The Climate Hinge: Green Industrial Transitions in the Global South

Lecture with:
Benjamin Bradlow
Assistant Professor of Sociology and International Affairs
Princeton University

Through a comparative study of the automotive sectors in Brazil and South Africa, The Climate Hinge shows how inherited energy infrastructures shape markets, coalitions, state capacity, and geopolitical positioning. Drawing on more than 120 interviews with auto executives, government officials, engineers, and union leaders, along with visits to factory complexes in both countries, I argue that “climate projects,” state-led efforts to coordinate industrial transformation around decarbonization, depend on “energetic affordances.” By centering industrial transformation, the book brings the sociology of climate change into direct conversation with the classic concerns of development sociology: how systems of production are reorganized, how institutions coordinate change, and how global inequalities structure national futures. Climate change, in this view, is not only an environmental crisis but a hinge in the history of global development.