The Green Planning Commission, an initiative of Common Wealth, has published a report by Common Wealth US Programme Director Melanie Brusseler arguing that private market coordination cannot deliver decarbonization or affordable essential provisions and that public coordination must be the organizing logic of the next progressive agenda and the premise of policy design.
The report’s key points can be found below:
- Achieving decarbonization and ensuring the affordable, universal provision of essentials are the two central goals of a progressive economic policy agenda. Both are challenges of economic coordination: organizing complex programs of economic activity like investment, divestment, production, and provision is needed to achieve them.
- Policy designed to meet these goals has typically been built around private capital as the default actor and market exchange as the default mechanism of economic organization. This is a political choice with structural consequences for the kinds of political and economic transformation that are achievable.
- Private market coordination has four features that systematically work against the investment, divestment, and provision that meeting these goals requires: the profit imperative, a structural bias against long-term fixed investment, the fragmentation of decision-making across uncoordinated actors, and the resistance of existing fossil capital to managed retirement.
- The most ambitious decarbonization policy frameworks to date in the US and UK have been based on a limited role of the state in economic coordination and have fallen short: underdelivering on pace and failing to address working people’s economic insecurity — leaving the green transition dangerously exposed to political backlash.
- Public coordination offers a different set of capacities: the ability to direct investment and divestment without being bound by private profitability, to sequence activity coherently across projects and sectors, to metabolize risk collectively, and to guarantee provision independently of market access. These are precisely the capabilities that decarbonization and the affordability agenda require.
You can read the report here.