TY - JOUR

T1 - Green Keynesianism

T2 - Bringing the entrepreneurial state back in(to question)?

AU - Goldstein, Jesse

AU - Tyfield, David Peter

N1 - This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Science as Culture on 12/07/2017, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/09505431.2017.1346598

PY - 2018

Y1 - 2018

N2 - Since the global financial crisis of 2007/8, proliferating calls for a Keynesian Green New Deal have cast the publicly (and environmentally) minded state as a necessary driver of technological innovation and social transformation, while, vice versa, innovation has moved to political centre-stage. The history and genesis of this particular Green Keynesian paradigm illustrate that some of its most high-profile proponents selectively and problematically frame twentieth-century Keynesianism and the 'public good'. It is important to examine critically the calls for an 'entrepreneurial state' in which Green Keynesian ideas are mobilized in support of an agenda for continued and accelerated development of commercially focused, privately developed green technologies. The entrepreneurial state represents a neoliberal re-appropriation of Green Keynesianism, where dominant financial actors (in Silicon Valley, as opposed to on Wall Street) are tapped as the visionaries who can and should set our collective innovation agenda. Although there is a need for large-scale, coordinated techno-social efforts to address climate change, supporting 'green' innovation cannot simply be framed as maximizing 'innovation' while taking the 'state' for granted. Instead, it must entail a careful assessment of the specific trajectories of innovation being enabled and the underlying socio-natures that they maintain and promote. Science and technology studies (STS)-informed analysis allows, and compels, asking how socio-technological innovation and their constitutive power relations are crucially interrelated, making the reshaping of the state-still the primary institution and system of social relations of collective governance-a core but neglected political, technological and ecological project of our time, with a key role for STS.

AB - Since the global financial crisis of 2007/8, proliferating calls for a Keynesian Green New Deal have cast the publicly (and environmentally) minded state as a necessary driver of technological innovation and social transformation, while, vice versa, innovation has moved to political centre-stage. The history and genesis of this particular Green Keynesian paradigm illustrate that some of its most high-profile proponents selectively and problematically frame twentieth-century Keynesianism and the 'public good'. It is important to examine critically the calls for an 'entrepreneurial state' in which Green Keynesian ideas are mobilized in support of an agenda for continued and accelerated development of commercially focused, privately developed green technologies. The entrepreneurial state represents a neoliberal re-appropriation of Green Keynesianism, where dominant financial actors (in Silicon Valley, as opposed to on Wall Street) are tapped as the visionaries who can and should set our collective innovation agenda. Although there is a need for large-scale, coordinated techno-social efforts to address climate change, supporting 'green' innovation cannot simply be framed as maximizing 'innovation' while taking the 'state' for granted. Instead, it must entail a careful assessment of the specific trajectories of innovation being enabled and the underlying socio-natures that they maintain and promote. Science and technology studies (STS)-informed analysis allows, and compels, asking how socio-technological innovation and their constitutive power relations are crucially interrelated, making the reshaping of the state-still the primary institution and system of social relations of collective governance-a core but neglected political, technological and ecological project of our time, with a key role for STS.

KW - Keynesianism

KW - Neoliberalism

KW - Green New Deal

KW - state

KW - innovation

KW - disruptive technology

U2 - 10.1080/09505431.2017.1346598

DO - 10.1080/09505431.2017.1346598

M3 - Journal article

VL - 27

SP - 74

EP - 97

JO - Science as Culture

JF - Science as Culture

SN - 0950-5431

IS - 1

ER -