The Neo-Rentier Paradox: The Political Economy of the Green Transition in the GCC

By Adam Alisher

Introduction

In November 2023, Sultan Al-Jaber presided over COP28 in Dubai as the United Nations

climate summit’s president. He was simultaneously the CEO of Abu Dhabi National Oil

Company (ADNOC) and chairman of Masdar, Abu Dhabi’s state clean-energy company. The

appointment drew immediate controversy. To many critics, placing a fossil fuel executive at

the helm of the world’s most consequential climate negotiation represented a structural

conflict of interest. Gulf governments responded that their states were uniquely positioned to

broker a pragmatic energy transition precisely because they understood both sides of the

equation. Both of the positions pointed at the same underlying reality, that in the GCC, the

boundary between hydrocarbon power and green ambition is not a line to be crossed but a

paradox to be managed. The Gulf manages this paradox through what can be called

neo-rentierism: the inherited apparatus of the rentier state, its mechanisms for extracting

rents, distributing benefits, and securing political loyalty, adapted for a decarbonizing

economy rather than dismantled.

The six states of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) collectively hold roughly 30% of the

world’s proven oil reserves and have built their political economies, social contracts, and to a

significant extent their regional influence on the monetization of that resource. Yet all six

have announced significant decarbonization targets. Saudi Arabia has pledged net-zero by

2060 and 50% renewable electricity by 2030. The UAE has committed to net-zero by 2050.

Qatar, Oman, and Kuwait have also each introduced their own emissions reduction strategies.

These pledges are backed by substantial capital commitments: Saudi Arabia’s Public

Investment Fund (PIF) has exceeded approximately $900 billion in assets, the UAE’s Alterra

fund, launched at COP28 with a $30 billion commitment, aims to mobilize $250 billion in

climate finance by 2030, and Masdar in addition has set a target of 100 gigawatts of global

renewable capacity by 2030.

This article intends to argue that these commitments are not structurally coherent. This

incoherence is deliberate as much as it is structural: Gulf states choose to manage the

transition on terms that protect existing rents, but the institutions they inherited leave them

little room to do otherwise. The commitments are at once strategic and constrained. Gulf

sustainability strategies are best understood as a reinvention of the rentier state into a

neo-rentier form, in which the mechanisms of rent extraction and political control are updated

for a decarbonizing world without being fundamentally altered. The GCC’s sustainability

agenda functions concurrently as a domestic economic strategy, geopolitical positioning, and

strategic hedging against future energy system changes. Each of these dimensions reveals the

same structural tension: the fiscal and institutional requirements of maintaining hydrocarbon

revenues inhibit the very transformation these states publicly pursue.

The rentier state framework, first developed by Hossein Mahdavy (1970) and systematized

by Hazem Beblawi and Giacomo Luciani (1987), holds that states deriving the bulk of their

revenues from external resource rents develop distinctive political economies. Because they

can fund public goods, subsidies, and employment without levying taxes, they generate a

social contract in which political acquiescence is exchanged for material provision rather than

democratic accountability. The structural consequences for reform are severe; the model

creates powerful incentives to preserve rent-generating activity and entrenches distributional

networks that resist reorganization. In Beblawi and Luciani's account, this has a further, direct

consequence: because the state allocates rents rather than taxing production, private activity

is drawn toward capturing a share of those rents rather than building productive enterprise.

The stunted private sector is thus not an incidental byproduct of resource wealth but an output

of the rentier mechanism itself, which suppresses the innovation-driven private sector a

knowledge economy requires. This is particularly consequential here, since the

knowledge-driven economies the GCC states claim to be building are precisely those the

rentier model curtails.

This tension is not theoretical, as the “resource curse” literature provides empirical grounding

for it. The research indicates that hydrocarbon wealth tends to weaken non-oil sectors and

reduce pressure for institutional reform which in effect entrenches the very governance

structures that make diversification structurally problematic; essentially the outcome that

these governments now claim to be reversing (Ross, 2001; Sachs and Warner, 1995). A

caveat on aggregation is warranted before proceeding. Although the GCC is treated as a

single analytical category, the sustainability gamble is not uniform across it: it differs in

urgency between high-reserve, low-population states such as the UAE and Kuwait, which can

hedge from a position of relative fiscal comfort, and states facing greater fiscal pressure and

larger domestic populations, such as Saudi Arabia and Oman, for which the social-contract

stakes of a misjudged transition are considerably higher. Nevertheless, the GCC’s

sustainability transition is being attempted from the institutional starting point least suited to

succeeding on its own stated terms.

I. Oil Revenue and National Visions: Funding the Transition

There is an irony at the heart of Gulf sustainability policy that deserves to be stated plainly

before examining the evidence. The same sovereign wealth funds that finance wind farms in

the UK and solar parks in Central Asia are capitalized by dividends from the national oil

companies that produce the hydrocarbons these investments are meant to eventually replace.

The fiscal and the green are not separate strategies pursued in parallel but elements of the

same broader strategy, and their inseparability shapes everything that follows.

The architecture of oil-funded green investment

Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030, launched in 2016 under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman,

is the most comprehensive articulation of this logic. The PIF, capitalized primarily through

Aramco dividends, funds NEOM alongside ACWA Power, Saudi Arabia’s leading renewable

energy developer, and a growing portfolio of clean technology investments. The UAE

replicates this architecture: ADNOC revenues capitalize both the Abu Dhabi Investment

Authority and Masdar, while the Alterra climate fund, launched at COP28, channels

hydrocarbon wealth into global green finance. Both instruments are financed by fossil fuel

rents and both are presented as evidence of the transition away from them. The GCC has also

recorded genuine progress in renewable deployment: installed capacity across the six states

grew from under 200 megawatts in 2015 to over 13 gigawatts by 2024, with both Saudi

Arabia and the UAE setting global benchmarks for low-cost utility-scale solar procurement

(ORF Middle East, 2025). What that progress does not change is the identity of the capital

driving it.

The production paradox

This architecture generates what might be called the “production paradox.” To fund a project

of NEOM’s scale, Saudi Arabia must maintain oil prices at the level required to balance its

fiscal accounts. The IMF estimated Saudi Arabia's fiscal breakeven oil price at $96.20 per

barrel for 2024 in its April 2024 Regional Economic Outlook, a figure that has risen sharply

from $73.30 in Fall 2022 (Callen, 2023) as Vision 2030 spending has accelerated, meaning

the kingdom is becoming more fiscally dependent on high oil prices over time, not less (IMF

Regional Economic Outlook, April 2024). That estimate, moreover, excludes the PIF's

substantial domestic spending; once the fund's outlays on giga-projects such as NEOM are

counted, analysts have placed the effective breakeven appreciably higher, at roughly $112 per

barrel, which deepens rather than relieves the dependence described here (CNBC, 2024). This

threshold creates a structural incentive to maximize production volumes and resist pressure to

constrain output. Sustaining domestic green investment therefore depends on sustaining

global hydrocarbon demand: the rents that fund the transition require that the transition,

globally, proceed slowly enough to preserve those rents. This fiscal dependency was made

visible at COP28 itself, where a joint investigation by the Centre for Climate Reporting and

the BBC revealed that ADNOC had prepared briefing materials for Al-Jaber designed to use

his presidency to advance fossil fuel commercial discussions with at least 15 nations (Centre

for Climate Reporting and BBC, 2023). Saudi Arabia in parallel defended a ‘phase-down’

rather than ‘phase-out’ of fossil fuels, a formulation that ultimately prevailed in the final

agreement text. Framed this way, the production paradox is also a problem of

intergenerational equity and strategic asset management. By maximizing production to

capitalize its renewable and diversified holdings, the state is effectively liquidating one finite

asset, its hydrocarbon reserves and its share of the remaining global carbon budget, in order

to acquire another in the form of green infrastructure and sovereign-fund equity. Whether that

exchange is occurring at an efficient rate is far from clear: too rapid a drawdown of the

carbon asset to fund the transition risks leaving future generations with neither the rents their

predecessors enjoyed nor a green capital base built at a defensible cost.

The neo-rentier social contract: subsidies, transfers, and the limits of reform

Energy subsidies, subsidized water, and public sector employment have historically been the

material basis of political stability across the GCC. Their removal threatens the implicit

compact between ruling elites and the governed. Both Saudi Arabia and the UAE undertook

significant subsidy reform in 2018, reducing fuel and energy support as part of fiscal

consolidation following the 2014 to 2016 oil price collapse. The UAE moved furthest, fully

liberalizing domestic fuel prices. Saudi Arabia implemented phased reductions alongside the

introduction of a value-added tax.

The Saudi approach is particularly instructive. The government did not simply remove

subsidies: it introduced the Citizens’ Account program, a system of direct cash transfers

compensating lower-income households for the increased cost of energy and goods.

Structurally, this represents a partial dismantling, almost a reengineering of the rentier social

contract. The state did not cease distributing material benefits; it changed the delivery

mechanism, shifting from indirect subsidies to direct cash transfers, while preserving the

underlying logic of material provision in exchange for political compliance. The distinction

between de jure and de facto reform is essential here. Subsidies were removed de jure, but

because the Citizens' Account compensates households for the resulting price increases, the

state retains de facto control over the effective price signal facing consumers. This raises a

question about what the reform actually achieves: whether it meaningfully fosters energy

efficiency by exposing consumers to real prices, or whether it merely absorbs the political

cost of inflation while leaving consumption incentives largely intact. The latter reading points

to a kind of circular rentierism, in which the state recycles hydrocarbon rents back to citizens

as cash precisely to neutralize the political friction generated by its own fiscal reforms,

preserving the distributive bargain under the appearance of liberalization. The rentier

mechanism was redesigned rather than removed. Al-Saidi (2020) has theorized this dynamic

as neo-rentierism, and the Citizens’ Account is a concrete institutional expression of it: the

state adapts its distributional architecture to changing fiscal conditions without relinquishing

the political control that distribution enables.

II. Sustainability as Geopolitics: Green Initiatives and Foreign Policy

Gulf sustainability policy functions as a multi-dimensional instrument of foreign policy,

geopolitical positioning, and strategic hedging against the existential threat that global

decarbonization poses to hydrocarbon-dependent states. As Koch (2022) has argued, the act

of greening oil money is best interpreted as a geopolitical practice aimed at controlling the

terms of the energy transition more so than contributing maximally to it: the goal is to remain

indispensable within the energy system, regardless of how it evolves.

COP28 and the strategic limits of green diplomacy

The UAE’s hosting of COP28 was the most visible expression of the use of green diplomacy

to project state modernity and accumulate symbolic capital in international arenas. This

symbolic capital is not sought for prestige alone; much of it is convertible into material

advantage. Signaling alignment with Western environmental, social, and governance (ESG)

criteria reassures the institutional investors, asset managers, and lenders on whose capital

Gulf diversification depends, and as Western markets increasingly screen for climate

exposure, a credible sustainability profile becomes a precondition for sustained foreign direct

investment and access to low-cost financing. The green agenda therefore hedges in a second

sense: it secures not only a place in the future energy system but continued access to the

Western financial system in the present. This use of green diplomacy is a pattern that Koch

(2024) analyzes as ‘green nationalism from above’, whereby Gulf rulers wield the language

of sustainability to legitimize their hold on state power domestically and internationally. The

UAE assembled reported climate pledges exceeding $80 billion at the summit and projected

an image of Gulf leadership on the global climate agenda. Al-Jaber’s dual role as ADNOC

chief and COP28 president presented the core logic of this diplomacy: the priority was in

effect to manage the terms of the replacement of fossil fuels in ways that preserve Gulf

influence and revenue streams for as long as possible.

Strategic hedging: positioning against energy system change

GCC states face a structural medium-term threat from decarbonization. If the global economy

transitions rapidly away from fossil fuels, the primary source of Gulf wealth, geopolitical

leverage, as well as state revenue disappears. The strategic response has been to reposition

these states as indispensable low-carbon energy partners, ensuring that regardless of how the

energy system evolves, Gulf capital, infrastructure, and bilateral relationships remain at its

center. This goes beyond soft power projection as the goal is to function as an insurance

policy against the risk of structural marginalization in a post-hydrocarbon order.

This hedging logic is visible across multiple dimensions. Masdar’s investments in renewable

energy projects across more than 40 countries, from UK offshore wind to solar installations in

Central Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, build the diplomatic and commercial relationships that

would anchor Gulf influence in a post-oil order. ACWA Power’s expansion across Central

Asia and Africa follows the same logic. As Abdul-Jabbar (2025) has argued, Gulf green

development assistance increasingly functions as a form of economic statecraft: it generates

the bilateral dependencies and political goodwill that oil diplomacy once produced,

recalibrated for a different energy era. GCC states are hedging simultaneously across

geopolitical blocs, maintaining relationships with both Western partners pursuing rapid

decarbonization and Asian economies seeking pragmatic energy security.

The Indo-Pacific pivot and the blue hydrogen question

The strategic dimension of Gulf green diplomacy is most analytically transparent in the

Indo-Pacific. Over 85% of GCC crude oil exports are destined for Asian markets, principally

China, India, Japan, South Korea, and the ASEAN economies (IEA, 2024). As these partners

face growing pressure to reduce emissions, GCC states have actively positioned themselves

as providers of low-carbon intensity energy for the region, promoting hydrogen, LNG as a

transition fuel, and offshore renewables.

This pivot contains an important analytical complication. Much of the hydrogen that GCC

states are marketing to Asian partners as low-carbon is in fact blue hydrogen, produced from

natural gas with carbon capture and storage rather than from renewable electricity. The

"low-carbon" label warrants technical scrutiny on this point. Gulf producers and the wider

industry typically cite CO2 capture rates of 90% or higher, yet independent lifecycle

assessments and reviews of operating facilities repeatedly find real-world net capture falling

well short of these figures: an IEEFA review of sixteen CCS projects found that none had

consistently captured more than 80% of their CO2, and most less than half (IEEFA, 2024).

Even where high capture is achieved, residual process emissions compounded by methane

leakage upstream in the gas supply chain leave blue hydrogen well short of genuinely clean.

The gap between the marketed capture rate and demonstrated performance is precisely what

the low-carbon framing elides. Japan and South Korea have each signed bilateral hydrogen

partnership frameworks with Gulf producers that include blue hydrogen as an eligible supply

category (Koch, 2022; IEA, 2024). Gulf producers have lobbied actively for this

classification, in part because it allows natural gas-derived hydrogen to be traded within

low-carbon frameworks. Whether blue hydrogen, if paired with robust carbon capture, can

contribute meaningfully to decarbonization remains genuinely contested in the scientific and

policy literature. What is analytically clear is that the current framing serves the commercial

interests of GCC producers at least as much as the climate objectives of importing nations,

ensuring continuity of hydrocarbon export revenue under a different label.

III. Ambition vs. Reality: A Critical Assessment

Green investment at scale and sustained hydrocarbon dependence are not, by themselves,

proof that the neo-rentier model is failing. Proponents of Gulf sustainability argue that

oil-funded transitions are not inherently self-defeating: Germany’s Energiewende was

state-directed; South Korea’s industrial transformation was top-down. What matters, on this

view, is whether the capital generates lasting structural change, not where it originates.

However, there are three structural constraints specific to the rentier context that make the

Gulf case categorically different.

The rentier social contract as a structural brake

The first and most significant difference is political. State-led transitions in Germany or

South Korea operated within political systems that, however imperfect, generated organized

civil society pressure, electoral accountability, and independent institutional checks on how

transition revenues were deployed. GCC sustainability policy on the other hand operates in

the absence of all three. The rentier social contract (material provision in exchange for

political compliance) creates structural resistance to exactly the kinds of institutional reform a

genuine transition requires. Energy subsidies remain substantial across the GCC despite the

2018 reforms: Saudi household electricity prices remain among the lowest globally, and

industrial energy costs are kept artificially low to support downstream petrochemical

industries whose competitiveness depends on cheap feedstock. Attempts at consumption

reform have encountered sustained resistance from business and industrial constituencies

with close ties to state institutions, a pattern consistent with the resource curse’s prediction of

elite capture of reform processes (Ross, 2001).

Managing the transition through top-down state intervention reinforces rather than dismantles

the institutional patterns of the rentier state. Sovereign wealth funds, giga-projects, and

state-mandated renewable targets preserve the state as the primary economic actor while

private initiative and civil society remain marginal. The knowledge economy that Vision

2030 claims to want is being designed from above. The participatory institutions, regulatory

independence, as well as the bottom-up dynamism that knowledge economies elsewhere

required are largely absent from the institutional environment GCC states are building.

Giga-project skepticism: NEOM as a case study

No single project better illustrates the gap between Gulf sustainability ambition and structural

reality than NEOM. Announced in 2017 as a $500 billion zero-carbon city-region in

northwest Saudi Arabia, NEOM has been presented as the physical embodiment of Vision

2030. The implementation record has been far more complicated. Bloomberg (2024) reported

that population projections for The Line had been scaled back from an initial target of 1.5

million residents by 2030 to under 300,000, with only 2.4 kilometers of the planned

170-kilometer structure expected to be completed by that date. These figures refer to the 2030

milestone rather than the project's ultimate end-state: the full vision of roughly nine million

residents along the entire 170 kilometers was not formally abandoned but pushed onto a far

longer horizon. The revision is therefore best understood as a downsizing of the near-term

phase combined with a delay of the full project, not as a wholesale cancellation of the

original target. A separate Wall Street Journal investigation (2025) revealed that an internal

audit found cost projections had ballooned to an estimated $8.8 trillion for full completion, on

a timeline extending to roughly 2080. That figure covers the entire NEOM build-out rather

than Saudi Arabia's wider Vision 2030 program, yet even so it amounts to more than 25 times

the kingdom's annual government budget, with auditors finding evidence of 'deliberate

manipulation' of financial projections by project management. By September 2025, the Public

Investment Fund had suspended all construction activity on The Line indefinitely, and

NEOM received no mention in Saudi Arabia's pre-budget statement for 2026.

The forced displacement of the Huwaitat tribe from their ancestral lands in the NEOM

development zone carries serious human rights significance, but it is also analytically

relevant to the broader argument. James Scott, in Seeing Like a State (1998), describes

high-modernist state-directed development as a pattern in which centralized authorities

impose large-scale transformations on landscapes and communities without adequate local

knowledge or consent. The low-carbon city being built at NEOM serves as a contemporary

archetype of Scott’s high-modernist framework: the state determines what is to be built,

where, and at whose cost. While the energy source changes, the governance relationship

between state authority and resident communities does not. This continuity suggests that Gulf

sustainability policy, even where it succeeds in reducing emissions, may not produce the

institutional overhaul that a genuine knowledge economy requires, because it is pursued

through the type of centralized, top-down mechanisms that preclude it.

NEOM’s Helios green hydrogen project faces independent structural uncertainty. Global

hydrogen demand remains nascent, and current pricing is not commercially competitive with

fossil fuel alternatives. The 4-gigawatt capacity target raises serious questions about

economic viability given current market conditions. Hydrogen production technologies and

carbon capture systems remain in active development, and their longer-term feasibility cannot

be excluded. The risk is that capital-intensive commitments made at current technology costs

may prove difficult to sustain if demand and price signals do not materialize as projected.

Downstream expansion: when diversification reinforces dependency

A second indicator of the gap between stated ambitions and actual capital allocation is the

trajectory of GCC downstream hydrocarbon investment. GCC refining capacity rose from

approximately 5.7 million barrels per day in 2019 to 6.5 million barrels per day by 2023, an

expansion of roughly 14% during a period in which every GCC state was simultaneously

announcing net-zero pledges (OPEC, 2024). As international pressure on upstream

production grows, GCC states are moving downstream to capture greater value from each

barrel extracted and to produce petrochemical products such as plastics, fertilizers, and

aviation fuel for which demand is projected to remain robust even as transport electrification

reduces petroleum fuel consumption. Saudi Aramco frames this downstream push as

converting low-cost feedstock into higher-value chemicals, with plans to turn as much as four

million barrels per day of crude directly into petrochemicals (S&P Global, 2022). This

strategy can be seen as constituting rational economic management within the hydrocarbon

sector as it reinforces long-term structural dependence on fossil fuel revenue streams,

consolidating exactly the position the energy transition is expected to erode. The strongest

objection to this reading comes from an industry-aligned perspective: downstream expansion

can be cast not as deepening vulnerability but as hedging against it, shifting revenue from the

volatile, demand-threatened crude market toward the more stable and durable specialty

chemicals and materials markets, and thereby de-risking the GCC's hydrocarbon exposure

rather than compounding it. The point has force, but it does not dissolve the argument.

De-risking a revenue stream is not the same as reducing dependence on hydrocarbons; it

preserves reliance on fossil-fuel feedstock while making that reliance more resilient. What

reads as prudent diversification at the level of the firm therefore reinforces, at the level of the

political economy, the very structural dependence the transition was meant to unwind.

Institutional resilience and the constraints of centralized governance

The governance dimension of Gulf sustainability policy connects the preceding observations

to a deeper structural argument about political power and energy systems. Timothy Mitchell,

in Carbon Democracy (2011), argues that oil-based energy systems are structurally less

conducive to democratization than coal-based ones: coal transported by railway gave

organized labor significant leverage to disrupt supply and extract political concessions, while

oil flowing through pipelines and offshore terminals generates no equivalent pressure. Jim

Krane’s Energy Kingdoms (2019), applying this logic directly to the Gulf, documents how

cheap domestic energy has functioned as a cornerstone of political survival for Gulf ruling

families. It essentially acts as a material benefit distributed broadly enough to pre-empt the

formation of the organized economic interests that might otherwise demand accountability. If

the transition to renewables is managed entirely from above, through state-controlled

sovereign wealth funds and nationally-owned energy companies, it replicates this political

architecture rather than disrupting it. Renewable energy revenues would flow to the same

state entities, distributed through the same patronage networks, sustaining the same absence

of the political pluralism that makes genuine institutional transformation possible. The

transition could succeed on technical metrics while consolidating the authoritarian conditions

that prevent the broader reforms GCC states claim to be pursuing.

The populations most directly exposed to climate risk in the Gulf are migrant workers who

constitute approximately 88% of the workforce in the UAE and 95% in Qatar (Gulf Labour

Markets and Migration Programme, 2023), who have no formal political standing to

participate in decisions about the energy future of the states in which they work and live.

Freedom House consistently rates GCC countries among the least free globally for civil

society and press freedom (Freedom House, 2024). These are incidental features of Gulf

governance that a successful sustainability transition might eventually erode, yet they are

conditions that the neo-rentier model is designed to preserve.

Conclusion

The Gulf sustainability agenda is best understood as the reinvention of the rentier state into a

neo-rentier form: one in which the mechanisms of rent extraction, distribution, and political

control are updated for a decarbonizing world without being fundamentally altered. The

production paradox ensures that the fiscal architecture funding the transition also requires it

to proceed slowly enough not to undermine the hydrocarbon revenues on which that funding

depends. Green diplomacy and blue hydrogen are utilized to manage the terms of

decarbonization rather than its full deceleration, practically preserving Gulf relevance across

geopolitical blocs while repositioning fossil fuel products within low-carbon trade

frameworks. And the Citizens’ Account, like NEOM before its suspension, is proof that the

institutional logic of the rentier state is being adapted and extended: material benefits are

repackaged and giga-projects are redesigned, yet the concentration of political control

remains intact.

What genuine transformation would require is identifiable even if politically implausible in

the near term. Transparent carbon accounting aligned with actual production trajectories is

absent: GCC states continue to expand both green investment and hydrocarbon output

simultaneously with no mechanism to reconcile the two. Subsidy reform deep enough to

meaningfully shift consumption patterns remains politically constrained by the social contract

logic the Citizens’ Account was designed to preserve. And the development of genuine

private sector dynamism requires accepting the political pluralism and institutional

accountability that make innovation possible. Those being conditions directly at odds with

the concentrated executive authority on which Gulf governance rests. None of these changes

or policies appear particularly imminent, and the rising fiscal breakeven price suggests the

window for managed transition is narrowing rather than widening.

The stakes extend well beyond the GCC. The Al-Jaber appointment with which this article

opened was not simply a diplomatic embarrassment. It was a structural exposé: the same

institutional logic that makes Gulf sustainability policy contradictory at home also makes it a

particular kind of actor on the global climate stage, one that shapes the terms of international

climate agreements in ways that preserve hydrocarbon relevance. Resource-rich states with

consolidated executive authority, from Kazakhstan to Nigeria to Venezuela, are plausibly

observing the Gulf model with interest. If Saudi Arabia and the UAE succeed in sustaining

revenues through the transition, preserving authoritarian governance through climate

diplomacy, and building sufficient clean energy infrastructure to remain credible post-oil

actors, they will have demonstrated that a resource-rich state can navigate energy transition

without democratizing and without dismantling its social contract. A successful neo-rentier

transition would offer a replicable template for what this article terms green authoritarianism.

The term denotes more than an authoritarian state that happens to install solar panels; it

describes a mode of rule in which the sustainability agenda itself becomes an instrument of

power, the urgency and scale of the climate transition supplying a fresh justification for

centralizing economic control, marginalizing independent institutions, and renewing the

legitimacy of unaccountable executive authority. Its hallmark is sustainability commitments

credible enough to generate international legitimacy, yet managed tightly enough to preserve

political control and resource rents in new forms. The Gulf sustainability arbitrage is, in this

sense, not solely a regional story. It is an early test of whether the global energy transition

will function as a democratizing force, or whether resource-rich authoritarian states will

succeed in capturing and redefining it on their own terms.

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