What role does the state play in just low-carbon transitions? This project elaborates, conceptually and empirically, transformative state-centered models outside the macrofinancial constraints inherited from decades of financialised capitalism. It captures such models under the conceptual umbrella of the Big Green State, understood as a state with capacity to plan and finance decarbonisation through public ownership of strategic green infrastructure and manufacturing, alongside capacity to discipline carbon capital into shrinking its carbon footprint. The project uses a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods to theorise the constructive and repressive features of Big Green State/s. It draws on the recent historical experience of successful capitalist state-driven projects, particularly but not exclusively in East Asia, where developmental states exercised close control over domestic credit flows to strategic sectors while instituting a set of ‘coercive institutions’ to discipline private capital into strategic state priorities. State capacity was further anchored in closer monetary-fiscal cooperation and capital controls that protected macroeconomic policy space, allowing states room for sectoral policy failure, a critical component given the range of carbon assets that will be stranded on private balance sheets, threatening financial instability. It extends insights from these historical examples with ongoing state-led decarbonization projects in Brazil, Colombia and China. 

The project has three aims. It (a) rethinks conceptually state credit as an instrument of decarbonization, b) elaborates a novel theoretical account of the state/capital nexus for decarbonisation, focusing on new architectures of ‘green coercive institutions’ that could discipline private (financial) capital into decarbonization priorities; and c) theorizes the macrofinancial roots of climate justice and the democractic aspects of planning orderly decarbonization