From sustainable development to carbon control: eco-state restructuring and the politics of urban and regional development

TLDR

Carbon‑emission management challenges sustainable development by introducing new values that can reshape urban and regional development, yet may also intensify uneven growth and state control. The study investigates how a low‑carbon polity as an ideological state project reshapes economy–environment relations in urban and regional contexts and aims to advance theory on state environmental regulation and spatial climate policy. The authors develop an eco‑state restructuring framework that captures conflicts, power struggles, and strategic selectivities governments face when reconciling environmental protection with other pressures.

Abstract

The management of carbon emissions holds some prospect for challenging sustainable development as the organising principle of socio-environmental regulation. This paper explores the rise of a distinctive low-carbon polity as an ideological state project, and examines its potential ramifications for the regulation of economy–environment relations at the urban and regional scale. Carbon control would seem to introduce a new set of values into state regulation and this might open up possibilities for challenging mainstream modes of urban and regional development in a manner not possible under sustainable development. But low-carbon restructuring also portends intensified uneven development, new forms of state control and a socially uneven reworking of state–society relations. In order to explore these issues we start by setting out a framework for conceptualising environmental regulation based around the idea of eco-state restructuring. This idea is introduced to capture the conflicts, power struggles and strategic selectivities involved as governments seek to reconcile environmental protection with multiple other pressures and demands. Overall the paper seeks to make a distinctive contribution to theoretical work on state environmental regulation and the emerging spatial dimensions of climate policy.