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Given the centrality of states to socio-technical transitions and deeper transformations, this article makes the case for a richer and more rounded political economy account of the roles that states perform in sustainability transitions.
The role of state in transitions towards a more sustainable society is receiving increasing academic and policy attention. Despite this, the focus often starts (and frequently) ends with the governance of transitions where the state is merely one actor among many and the tensions and contradictions between the range of roles it simultaneously performs often under-analysed. Given the centrality of states to the sorts of socio-technical transitions and deeper transformations required to live safely within planetary boundaries, this article makes the case for a richer and more rounded account of the multiple and often competing roles that states perform in sustainability transitions that goes beyond both narrower questions of governance and a predominant focus either on the ‘environmental state’ on the normative basis of a ‘green state’. Building on key strands of critical scholarship in political economy it highlights, in particular, the value of multiplicity, relationality and global and historical differentiation as being central to understanding the roles states currently play in sustainability transitions and to provide an analytical grounding for assessing the prospects of them playing more transformational and progressive roles.