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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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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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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ItemAustralian democracy and climate politics for the long-term(Melbourne University Publishing - Mianjin Company, 2015)One of the great ironies in the story of modern representative democracy is that its geographic expansion in the closing decades of the twentieth century has been accompanied by a thinning out in its liberal Western heartland. The short-lived triumph of liberal democracy that followed the crumbling of the Berlin Wall has given way to a slowly building chorus of more sceptical voices, no less in Australia than elsewhere. Alongside the familiar problems of rising political inequality, declining political party membership and general political disaffection there is the creeping worry that liberal democracies may not be capable of handling the major challenges of the new millennium. The looming ecological crisis is widely recognised as one of these challenges, with climate change featuring as exhibit A.
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ItemNational identities, international roles, and the legitimation of climate leadership: Germany and Norway compared(ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD, 2016-01-02)The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) confers an obligation on developed states to lead in mitigation. This obligation challenges traditional conceptions of the modern state by calling forth a more outward looking state that is able to serve both the national and international communities in the service of global climate protection. Yet, the more skeptical theories of the ecological state suggest that climate leaders will only emerge if they can connect their climate strategy to the traditional state imperatives of economic growth or national security. How the governments of Germany and Norway, both relative climate leaders with ongoing fossil-fuel dependencies, have legitimated their climate policies and diplomacy is examined through a comparative discourse analysis. While both governments rely heavily on discourses of Green growth, they also construct national identities and international role conceptions that serve purposes beyond themselves.
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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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ItemPoles apart?: The social construction of responsibility for climate change in Australia and Norway(Wiley, 2013-01-01)This article provides a comparative discourse analysis of the climate responsibility narratives of Australian and Norwegian political leaders during the period 2007-2012. The analysis focuses on how political leaders imagine their country's identity and role in the world and how they connect (or disconnect) these identities, roles and interests with responsibility for climate change, and with their respective energy policies. The analysis shows that the striking differences in mitigation ambition and responsibility discourses between Australia and Norway are clearly related, but cannot be reduced, to differences in their relative dependence on fossil fuel. Rather, differences in national identity and international role conception provide a far more illuminating account than a simple interest-based explanation. However, Australia and Norway are not quite so "poles apart" on their energy policies, and I briefly explore the implications of climate policy hypocrisy.