Can today’s governments enable a proper green transition before full climate breakdown, or mainly screw it up?

The eminent expert on global environmental policy, Peter Newell, has written a new book to show that governments dohave the necessary capacities to make the required changes before it’s too late.

In States of Transition (CUP, 2025), Newell discusses the limits of today’s policies in ways that reveal their potential for much more powerful effects. While existing efforts at regulation are essential, they also support the same industries they seek to curtail, leaving needed transitions incomplete. He describes states as dynamic sites of continuous improvisation and struggle, with their prospects far more open and hopeful than we often assume.

The presentation and commentators will analyse Newell’s concept of a “state of transformation,” in which the “transition state” moves towards becoming an ecological democracy. The power of Newell’s book lies in its direct address of an overwhelming issue of our time that specifies a programme that will allow us to make the energy transition in time.

At a moment when we have been plunged into another oil war, Newell’s book offers a way out.

Peter Newell is Professor of International Relations at the University of Sussex. He is a specialist in the politics and political economy of environment and development, and was an ISRF Political Economy Fellow 2018-19 for the project The Political Economy of Low Carbon Energy Transitions.

Peter will be joined by Pauline Heinrichs, Lecturer in War Studies at King’s College London, whose research focuses on international climate diplomacy and the contestation of state security narratives in the context of climate change; and Hannah Hughes, Senior Lecturer in International Politics and Climate Change at Aberystwyth University, and author of The IPCC and the Politics of Writing Climate Change (CUP, 2024).

A Q&A will follow, moderated by Christopher Newfield, ISRF Director of Research.