Solar energy is widely expected to decentralize electricity production but lowerand middle-income countries (LMICs) governments can opt for centralized megaprojects instead. In Morocco, decentralized generation and selfproduction is legalized, but the state, foreign donors, and private investors instead prioritized the Noor Ouarzazate complex, the world's largest concentrated solar power plant. We argue that this outcome is better explained by the political economy of the power market than predispositions of authoritarian or centralized states. Incumbent producers and distributors and their institutional relays blocked reform within a fragmented state lacking adjudication mechanisms. Megaprojects offered the returns of strategic 'extraversion': concessional finance and geopolitical standing mobilized for domestic ends, though these returns proved fragile. Against the dichotomy of 'authoritarian environmentalism' and 'energy democracy', we propose a national-scale political economy sitting between global capital and local impact, and show that the scale of evaluation shapes what counts as success.
International Political Economy (IPE) has long viewed inflation as a central force driving instability. More recently, scholars have foregrounded climate change as a central theme of analysis for IPE. In this article, we undertake a theory synthesis of IPE work in the areas of inflation and climate change to outline how the discipline can advance our understanding of 'Climateflation' - the notion that the causes of climate change, its material consequences, and the efforts to mitigate it, are jointly and increasingly resulting in price volatility. We hypothesize that Climateflation will likely amplify other geopolitical economic stressors to drive mounting net economic costs and sporadic price shocks, contributing to a period marked by 'Great Volatility'. Our work contributes a synthesized theoretical framework of existing IPE literature, demonstrating how the material realities of climate change, fossil fuel dependence, and clean energy transition are likely hampering the stability of the global political economy.
This article revisits the New International Economic Order (NIEO) in the context of digital capitalism and transborder data flows. It argues that Big Tech reproduces dependency through asymmetries in data extraction, infrastructure control, and algorithmic governance. Drawing on dependency theory, debates on NIEO and the New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO), and contemporary scholarship on data colonialism and epistemic justice, the article conceptualizes data decolonization as a practical agenda to redistribute authority over data governance, digital infrastructures, and technological value. Contemporary dependency is embedded in cloud infrastructures, platform ecosystems, technical standards, and systems of value capture dominated by a small number of corporations and states. Building on the principles of sovereignty, equity, and collective self-reliance, the article proposes a Digital NIEO as a normative horizon for more democratic global digital governance.
Geopolitical reconfigurations accompanying energy transitions are increasingly framed as a struggle between entrenched fossil fuel incumbents and a rapidly emerging techno-political formation: the electrostate. Yet what constitutes an electrostate, and how it differs from a petrostate or other state formations, remains under-specific and under-explored. We argue that electrostate formation is best understood not as a clean break from fossil-fuelled political economies, but as an emergent process of institutional and geopolitical reconfiguration marked by continuity as much as change. Rents are redistributed rather than abolished, incumbency is rearticulated rather than disrupted, and new geopolitical dependencies are forged through electrification rather than transcended altogether. We caution against the petrostate-electrostate dichotomy, which obscures the ways states are both shaping and being reshaped by energy transitions. By examining changes both within the state and beyond the state, we examine whether electrification reorders state-capital relations or instead reallocates rents, reshapes coalitions, and reworks dependencies while preserving extractivist and rentier logics, but under new conditions.
