ABSTRACT

The 'neoliberal environments' literature broadly focuses on the ways that neoliberalism has, over the past few decades, promoted a broad restructuring of environmental governance in line with market principles. This chapter begins from the dual assumptions that all states in capitalist societies have a first-principle obligation to foster accumulation, and that neoliberalism itself arose as a project aimed principally at restoring and enhancing capital accumulation. Neoliberal climate policy then only really becomes complicated when we acknowledge that it simultaneously consists of a 'developmental state' impulse and a 'deregulatory state' impulse, the former of which aims to expand state power to facilitate accumulation, while the latter rhetorically aims to rollback state power to achieve the same end. The main task then is to identify the main accumulative logics informing the state's climate policy, and the strategies that policymakers use to implement them within neoliberalism's anti-regulatory climate.