Re‐stating power: How states make, tame, and shape markets

Abstract

AbstractThis article presents the argument that states work in and through markets to actively balance competing interests and manage contradictions and disequilibrium. I focus on four processes reshaping Australia’s electricity governance in the last two decades, namely deregulation, (de)centralisation, decarbonisation, and digitalisation, and show the ubiquity of state spatial strategies to govern through markets. I establish the historical legacy of subnational state‐led development in Australian electricity, then examine how recent deregulatory processes have resulted in new modes of state power exercised through the creation and taming of markets. My claims are that subnational governments continue to exercise authoritative power under Australian federalism and that new networks of techno‐managerial market governance remain subject to hierarchical state power. The purchase of key electricity assets has become a strategy for exercising state influence in and through the market. Political and spatial economic geographies of Australian energy continue to shape the struggles over energy futures, requiring attention to place, scale, territory, and network. The socio‐spatial dimensions of state strategies reveal complex and vacillating modes of state power. State action is characterised by a lack of coordination rather than unification at different scales, and the capacity to execute state projects is complicated by discursive and agential politics.