Building Transformative State Capacity in Green Industrial Policy: Enabling Sustainability Transitions in Ferry Shipping

Green industrial policy missions toward green transitions depend upon public sector organizations (PSOs) to implement and deliver mission policy goals. We ask how PSOs build transformative capacity in their organizations when implementing green industrial policy to enable sustainability transitions? In four case-in-case studies from Norwegian ferry shipping, we analyze how three PSOs have jointly built transformative capacity in their respective organizations over 25 years, overcoming legal, technical, cost, and fuel availability barriers. We find that PSO transformative capacity-building is an iterative process of relation-building, in which PSOs redefine their roles into orchestrators of green transitions, coordinate closely amongst themselves, leverage critical external resources, and partly reconsider routines and procedures. To enable sustainability transition missions and green industrial policy implementation, PSOs need to engage in joint transformative capacity-building that explicitly target all major transition barriers.