State, capital and nation in Green New Deal Politics: lessons from the British Labour Party’s 2019 programme

The Green New Deal (GND) has emerged as a crucial progressive agenda for sustainability transition, but there have been few attempts to develop it into a concrete programme for government. This paper considers one such attempt – the GND proposals put forth by the British Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn – and how it tackled three key challenges faced by the broader GND agenda: its reliance on the state, its relationship with capital, and its Western centrism. The paper argues that these challenges gave rise to tensions within Labour’s proposals: treating the state both as an instrument and as an object of change, ambivalence towards capitalism as an economic system and struggling to reconcile the competing forces of nationalism and internationalism. By examining these challenges and Labour's efforts to overcome them, this study provides valuable insights into the messy politics of enacting Green New Deal visions.