Collington, Rosie; (2024) Ministries for the Future: National Bureaucracies and the Political Economy of Green Transitions. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

Text Collington_10195881_Thesis_sig_removed.pdf Access restricted to UCL open access staff until 1 September 2025. Download (5MB)

Abstract

National governments around the world have developed multi-sectoral plans to pursue systemic reductions in carbon emissions. In many cases, they are underpinned by domestic legislation and receive broad cross-partisan support. Despite this, even the most pioneering governments are failing to achieve anything like what their national green transition strategies demand. This thesis confronts this paradox by exploring what affects the development of state capacity for implementing initiatives within green transition strategies. It advances a conceptualisation of state capacity for transformational policies as a set of dynamic and interacting processes within national bureaucracies related to access to financial resources, the strategic creation of bureaucratic structures, including coordination mechanisms, the establishment of routines and capabilities, and learning and adaptation within public sector organisations. Through case studies that trace these processes in two countries hailed regionally and globally for their progress in climate policy – Denmark and Chile – it finds support for the hypothesis that the development of state capacity for implementing green transition initiatives is associated with the extent of their convergence with the objectives of bureaucratic financing actors. Using within-case comparative analysis of initiatives that are critical to overall emissions reduction goals, the research suggests that state capacity for implementing green transition strategies develops unevenly across policy areas on this basis. It demonstrates how finance ministries and public investment banks, and their approaches to economic development and growth, influence national bureaucracies’ ability to pursue carbon neutrality. In so doing, it also identifies processes of contestation in green transition governance within, across, and beyond national bureaucracies. The findings point to the importance of embedding ambitious emissions reduction objectives in public finance allocation processes, with broader relevance for debates on policy coordination, structural change and de-risking regimes, and green finance. More generally, they underscore the value of analysing national bureaucracies as sites of politics, and public sector organisations as agents in the international political economy.

Download activity - last month

Export as XMLJSONCSV

Download activity - last 12 months

Export as CSVJSONXML

Downloads by country - last 12 months

Export as CSVJSONXML

Archive Staff Only

View Item