The purpose of this paper is to explore the idea of a glass ceiling that blocks the transformation of the environmental state into a properly sustainable or “green” state. The underlying hypothesis is that environmental states are good at managing environmental risks “at home” but fail to bring about the deep transformations required to halt global climate change and biodiversity loss. I take as a starting point the concept of state imperatives and challenge John Dryzek’s view that the legitimation imperative in democratic states may warrant the emergence of a sustainability imperative as another core state function. I show that the environmental state with ecological modernisation as its mode of operation is securely locked into the state imperatives of security, accumulation and legitimation and that within the logic of the capitalist democratic state, there is no toehold for a sustainability imperative that would go beyond the ultimate functional requirements of expanding the economy and improving (the perception of) domestic material living conditions. Environmental politics became a necessity under the legitimation imperative, but any non-expansionist sustainability politics are structurally blocked. Thus, efficiency and technology-based ecological modernisation remains the only game in town for capitalist democracies – by necessity.
I explain the nature of the glass ceiling on a deeper level with a view to the representative structure of capitalist democracy and the related functional requirement to naturalise the economy as an independent and dynamic sphere of social reality (and objectified knowledge) that is needed as an object of government rather than the subject of societal self-creation. This deep structure of the glass ceiling is explained with reference to the writings of Foucault, Hayek and Marx. In conclusion, some theoretical conditions of breaking the glass ceiling are identified.