ABSTRACT
Climate change governance is changing and shifting in emphasis from regulating reductions in carbon emissions towards promoting low-carbon development and decarbonization. In recent years, state actors and institutions have been active in developing a number of initiatives and national strategies for supporting low-carbon development. Such decarbonization strategies imply a different kind of direction for climate policy and represent, we argue, steps in the direction towards a decarbonized green state, i.e. a state engaged in greening society through decarbonizing societal structures and systems. In this chapter we ask what the politics of a low-carbon transition might imply for such a state and explore how the state engages in governing transformative change through various arrangements of public policy and governance by examining insights from the case of Swedish climate policy.
