Decline by Design: From Decarbonization to a General Theory of Deindustrialization

• In Event: Comparative-Historical Perspectives on Climate Change (Co-sponsored by Environmental Sociology Section)

Abstract

What kind of problem is climate change? I argue that, amongst other things, it is a deindustrializatory one. Scholars have recognized that decarbonization will likely produce outcomes similar to those that devastated Rust Belt cities fifty years ago, drawing upon this analogy to inform just transition planning. While the analogy has proven useful as a heuristic device, the treatment of decarbonization as a manifestation of deindustrialization itself remains theoretically underdeveloped — a deficit compounded by an energy transition literature that collapses the distinct processes of deindustrialization and (re)industrialization into a unified concept of “transition.” I argue against the assumptions that belie transition frameworks, developing instead an approach that takes seriously the analytical distinction between deindustrialization and reindustrialization. In so doing, I develop two ideal types of deindustrialization: liberal and planned. Manufacturing represents the former and decarbonization the latter. Drawing on three years of ethnographic fieldwork in California’s largest oil-producing region, combined with historical analysis of manufacturing decline, I identify four shared structural dynamics that contribute to a general theory of deindustrialization. This framework not only reveals that deindustrialization is a recurrent feature of industrial modernity, but also that designing adequate social policy for decarbonization requires distinguishing between the governance of industrial decline and development, two processes that transition narratives collapse into one.

Author

• Daniel Alain Evrard, Harvard University