Fighting climate change requires reinvigorated states
By Ishac Diwan & Bright Simons
REPOSTED FROM THE BOSTON REVIEW
Táíwò asks whether nation-states can be corralled to create a green global economy-a starting point, he argues, for anything else that might improve the lives of the world’s poor.
As an economist and a social innovator, we see the prospect from both practice and theory, but it is important to situate the matter historically. The state was central to postwar industrialization; it has been invoked again, following the demise of the Washington Consensus, in efforts aimed at healing society from the human costs of neoliberal globalization. More recently, the call to “bring the state back” has often amounted to viewing the state as a mere platform for creative experimentation with new global governance models. We think this gets it wrong. A successful global fight against climate change will have to be based on reinvigorated states that are, if not democratic, then at least developmental.