramatically higher. Climate scientists have long known
both about critical thresholds in the climate system and that climate changes usu-
ally happen rapidly and disruptively as climate tips from one state to another.
However, in the 1990s the possibility of a ‘runaway greenhouse effect’ was a dis-
tinctly minority view, not even represented in early IPCC reports (Houghton et al.,
1990). However, during the early 2000s, climate scientists and many policymakers
increasingly accepted that at around 2
C of warming above pre-industrial levels,
certain key thresholds might be breached that would trigger significant positive
 REVIEW OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL ECONOMY 397

feedbacks in the climate system that would take climate change beyond
human control.
During the 2010s, this frame expanded, to increasingly emphasize that failing to
keep warming within 2
C limits would be catastrophic for human civilization, and
even to fail to limit it to 1.5
C would be highly destabilizing. There were a number
of specific elements to this shift – revised estimates of melting rates for Greenland
and Antarctic ice sheets and thus of sea level rise, revised analyses of the rate of
increase of incidence and/or severity of extreme weather events, notably. These
were complemented by new observations about the former, and confirmation of
the latter, with Hurricanes Katrina, Sandy and Harvey all devastating different
metropolitan areas just in the US within a decade (to say nothing of more devastat-
ing storms elsewhere, such as Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines), each of which
was supposed to be a 1 in 100 year storm at worst.
Prognostications of a 3 or 4
C world, or worse, started to abound and become
taken more seriously. The possibility of total collapse, triggered by various proc-
esses – collapse in food production systems, emergency management systems being
overwhelmed by ‘cascading’ extreme weather events, inundation and abandonment
of major cities, and so on, have become widely accepted. At the very least the possi-
bility of a major collapse of global human civilization can no longer be discounted,
within living timeframes, even if the timing or character of such collapse cannot be
predicted. And even if such collapse does not occur, it became clearer that the
severity of climate impacts beyond 1.5 or 2
C would entail progressively growing
forms of human degradation and insecurity, as popularized effectively by Wallace-
Wells’ Uninhabitable Earth (2019). The politics of thinking about such collapse is
of course deeply problematic and dangerous, but so is the politics of not thinking
about it.
While the specifics of how such collapse unfolds cannot be precisely predicted,
we can be confident that its impacts will be highly uneven, following and intensify-
ing pre-existing lines of inequality, violence and colonial power: lines of class, gen-
der, and racialization (on these, see contributions by Bhambra, Pr€ ugl, and Singh,
this issue). Indeed, for many, the idea of civilizational collapse may not be a novel
experience: indigenous peoples’ round the world have seen their civilizations
destroyed by colonialism, destruction which is ongoing in many places, and of
course is intersecting increasingly with climate change itself.1 Specific civilizations
such as the Mayans, Harappans or most famously on Easter Island, have also col-
lapsed for other, mostly socio-ecological, reasons, popularized most prominently by
Jared Diamond (2011). Nevertheless, while we can learn much from the collapse of
particular civilizations, with the their specific languages, cultures, and economies, it
is a different proposition to face the possibility of the end of human civilization per
se – that is, of the existence of large-scale human societies with advanced institu-
tional and technical apparatuses, within the lifetime of those alive today.
At least for a time, transformation and collapse are likely to co-occur. Many ele-
ments in transformative processes are already underway, such as the dramatic rise
of solar and wind energy, the early stages of a shift to electric vehicles, or the crisis
of the coal sector in many parts of the world. But however fast they scale up, some
aspects at least of collapse are now more or less inevitable given the time-lags in
the climate system. Increasingly devastating storms, floods, droughts, are now more
or less certain to continue and intensify. Significant sea level rise inundating coastal
398 M. PATERSON

areas is similarly just a question of time, and parts of major cities like Miami are
becoming indefensible against this. At some point, collapse may overwhelm our
systems and thus the way societies are transformed is driven by climate impacts
rather than our collective attempts to mitigate climate change. But they will never-
theless co-exist for at least a period of time until one or the other becomes the
dominant trajectory.

IPE’s challenges
This way of understanding climate change as a social and political challenge raises
various theoretical challenges for IPE. Just to take a few examples, debates about
financial regulation, trade relations, multilateral economic governance, the rise of
the BRICs, or labor regimes, will all be transformed both as decarbonization of the
global economy increasingly transforms what is produced, where, by whom, and by
the need for new systems to adapt to sea level rise, extreme weather, the collapse
of food production, or new waves of climate-induced migration.
A more important challenge however for scholars in IPE is to use the theoret-
ical, methodological and substantive knowledge they have to apply it to advancing
understanding of how to go about pursuing rapid transformation towards decar-
bonization and thus to avoid the worst of the implications of collapse. I focus on
the transformation question here, largely for normative reasons. Since various phe-
nomena that IPE scholars already study are central to how this dynamic of trans-
formation or collapse are both caused and will play out – corporate power,
financialisation, geopolitical rivalries, resource competition, inequalities and injusti-
ces of various sorts, but also thinking generally about transformation (Blyth, 2002)
– then we have a corresponding responsibility to explain how these phenomena
shape the potential for either a relatively benign transformation (often framed as a
‘just transition’, e.g. Healy & Barry, 2017) and/or an adaptation to the sorts of sys-
tem collapse that may retain some elements of a humane social form.

Thinking about transitions

There is plenty of existing research on such transitions. However, much of this
work is couched variously within conceptual frameworks that largely abstract from
the dynamics of global political economy (for some exceptions, see Malm, 2015;
Scoones et al., 2015). Specifically (and I simplify enormously here), they tend to be
couched either in terms of complex adaptive systems (e.g. Bernstein & Hoffmann,
2018; Geels et al., 2017; Levin et al., 2012; Meadowcroft, 2009; Unruh, 2000), using
the language of ‘tipping points’, ‘lock-in’, and so on, or it arises out of various
combinations of Foucauldian, STS, or other cultural politics forms of analysis,
focusing variously on new forms of climate governmentality, socio-materialities,
subjectivity and practice, or imaginaries (e.g. Bulkeley, 2016; Bulkeley et al., 2016;
Milkoreit, 2017; Stripple & Bulkeley, 2014, 2019).
While there is a lot to learn from these various bodies of work, there are surely
important contributions to be made by scholars within IPE. The question is then
what tools do scholars in IPE have to engage and contribute to these debates?
 REVIEW OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL ECONOMY 399

IPE’s contributions to transitions thinking

First, we could identify those specific aspects of the transformation agenda where
IPE may have the most important contributions to existing debates. I highlight
finance here for reasons of space, but other key contributions could come from
political economy accounts of the State, of the nature of power in capitalist society,
or of regulatory politics (see e.g. Breetz et al., 2018).
To date, to the extent that IPE scholars have engaged the financial dimensions
of climate change, it has focused the implications of climate change policy for
finance and the roles and interests of the financial sector in climate policy (see
references in the introduction). Where climate policy is the object it is only
recently that some in IPE and closely related fields have framed it as a transform-
ational problem, turning their attention to how finance might help accelerate low
carbon transitions (Bridge et al., 2020; Christophers et al., 2020).
Yet there is a very significant literature on climate finance, as well as attention
to it by policy-makers, that is crying out for IPE analyses, but to which IPE schol-
ars have for the most part been blind. Most of this analysis has a thin understand-
ing of finance, often simply crudely in terms of ‘how much money is needed to
fund low-carbon development in the global South, and how can that be channeled
in an institutionalized manner?’ (e.g. Steckel et al., 2017, for a similar criticism, see
Bridge et al., 2020). Finance is not understood well either in terms of the specific
financial processes that are the bread and butter of IPE studies of finance, or in
terms of a specific economic sector with particular forms of power and particu-
lar interests.
IPE scholars of finance could overcome this blind spot by making major contri-
butions to the understanding of transformation dynamics through, among other
things: their understandings of the specific qualities of various sorts of financial
instrument and their potential for use to accelerate low carbon transformations
(such as the differences between green bonds, project finance, or carbon trading,
see e.g. Bridge et al., 2020); their analyses of policy or governance interventions
and how they shape the incentives for financiers to engage in specific investment
strategies; their understanding of the spatial or scalar qualities of finance and thus
the potential to take advantage of the spatial qualities of renewable energy or other
low carbon infrastructure; understanding of the political dynamics of central bank
regulation and novel forms of public financing (such as ‘Green Quantitative
Easing’, see Dafermos et al., 2018); or their analyses of the shift to ‘assetization’
(Langley, this issue). Each of these could make important contributions to under-
standing the key types and sites of intervention that could accelerate transformative
action on climate.

The question of growth

Beyond specific literatures such as finance or regulatory politics, IPE has some gen-
eral underpinning assumptions that are worth re-exploring, to enable us to extend
existing work on low carbon transitions (see also Newell, 2019a,b). Perhaps most
obvious of these is the question of economic growth. The process of growth is cen-
tral to the empirical matter of IPE. With a few notable exceptions, all major per-
spectives in IPE have a, mostly unstated but presumed, normative commitment to
400 M. PATERSON

economic growth – the failure to question growth could itself be considered a blind
spot. The same is of course true for policy makers, corporate leaders, and even
most environmental NGOs. The normativity of growth has been challenged again
recently by the rise of the degrowth movement (e.g. D’Alisa et al., 2015; Kallis,
2011), and climate change provides an important part of the argument of degrowth
advocates. But it would be a wild exaggeration to say that degrowth is anything but
marginal politically or within IPE.
This widely held commitment to growth has functioned as a powerful constraint
on even timid climate action. It also remains the case that, at the global level, there
is a pretty strong correlation between the expansion of GDP and continued
increases in carbon emissions. To think about transformation without reflecting on
the commitment to growth is hazardous.
The point here is not whether there are in the abstract sense ‘limits to growth’
(Meadows et al., 1972). It is more to think of the impact of growth as a broad
social imperative on the possibility and shaping of transformative climate action.
Quantitatively this is reasonably easy to understand. To have any chance of meet-
ing a 2
C target, the global economy needs to reduce emissions absolutely by
around 3% per year (and every year that emissions keep going up, the decline
needed after emissions peak is faster still). If the global economy grows at 2%, then
in relative terms, the global economy needs to decarbonize by 5% annually. The
historical rate of relative decarbonization is around 1%. So with existing rates of
GDP growth, we need to increase the historical rate of socio-technical change five-
fold, while with zero economic growth, we ‘only’ need to triple it. And even with
degrowth, we would still need to accelerate it substantially.
This observation provokes many debates. The most obvious tension to explore
is that the transformation will require, among other things, massive investment in
alternative forms of energy, transport, food system, and building infrastructure,
investment that within capitalist conditions at least will be seeking a return and
thus generating future economic growth. Ideas about a ‘Green New Deal’ or similar
package (Luke, 2009) have arguably not yet dealt with the underlying tension raised
by this.
Focusing debates on the question of growth ought to provide IPE scholars with
opportunities to contribute in important ways to thinking about the dynamics of
transformations towards decarbonization. In particular, political economists have
the theoretical tools both to explain why the commitment to growth is so widely
held, and how the politics of growth is central to understanding in particular the
pursuit of ‘tipping points’ that enable rapid transformations.
But raising the question of growth also raises the question of capitalism, since
the most common explanation within political economy (especially but not only
ones derived from Marx) frameworks for the question of why we live in a world
that is obsessed with growth, is because that world is capitalist. That is, it has some
fundamental institutional features – wage labor, commodity production, market
competition - that create dynamics that both generate growth in a highly dynamic
way, but also depend on that growth for its stability.
This is of course one of the underlying reasons for the existence of a large litera-
ture arguing that capitalism has a basically contradictory relationship to climate
change. At one level, it is an easy story to tell about the contradictions between
capitalism and the climate. The contours are well known (see Malm, 2015; Newell
 REVIEW OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL ECONOMY 401

& Paterson, 2010; notably DiMuzio, 2015). Clearly, a broadly convincing story can
be told that the origins of climate change are in specific patterns of industrial
development whose logics can be readily explained in terms of the dynamics of
capitalism. Malm’s Fossil Capital (2015) is perhaps a central starting point for such
an exercise, as it shows in meticulous detail how the class dynamics of Lancashire
mill operations in the early nineteenth century were central to how coal came to
be the dominant power source in the industrial revolution, with huge structuring
effects across the history of the global economy. He shows how the decisive move-
ments in the shift from water to coal were to do with undermining labor activism,
failures of inter-capitalist coordination, spatial contradictions between the availabil-
ity of water and effective supply of labor, among others.
One complicating factor in focusing attention on potential transformations away
from capitalism in response to climate change is the temporal question. If we have,
as the current climate movement slogans tell us, 12 years (by the time this is pub-
lished it will be more like 10) to make the key decisions to get us on the trans-
formation rather than collapse trajectory, then how does this interact with a claim
that capitalism needs to be transcended? For some (e.g. Monbiot, 2019) this
urgency intensifies the need to replace capitalism. But at the same time, it raises
the question of whether or not such a broad change in political-economic system is
possible in such a timeframe. Arguably, capitalism took something in the region of
500 years to become globally dominant, so how would transcending it occur so
much more quickly?
A related issue is to ask whether we can legitimately infer from the historical
dependence of capitalism on fossil energy, whether this is a structural requirement
or rather a (deeply embedded and powerful) historical contingency. There are good
reasons for believing it might be structural (Altvater, 2009) but there are perhaps
similarly good reasons to think that innovation, constant change, ‘all that is solid
melts into air’, is just as strong an intrinsic dynamic of capitalism and that the
investment and technological dynamics of capitalism mean it can in principle shift
to non-fossil energy rapidly. Many capitalists believe this genuinely, and there is
prima facie evidence that the solar and wind revolution is occurring much quicker
than many thought possible, stimulated by such dynamics.
One of the things this focus does however in relation to IPE is to call attention
to capitalism’s materialities in ways that perhaps much work in IPE neglects, and
which taking more seriously would enable IPE to contribute more effectively to
thinking about transformative action on climate change. In part this entails recog-
nizing more fully how to understand the global economy as a material and energy
system (Katz-Rosene & Paterson, 2018), with the history of the global economy
being structured by coal, oil and gas, and then the implications of this for what a
post-petroleum global economy might look like.
But it also entails thinking through the specific socio-technical, or socio-mater-
ial, qualities of the various sectors and practices entailed in the transformation, rec-
ognizing significant variation across them. This is something that much existing
transitions literature does well (e.g. Barry, 2013; Geels et al., 2017; Stripple &
Bulkeley, 2019). Nevertheless, IPE’s particular strength here is to emphasize the
ways that such transformations are driven and constrained by key capitalist dynam-
ics such as those analyzed by Malm in the transition to a coal economy. IPE schol-
ars could make distinctive contributions to understanding how, for example, a
402 M. PATERSON

rapid transition to electric vehicles will be shaped by questions of labor relations,

inter-capitalist competition, intellectual property rights politics, and interstate com-
petition, all features often neglected in existing research. At the same time, such
research ought to contribute to attempts within IPE to understand more fully the
socio-material dynamics of the global economy.
A final point to make regarding IPE’s challenges, is to underscore that some
forms of IPE scholarship are more likely to be able to engage this research and
action agenda than others. It needs an ontological starting point of capitalism
rather than the market, in order to be able to understand dynamic forms of
change, the grounding of the economy in material processes, questions of inequal-
ity and power. It needs to be able to think in terms of transformation and change
rather than seeking stability. Much of the existing focus on global governance
needs at least to be significantly retooled, since its origins are distinctly in attempts
to understand the conditions for producing forms of governance designed to gener-
ate stability, not to contribute to transformative change (much of the recent work
on the post-2007 crisis has focused on stabilizing global finance through novel
regulatory arrangements). It needs to be attentive to questions of inequality and its
effects. But it needs also to be capable of considering the materialities of the global
economy in the ways hinted above.

Conclusions
This piece does not pretend to have offered any ‘solutions’. Rather, it has tried to
provoke IPE scholars to step up to the challenge of using their knowledge to con-
tribute to the challenge of dealing with the climate crisis, to recognize their blind
spot in using their expertise to contribute to these crucial questions for the future
of humanity. Either the world economy will be totally transformed by the abandon-
ment of fossil fuels and the emergence of a renewable economy, the shift from
ruminant agriculture, the shift to electric transport systems, the elimination of
almost all aviation, and the financial and other infrastructure that underpins these
transformations. Or it will collapse as a cascade of climate impacts overwhelm our
social institutions and daily practices. More likely, we will experience some com-
bination of these two processes, both of which are likely to dwarf anything human
societies have experienced, at least on a global basis. IPE is particularly important
to the attempt to chart a course towards the transformative dynamic and away
from the collapse one, since many of the core concerns of political economists are
precisely the drivers both of the underlying crisis but also of the potential for trans-
formative action.

Note
1. I am grateful to Gurminder Bhambra for making this point particularly well in the
workshop at Sheffield that led to this collection of papers.

Acknowledgements
I am very grateful to astute, thorough and helpfully critical comments on earlier drafts by the par-
ticipants at the original workshop in Sheffield in 2019, the editors of this special issue, and the
anonymous reviewers for RIPE.
 REVIEW OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL ECONOMY 403

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor
Matthew Paterson is Professor of International Politics, and Research Director of the Sustainable
Consumption Institute, at the University of Manchester. His research focuses on the political
economy, cultural politics, and global governance of climate change. He is currently completing a
manuscript for a book called In Search of Climate Politics.

ORCID
Matthew Paterson http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0007-2229

References
Altvater, E. (2009). The social and natural environment of fossil capitalism. Socialist Register,
43(43), 37–59.
Anderson, K., & Peters, G. (2016). The trouble with negative emissions. Science (New York, N.Y.),
354(6309), 182–183. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aah4567
Bailey, I. (2007). Neoliberalism, climate governance and the scalar politics of EU emissions trad-
ing. Area, 39(4), 431–442. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-4762.2007.00770.x
Barry, A. (2013). Material politics: Disputes along the pipeline. Wiley-Blackwell.
Bernstein, S., & Hoffmann, M. (2018). The politics of decarbonization and the catalytic impact of
subnational climate experiments. Policy Sciences, 51(2), 189–211. https://doi.org/10.1007/
s11077-018-9314-8
Blyth, M. (2002). Great transformations: Economic ideas and institutional change in the twentieth
century. Cambridge University Press.
Breetz, H., Mildenberger, M., & Stokes, L. (2018). The political logics of clean energy transitions.
Business and Politics, 20(4), 492–522. https://doi.org/10.1017/bap.2018.14
Bridge, G., Bulkeley, H., Langley, P., & van Veelen, B. (2020). Pluralizing and problematizing car-
bon finance. Progress in Human Geography, 44(4), 724–742. 0309132519856260. https://doi.org/
10.1177/0309132519856260
Bulkeley, H. (2016). Accomplishing climate governance. Cambridge University Press.
Bulkeley, H., Paterson, M., & Stripple, J. (Eds.). (2016). Towards a cultural politics of climate
change. Cambridge University Press.
Christophers, B., Bigger, P., & Johnson, L. (2020). Stretching scales? Risk and sociality in climate
finance. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 52(1), 88–110. https://doi.org/10.
1177/0308518X18819004
Dafermos, Y., Nikolaidi, M., & Galanis, G. (2018). Climate change, financial stability and monet-
ary policy. Ecological Economics, 152, 219–234. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2018.05.011
Diamond, J. (2011). Collapse: How societies choose to fail or survive (reprint edition). Penguin.
D’Alisa, G., Demaria, F., & Kallis, G. (Eds.). (2015). Degrowth: A Vocabulary for a New Era.
Routledge.
DiMuzio, T. (2015). Carbon capitalism: Energy, social reproduction and world order. Rowman &
Littlefield International.
Geels, F. W., Sovacool, B. K., Schwanen, T., & Sorrell, S. (2017). The socio-technical dynamics of
low-carbon transitions. Joule, 1(3), 463–479. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joule.2017.09.018
Green, J. F., & Hale, T. N. (2017). Reversing the marginalization of global environmental politics
in international relations: An opportunity for the discipline. PS: Political Science & Politics,
50(2), 473–479.
Grubler, A., Wilson, C., Bento, N., Boza-Kiss, B., Krey, V., McCollum, D. L., Rao, N. D., Riahi,
K., Rogelj, J., De Stercke, S., Cullen, J., Frank, S., Fricko, O., Guo, F., Gidden, M., Havlık, P.,
Huppmann, D., Kiesewetter, G., Rafaj, P., Schoepp, W., & Valin, H. (2018). A low energy
404 M. PATERSON

demand scenario for meeting the 1.5
C target and sustainable development goals without
negative emission technologies. Nature Energy, 3(6), 515–527. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41560-
018-0172-6
Healy, N., & Barry, J. (2017). Politicizing energy justice and energy system transitions: Fossil fuel
divestment and a “just transition. Energy Policy, 108, 451–459. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.
2017.06.014
Helleiner, E., & Thistlethwaite, J. (2013). Subprime catalyst: Financial regulatory reform and the
strengthening of US carbon market governance. Regulation & Governance, 7(4), 496–511.
IPCC. (1990). Policymakers summary, prepared by working group I. In J. T. Houghton, G. J.
Jenkins, & E. J. J. (Eds.), Climate change: The IPCC scientific assessment. Cambridge University
Press for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (pp. xi–xxxiv).
Jorgenson, A. K. (2012). The sociology of ecologically unequal exchange and carbon dioxide emis-
sions, 1960-2005. Social Science Research, 41(2), 242–252. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssresearch.
2011.11.011
Kallis, G. (2011). In defence of degrowth. Ecological Economics, 70(5), 873–880. https://doi.org/10.
1016/j.ecolecon.2010.12.007
Katz-Rosene, R. M. (2019). The treatment of global environmental change in the study of inter-
national political economy: An analysis of the field’s most influential survey texts. International
Studies Review, 21(3), 477–496. https://doi.org/10.1093/isr/viy002
Katz-Rosene, R., & Paterson, M. (2018). Thinking ecologically about the global political economy.
Routledge.
Kindleberger, C. P. (1973). The world in depression, 1929–1939. University of California Press.
Klein, N. (2014). This changes everything: Capitalism Vs. the climate. Knopf Canada.
Koch, M. (2012). Capitalism and climate change: Theoretical discussion, historical development and
policy responses. Palgrave.
Levin, K., Cashore, B., Bernstein, S., & Auld, G. (2012). Overcoming the tragedy of super wicked
problems: Constraining our future selves to ameliorate global climate change. Policy Sciences,
45(2), 123–152. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11077-012-9151-0
Levy, D., & Newell, P. (Eds.). (2005). The business of global environmental governance. MIT Press.
Lohmann, L. (2012). Financialization, commodification and carbon: The contradictions of neo-
liberal climate policy. Socialist Register, 48, 85–107.
Luke, T. W. (2009). A green new deal: Why green, how new, and what is the deal? Critical Policy
Studies, 3(1), 14–28. https://doi.org/10.1080/19460170903158065
MacKenzie, D. (2009). Making things the same: Gases, emission rights and the politics of carbon
markets. Accounting, Organizations and Society, 34(3–4), 440–455. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.aos.
2008.02.004
MacNeil, R. (2017). Neoliberalism and climate policy in the United States: From market fetishism
to the developmental state. Routledge.
Malm, A. (2015). Fossil capital: The rise of steam-power and the roots of global warming. Verso
Books.
Meadowcroft, J. (2009). What about the politics? Sustainable development, transition manage-
ment, and long term energy transitions. Policy Sciences, 42(4), 323–340. https://doi.org/10.1007/
s11077-009-9097-z
Meadows, D., Meadows, D. R., & Behrens, W. (1972). The limits to growth. Pan.
Meckling, J. (2011). Carbon coalitions: Business, climate politics, and the rise of emissions trading.
MIT Press.
Milkoreit, M. (2017). Imaginary politics: Climate change and making the future. Elem Sci Anth,
5(0), 62. https://doi.org/10.1525/elementa.249
Mitchell, T. (2013). Carbon democracy: Political power in the age of oil. Verso.
Monbiot, G. (2019, April 25). Dare to declare capitalism dead – before it takes us all down with it
j George Monbiot. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/apr/25/
capitalism-economic-system-survival-earth
Newell, P. (2019a). Trasformismo or transformation? The global political economy of energy tran-
sitions. Review of International Political Economy, 26(1), 25–48. https://doi.org/10.1080/
09692290.2018.1511448
 REVIEW OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL ECONOMY 405

Newell, P. (2019b). Towards a global political economy of transitions: A comment on the transi-
tions research agenda. Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions, 34, 344–345. https://
doi.org/10.1016/j.eist.2019.10.007
Newell, P., & Paterson, M. (1998). A climate for business: Global warming, the state and capital.
Review of International Political Economy, 5(4), 679–703. https://doi.org/10.1080/
096922998347426
Newell, P., & Paterson, M. (2010). Climate capitalism: Global warming and the transformation of
the global economy. Cambridge University Press.
Norgaard, K. M. (2011). Living in denial: Climate change, emotions, and everyday life. The MIT
Press.
Paterson, M. (2001). Risky business: Insurance companies in global warming politics. Global
Environmental Politics, 1(4), 18–42. https://doi.org/10.1162/152638001317146354
Paterson, M. (2010). Legitimation and accumulation in climate change governance. New Political
Economy, 15(3), 345–368. https://doi.org/10.1080/13563460903288247
Paterson, M. (2012). Who and what are carbon markets for? Politics and the development of cli-
mate policy. Climate Policy, 12(1), 82–97. https://doi.org/10.1080/14693062.2011.579259
Paterson, M., & P-Laberge, X. (2018). Political economies of climate change. Wiley
Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, 9(2), e506. https://doi.org/10.1002/wcc.506
Pelling, M., Manuel-Navarrette, D., & Redclift, M. (Eds.). (2011). Climate change and the crisis of
capitalism: A chance to reclaim, self, society and nature. Routledge.
Roberts, J. T., & Parks, B. C. (2009). Ecologically unequal exchange, ecological debt, and climate
justice the history and implications of three related ideas for a new social movement.
International Journal of Comparative Sociology, 50(3–4), 385–409. https://doi.org/10.1177/
0020715209105147
Scoones, I., Leach, M., & Newell, P. (2015). The politics of green transformations. Routledge.
Seabrooke, L., & Young, K. L. (2017). The networks and niches of international political economy.
Review of International Political Economy, 24(2), 288–331. https://doi.org/10.1080/09692290.
2016.1276949
Steckel, J. C., Jakob, M., Flachsland, C., Kornek, U., Lessmann, K., & Edenhofer, O. (2017). From
climate finance toward sustainable development finance. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews:
Climate Change, 8(1), e437. https://doi.org/10.1002/wcc.437
Stephan, B., & Lane, R. (Eds.). (2014). The politics of carbon markets. Routledge.
Stripple, J., & Bulkeley, H. (2019). Towards a material politics of socio-technical transitions:
Navigating decarbonisation pathways in Malm€o. Political Geography, 72, 52–63. https://doi.org/
10.1016/j.polgeo.2019.04.001
Stripple, J., & Bulkeley, H. (Eds.). (2014). Governing the climate: New approaches to rationality,
power and politics. Cambridge University Press.
Thistlethwaite, J. (2011). Counting the environment: The environmental implications of
International Accounting Standards. Global Environmental Politics, 11(2), 75–97. https://doi.
org/10.1162/GLEP_a_00056
United Nations. (1992). Framework convention on climate change. United Nations.
Unruh, G. (2000). Understanding carbon lock-in. Energy Policy, 28(12), 817–830. https://doi.org/
10.1016/S0301-4215(00)00070-7
Wallace-Wells, D. (2019). The uninhabitable earth: A story of the future. Allen Lane.
Wright, C., & Nyberg, D. (2015). Climate change, capitalism, and corporations: Processes of creative
self-destruction. Cambridge University Press.