Green Economic Planning From Concept to Practice: Comparing the Cases of China, Denmark, and Post-war France

A consensus is starting to form in political economy and environmental politics around the need for strong green states as central actors in sustainability transformations. But the literature has yet to clarify which institutional or political-economic re-arrangements this entails. This is especially true when it comes to the lack of imagination of political economy in the area of planning. We argue that green economic planning covers a range of necessary and effective policy and administrative instruments that represent the best available options to transform economies at a pace and scale that respects Paris-compliant decarbonization pathways. While historical (but largely forgotten) experiences with indicative planning in the post-World War II era demonstrate the effectiveness of economic planning, important questions are raised when considering these options for sustainability transformations under contemporary capitalism: Which forms of planning are feasible under conditions of intense financialization and the constraints of global value chains? Can planning ‘undo’ or ‘remake’ environmentally destructive industries today to the same extent that it was able to produce industrialization historically?