Decolonising the Environmental State: National Sustainable Transitions and the Question of Coloniality

This article starts with the premise that Western states, in responding to climate change, often reproduce the very capitalist and colonial structures that contributed to the crisis. It argues that the environmental state literature, as the key body of scholarship on this role, has failed to fully capture these intersecting dynamics. The narrow periodisation of the environmental state as having emerged only in the latter half of the twentieth century has limited scholarly engagement with its colonial dimensions. More specifically, this has had significant effects on the ways in which the environmental state’s relationship to nature and territory can be problematised, often sidelining colonial legacies. To address this, the article examines how a Western ontology of nature shapes environmental state responses to climate change and explores territoriality as a colonial mechanism through which the state asserts control over environments and populations. By expanding the conceptual scope of the environmental state, this article seeks to provide a more comprehensive understanding of its empirical realities and normative possibilities.