Growth, Democracy or Climate Action? : The New Political Trilemma of Advanced Capitalism

Governments are confronted with a tradeoff between growth, liberal democracy and effective climate action. They cannot achieve all three objectives at the same time. The authors consider which one has to give.

Governments face a conflicting choice between economic growth, democracy and tackling the climate crisis. They cannot achieve all three objectives simultaneously and the growing tensions between them are being played out in countries across the world. It is the new trilemma of advanced capitalist democracy. The authors use this trilemma as a fresh analytic framework to conceptualize these trade-offs and tensions in the study of capitalist democracies. The type of democratic politics required to generate growth and prosperity within the ecological limits of the planet, they argue, has not been taken seriously in the study of comparative political economy and needs to be located at the heart of future research. Given the unprecedented scale of structural reform that governments need to implement to effectively tackle the climate crisis, the authors question whether the transition to carbon neutrality can be done within the liberal rulebook that has governed the politics of advanced capitalism for the past hundred years.