Description
The ‘Green Transition’ is now central to academic and policy debates, yet its meaning and drivers remain contested. Narrow approaches focusing only on corporate sustainability or state environmental governance overlook the broader political and economic dynamics shaping these transitions. Recent scholarship emphasises the need to situate green transitions within global capitalism and to account for the geopolitical forces influencing them.
While such dynamics are well examined in sectors like defence, critical minerals, and energy—where geopolitics is seen as inherently relevant—other industries are often treated as insulated from these pressures. The garment sector, for instance, is typically analysed through a narrow environmental governance lens, where only state and corporate sustainability actors are considered. This is a serious limitation: these ‘non-strategic’ sectors are equally embedded in global political and economic relations. Analysing them in isolation obscures critical dynamics shaping how they unfold.
This paper seeks to address this gap by examining the geopolitical foundations of the green transition within the global garment industry, focusing on the Moroccan case. It explores how geopolitical and geo-economic developments—particularly the rise of China, supply chain disruptions, and escalating climate breakdown—inform the actions of the European Union, European nation states, multinational garment retailers, and the Moroccan state. It argues that the strategies of each actor towards the green transition are deeply conditioned by these wider forces.
Empirically, the paper draws on five months of PhD fieldwork in Morocco, including 65 interviews with key industry stakeholders, supplemented by document analysis. In doing so, it aims to contribute to a broader theorisation of green transitions that recognises their global and geopolitical foundations, even in ‘non-strategic’ sectors. The paper delivers key insights into the global governance of green transitions, how this intersects with the power relations pervading global supply chains, and the effects of intensifying geo-economic fracturing within global capitalism.
