Comparative capitalisms in the Anthropocene: a research agenda for green transition

Climate change and the impacts of the Anthropocene, which have come to be understood as human-driven environmental change, pose existential threats to humanity. Anthropocene risks demonstrate that existing fossil-fuel-intensive and growth-oriented capitalist development is unsustainable and the urgent need to transition towards greener forms of development is widely recognised. Comparative Political Economy (CPE) should be well placed to guide and evaluate green transition, yet it typifies a wider disconnect between political economy and the environment.

This project seeks to understand and transcend that disconnect. Developing a critical genealogy of CPE’s post-war emergence, the article examines CPE’s paradigmatic evolution and fitness for grappling with the Anthropocene. It argues that dominant theoretical paradigms (Varieties of Capitalism and Growth Models approaches) are grounded in a ‘nature/society’ dualism that treats national economic models as environmentally disembedded and causally independent from the Earth System. Economic growth is uncritically elevated as a dominant comparative metric, normative aspiration, and policy objective for capitalist development. These characteristics limit the capacity to engage with green transition. Embedding CPE within ecological considerations, the project selectively repurposes the field’s existing conceptual insights to develop hypotheses concerning comparative capitalisms and green transition in the Anthropocene.