School of Social and Political Sciences - Research Publications
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ItemFor a progressive realism: Australian foreign policy in the 21st century(ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD, 2022-03-04)What ideas and concepts might be used to reinvigorate a progressive approach to Australian foreign policy? In contrast to the clarity of the international vision provided by right-wing movements, there is uncertainty about the contours of a progressive approach to contemporary Australian foreign policy. This article outlines the basis of a ‘progressive realism’ that can challenge right-wing accounts. Progressive realism combines a ‘realistic’ diagnosis of the key dynamics that underpin contemporary world politics with a ‘progressive’ focus on the redistribution of existing power configurations. Taken together, these two building blocks provide the foundations for a left-of-centre foreign policy agenda. We apply progressive realism to four policy areas: pandemic politics, aid and infrastructure in the Pacific, climate change, and a crisis in the Taiwan Strait. This analysis, in turn, highlights the challenges and opportunities for progressive political actors in crafting foreign policy both within and beyond Australia.
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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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ItemGreat Expectations: The United States and the Global Environment(Oxford University Press, 2022-01-10)This chapter conceptually disentangles the relationship between environmental leadership and special environmental responsibilities that attach to the US as a great power and uses this framework to assess the US’s environmental diplomacy from the 1970s to 2020. It shows that the US has never fully accepted special environmental responsibilities because they cede economic advantages to rising powers and clash with the US-sponsored liberal economic order. The chapter also challenges the conventional narrative that US environmental leadership has been in general decline since the Nixon administration’s diplomacy at Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment in 1972. It identifies the conditions that are most conducive to US environmental leadership and shows that the high point of environmental leadership was the US’s ozone diplomacy under the Reagan administration, followed by the Obama administration’s climate diplomacy, while the Biden administration’s climate diplomacy may give rise to another high point.
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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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Item(Dis)order and (in)justice in a heating world(Oxford University Press (OUP), 2023-01-09)Conventional accounts of the relationship between international order and justice treat order as necessarily prior to justice because it is a precondition for the management of conflict and for collective debates about justice. This contribution takes the climate change challenge as an opportunity to challenge and enlarge this account from the perspective of critical political ecology. This approach highlights the more fundamental socio-ecological conditions that are necessary for the stability and possibility of political order itself. It also directs more systematic attention to how orders themselves disorder the climate in ways that also constitute climate injustices. Structurally generated injustices of this kind cannot be addressed solely at the level of a single regime (via the Paris Agreement). They also require a transformation of the constitutive norms and practices of the international liberal economic order in which the climate regime is embedded so that the order serves the objectives and principles of the regime. However, this is unlikely, and the contribution reflects on the implications for the legitimacy and functional viability of states and the international order in a heating world.
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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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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.
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ItemInjustice, power and the limits of political solidarity(Taylor & Francis (Routledge), 2020-01-02)Brooke Ackerly’s Just Responsibility provides the most significant intervention in the scholarly debates about political responsibility for global justice since Iris Marion Young’s posthumously published book Responsibility for Justice (2011). Like Young, she grapples with globally generated injustices with a focus on sweatshop labour. In sympathy with Young, she seeks to transcend a narrow focus on distributive justice and expose the less visible and more deep-seated, embedded injustices that prevent the realisation of human rights. Like Young, she is critical of a simple backward-looking liability model of responsibility that focuses on individual culpability in favour of a forward-looking approach that focuses on taking political responsibility for less visible, systemic injustices that are collectively produced. Ackerly’s and Young’s approaches are also both firmly anchored in the feminist tradition of critical, emancipatory inquiry that stands in political solidarity with those most affected by injustices, and they are interested in political transformation of injustices rather than merely the amelioration of the most harmful effects.
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ItemRethinking leadership: understanding the roles of the US and China in the negotiation of the Paris Agreement(SAGE PUBLICATIONS LTD, 2020-06-11)The study of leadership in International Relations has followed two different paths: work on hegemony and work on different leadership types in international negotiations. Yet there is little overlap between them and no agreement on the distinctive features of leadership and what connects leaders and followers in a collective pursuit. This article critically engages with both literatures and offers a reconceptualization of leadership as a form of legitimated asymmetrical influence that is marked off from domination and performs an important social function in facilitating collective agency towards common goals in a given community. This account is then operationalised in relation to multilateral negotiations to examine and clarify the roles of the United States and China in the negotiation of the mitigation provisions of the Paris Agreement. It is shown that the US under the Obama administration performed a sustained but largely transactional leadership role in bringing the parties to an agreement while China’s role was predominantly that of a defensive co-operator but with significant moments of shared leadership with the US towards the endgame. The analysis shows that, despite growing international expectations, China, unlike the United States, did not see its role as leading the world.