KARL POLANYI IN THE TRANSITION TO A LOW-CARBON AND BIODIVERSE SOCIETY

The challenges of climate change and biodiversity loss have in recent years increasingly moved up the political agenda of the international community and many of its key states. However the dominant framing remains very technocratic and lacks an appreciation of what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has called ‘the profound transformations that would be needed to integrate sustainable development and 1.5°C-compatible pathways’. This chapter argues that Karl Polanyi’s oeuvre offers a uniquely relevant theoretical framework through which to understand the nature of the transformations required to transition to a low-carbon society, identifying eight core themes around which the chapter is structured. Central to these is the central challenge of decommodifying land, labour and money. It furthermore draws on Polanyi’s three forms of integration – reciprocity, redistribution and exchange – as a way of re-embedding the market in society and overcoming the market society that, it is argued, is the principal obstacle to be overcome if the radical socio-economic transformations required are to be achieved. Other themes relate to Polanyi’s rediscovery of society, his understanding of economics, of freedom and of agency, and his warning of the threats of what he called the ‘machine age’. The chapter ends by critiquing an influential social democratic reading of Polanyi, arguing that he offers a fuller and more demanding critique of the current technoeconomic paradigm and gives clarity to what might constitute the profound transformations that the IPCC calls for.