Financialisation and ecological modernisation

Ecological modernisation (EM) scholarship has suggested that different national-level socio-economic institutions may provide more or less supportive environments for EM. Here, the varieties of capitalism (VoC) analysis is extended, but with an emphasis on corporate governance as the central institutional complex that characterises VoC. The liberalisation of international and domestic finance (securitised capital) in the 1970s inaugurated transformative processes in all capitalist countries. This occurred first in the liberal United States and UK, but is now proceeding in the ‘stakeholder corporate governance’ countries that provided the most supportive institutional context for EM. The reorientation of productive corporations towards financial market performance in the United States and UK has adversely affected their innovative capacity, helping to explain these countries’ relatively laggard EM performance.