School of Social and Political Sciences - Research Publications
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ItemGreen democracy(Taylor & Francis, 2020-09-01)
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ItemGreen Theory(Oxford University Press, 2021)This chapter explores the ways in which environmental concerns have influenced International Relations (IR) theory. It provides a brief introduction to the ecological crisis and the emergence of green theorizing in the social sciences and humanities in general, and then tracks the status and impact of environmental issues and green thinking in IR theory. It shows how mainstream IR theories, such as neorealism and neoliberalism have constructed environmental problems merely as a ‘new issue area’ that can be approached through pre-existing theoretical frameworks. These approaches are contrasted with critical green IR theories, which challenges the state-centric framework, rationalist analysis, and ecological blindness of orthodox IR theories and offer a range of new environmental interpretations of international justice, democracy, development, modernization, and security. In the case study, climate change is explored to highlight the diversity of theoretical approaches, including the distinctiveness of green approaches, in understanding global environmental change.
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ItemGeopolitan Democracy in the Anthropocene(Sage Journals, 2017)The proposed new epoch of the Anthropocene, whereby humans have become the dominant geological force shaping Earth systems, has attracted considerable interest in the social sciences and humanities but only scant attention from democratic theorists. This inquiry draws out the democratic problems associated with the two opposing narratives on governing the Anthropocene – Earth systems governance and ecomodernism – and juxtaposes them with a more critical narrative that draws out the democratic potential of the Anthropocene as a new source of critique of liberal democracy and a new resource for democratic renewal. While Ulrich Beck welcomed reflexive cosmopolitan democracy (understood as a civil culture of responsibility across borders) as the appropriate response to the world risk society, this narrative develops an account of hyper-reflexive ‘geopolitan democracy’ based on a more radical extension of democratic horizons of space, time, community and agency as the appropriate response to navigating the Anthropocene.
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ItemEcological democracy and the rise and decline of liberal democracy: looking back, looking forward(Taylor and Francis Group, 2020)The critical environmental political theory (EPT) of ecological democracy emerged in the 1990s when liberal democracy and cosmopolitanism appeared to be on the rise. A quarter of a century later, as both went into decline in the western heartland, a new iteration of ecological democracy has emerged, reflecting a significant shift in critical normative horizons, focus and method. Whereas the first iteration sought to critique and institutionally expand the coordinates of democracy – space, time, community and agency – to bring them into closer alignment with a cosmopolitan ecological and democratic imaginary, the second has connected ecology and democracy through everyday material practices and local participatory democracy from a more critical communitarian perspective. The respective virtues and problems of each iteration of ecological democracy are drawn out, and the complementarities and tensions between them are shown to be productive in maintaining theoretical and methodological pluralism and enhancing the prospects for sustainability and a multifaceted democracy.
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ItemConvergent evolution: framework climate legislation in Australia(TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD, 2021-09-24)Australia is a well-known climate laggard with a history of political conflict over climate policy and the dubious distinction of being the only country to repeal a national emissions trading scheme (ETS). This article examines the puzzle of why four subnational governments in Australia’s federation succeeded in enacting durable framework climate legislation based on a model that came to be widely regarded as ‘best-practice’. We show that in 2007 South Australia was the first jurisdiction in the world to enact framework climate legislation with a 2050 emissions reduction target and an independent expert advisory committee to provide guidance on the implementation of interim targets. We show that this local legislative innovation set off a process of political learning, policy transfer and a virtuous political competition among like-minded Labour and Labour-Green governments at the subnational level. We call this ‘convergent evolution’ insofar as the legislative innovation and diffusion over the period 2007–2015 was similar to, but occurred independently of, the UK Climate Change Act 2008 and the diffusion of this model elsewhere in Europe. Common to all cases was a strong commitment by the premier and/or the relevant minister to pursue a decarbonisation strategy via targets, and reliance on sources of advice for legislative reform that were professionally and/or politically committed to climate action rather than from vested industry groups. More generally, we argue that framework climate legislation carries lower political risks than an ETS because it does not draw attention to the upfront costs of action. The diffusion of subnational climate change legislation, accompanied by renewable energy promotion, has helped to limit the impacts of Australian national climate policy failure while also providing a springboard for renewed climate legislative momentum at the national level.
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ItemTaking Responsibility for Climate Change(Melbourne University Press, 2012)
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ItemMultilateralism in crisis?(Edward Elgar Publishing, 2015-11-27)The 2009 United Nations climate conference in Copenhagen is often represented as a watershed in global climate politics, when the diplomatic efforts to negotiate a successor agreement to the Kyoto Protocol failed and was replaced by a fragmented and decentralized climate governance order. In the post-Copenhagen landscape the top-down universal approach to climate governance has gradually given way to a more complex, hybrid and dispersed political landscape involving multiple actors, arenas and sites. The Handbook contains contributions from more than 50 internationally leading scholars and explores the latest trends and theoretical developments of the climate governance scholarship.
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ItemResponsibility for Climate Change as a Structural Injustice(Oxford University Press, 2016-01-07)This chapter critically explores the political and moral challenges involved in understanding the harms of climate change as the product of structural injustices with a specific focus on political responsibility. The chapter stages a critical encounter between Iris Marion Young’s account of political responsibility, and the debate among climate justice theorists on how to assign responsibility for mitigation and adaptation to citizens and states. This encounter demonstrates the value of a hybrid approach that includes, and bridges, forward looking shared responsibility and backward looking liability models, but also reveals a major predicament. The more that structural injustices based on historical responsibility are backgrounded, the easier it becomes to reach agreements between the world’s most vulnerable and most privileged. Yet doing so accelerates the skewed distribution of climate vulnerability toward the least privileged, diminishing the common ground needed to achieve an equitable allocation of responsibility for climate change.
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ItemAustralia is a Climate Laggard rather than Leader(Oxford University Press, 2014)The debates are informative and potentially provocative as the book is designed to encourage discussion and analytical and critical thought. For the topics discussed, there is not necessarily a "right" answer.
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ItemThe Green State in Transition: Reply to Bailey, Barry and Craig(Taylor & Francis (Routledge), 2020-01-02)The contributions comprising this special section are part of a more general wave of research that is revisiting and/or re-envisaging the environmental state. They do so from the perspective of critical political economy. This article provides an assessment of their respective contributions while also reflecting on how those seeking to understand the greening (or de-greening) of the state from this critical political economy perspective might extend their critical theory to ‘critical problem-solving’ in ways that are attentive to the politics of transition. To this end, I play Bailey off against Barry and Craig to illustrate how critical problem-solving might be approached.