Manuscript available upon request.
Rich democracies have pursued decarbonization through a combination of subsidies for capital and compensation for people. While depoliticized developmental statecraft can deliver incremental change in historical contexts of broad-based growth, it cannot transform society. Climate policies aimed at limiting global warming to 2 degrees Celsius would bring about transformative change for virtually everyone. Such a transformation cannot be supported by a technocratic politics of compensation that conceptualizes citizens as bundles of fixed preferences. We argue that, in contrast with contemporary technocratic statecraft, transformative statecraft requires a political infrastructure that can embrace the malleability of preferences and the incommensurability of aims. From this perspective, mobilization—of both capital and people—constitutes a necessary foundation of transformative statecraft. Thus we observe that the mobilization of citizens around collective futures, above and beyond compensatory schemes, will be foundational to the transformative statecraft necessary to securing a green transformation.