Richard Eckersley
Biographic Data
| ID | 269478 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Richard Eckersley |
| GIVEN NAMES | Richard |
| FAMILY NAME | Eckersley |
| SIGNATURE | ECKERSLEY R |
| AFFILIATIONS | The University of Melbourne |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3410-7186 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 62 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 643 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 61 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1989 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 14 |
Nationalism, populism and climate scepticism in Australia
Climate scepticism and hostility to climate policy are common features of populist radical right (PRR) parties. Yet these attributes emerged first in many established conservative centre-right (CCR) parties, especially in Anglophone countries. Given these overlaps, and the growing support for PRR in many countries, are CCR parties also recruiting PRR or developing their own distinctive brand of nationalist populism to legitimate opposition to cli…
Ecological Crises and Ecopolitics Research in Australia
It is difficult to exaggerate the scale of contemporary ecological crises. These challenges, particularly climate change, necessitate new modes of politics and policy, even potentially new institutions, that seem anathema to the emphases of traditional accounts of environmental political science. In this paper, we explore contemporary ecopolitics research in Australia that is attempting to come to terms with the reality of ecological crises and t…
Dis)order and (in)justice in a heating world
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-ecologica…
For a progressive realism
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’ dia…
Greening states and societies
This article examines the limits and potential of the state in orchestrating sustainability transitions from the standpoint of critical theory on the green state. Two interrelated questions are posed. First, to what extent are democratic capitalist states necessarily compromised in their functional capacity to orchestrate ecological sustainability? Second, in light of this analysis, how can a theory of the green state that claims to be critical a…
Injustice, power and the limits of political solidarity
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 visibl…
Rethinking leadership
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…
Ecological democracy and the rise and decline of liberal democracy
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 e…
Global environment
This chapter examines how US foreign policy on environmental issues has evolved over a period of nearly five decades, from Richard Nixon to Barack Obama. It first considers the United States’ environmental multilateralism as well as environmental initiatives under Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Obama, and Donald Trump before discussing key trends and puzzles in US foreign environmental policy.…
History of International Thought
Our attitudes to understanding past texts fall into three conceptually distinct manners of enquiry. The Emblematic Past is resistant to correction, and impervious to criticism, and its characters and events are on permanent loan to the present as symbols indicative of all the vices and virtues of humanity. The Practical Past is the predominant mode of invoking a world of ideas to assist us in working through, or understanding, current problems. I…
The Green State in Transition
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 ext…
Societal and personal concerns, their associations with stress, and the implications for progress and the future
Geopolitan Democracy in the Anthropocene
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 c…
National identities, international roles, and the legitimation of climate leadership
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 …
Responsibility for Climate Change as a Structural Injustice
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.…
Public perceptions of future threats to humanity and different societal responses
The common but differentiated responsibilities of states to assist and receive ‘climate refugees
This paper examines the responsibilities of states to assist and to receive stateless people who are forced to leave their state territory due to rising seas and other unavoidable climate change impacts and the rights of ‘climate refugees’ to choose their host state. The paper employs a praxeological method of non-ideal theorising, which entails identifying and negotiating the unavoidable tensions and trade-offs associated with different framings…
Beyond inequality
Representing Nature and Contemporary Democracy
Editors’ introduction to the interview: Modern environmentalism, whose genesis tracks mainly from the 1960s and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), has forced the anthropocentric emphasis of democracy to account. Nonhuman actors like trees, ecological systems, and the climate have increasingly become anthropomorphized by humans representing these actors in politics. Aside from challenges to the anthropocentric concepts of citizenship, political…
Poles Apart
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 t…
Subjective Wellbeing
Special Responsibilities
The language of special responsibilities is ubiquitous in world politics, with policymakers and commentators alike speaking and acting as though particular states have, or ought to have, unique obligations in managing global problems. Surprisingly, scholars are yet to provide any in-depth analysis of this fascinating aspect of world politics. This path-breaking study examines the nature of special responsibilities, the complex politics that surro…
Global Environmental Politics
This chapter will introduce three of the most prominent global environmental discourses: sustainable development, environmental security and environmental justice. It begins by tracking the emergence of environmental problems as a ‘global’ political problem and tracing the discursive shift from ‘limits to growth’ in the early 1970s to sustainable development in the 1980s. It then highlights the environmental challenges of the post-Cold War period…
Moving Forward in the Climate Negotiations
The slow progress of the international climate negotiations has generated calls for a shift from large-n multilateralism (inclusive multilateralism) to more streamlined negotiations that are confined to the major emitters whose support is crucial for an effective climate treaty (exclusive minilateralism). This article pushes critical theory in an applied direction to explore under what circumstances, if any, minilateralism might help to advance t…
Comparing State Responses
The Oxford Handbook of Climate Change and Society presents an analysis of this issue that draws on the best thinking on questions of how climate change affects human systems, and how societies can, do, and should respond. Key topics covered include the history of the issues, the social and political reception of climate science, the denial of that science by individuals and organized interests, the nature of the social disruptions caused by clima…
Developing a National Index of Subjective Wellbeing
Geopolitan Democracy in the Anthropocene
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 c…
Green Politics and the New Class
The predominantly new middle-class social composition of the green movement has become a matter of increasing interest in the wake of the success of green parties and the growth of an international green movement. This paper considers the concept of the ‘new class' in relation to two explanations for the social composition of the green movement. The class-interest argument seeks to show that green politics is a means of furthering either middle-c…
Moving Forward in the Climate Negotiations
The slow progress of the international climate negotiations has generated calls for a shift from large-n multilateralism (inclusive multilateralism) to more streamlined negotiations that are confined to the major emitters whose support is crucial for an effective climate treaty (exclusive minilateralism). This article pushes critical theory in an applied direction to explore under what circumstances, if any, minilateralism might help to advance t…
Dreams and expectations
Cultural correlates of youth suicide
Ecological democracy and the rise and decline of liberal democracy
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 e…
The Big Chill
The increasing scope and disciplinary force of international trading rules have generated concern in the international environmental community concerning how far different types of trade restrictions in multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs) are compatible with the rules of the World Trade Organization (WTO). Environmental Nongovernment Organizations (ENGOs) have argued that the WTO exerts a form of disciplinary neoliberalism that has a ‘ch…
The State and Fate of Nations
Ecological Intervention
This essay seeks to extend the already controversial debate about humanitarian intervention by exploring the morality, legality, and legitimacy of ecological intervention and its corollary, ecological defense. If the legacy of the Holocaust was acceptance of a new category of “crimes against humanity” and an emerging norm of humanitarian intervention, then should the willful or reckless perpetration of mass extinctions and massive ecosystem destr…
The common but differentiated responsibilities of states to assist and receive ‘climate refugees
This paper examines the responsibilities of states to assist and to receive stateless people who are forced to leave their state territory due to rising seas and other unavoidable climate change impacts and the rights of ‘climate refugees’ to choose their host state. The paper employs a praxeological method of non-ideal theorising, which entails identifying and negotiating the unavoidable tensions and trade-offs associated with different framings…
A new narrative of young people's health and well-being
Young people's health is continuing to improve in line with historic trends. Death rates are low and falling, and most young people say they are healthy, happy and enjoying life. For most, social conditions and opportunities have got better. Health efforts need to focus on the minorities whose well-being is lagging behind, especially the disadvantaged and marginalised. This is the widely accepted story of young people's health. There is another v…
Population Measures of Subjective Wellbeing
Beyond inequality
Ambushed
Portraits of youth
Liberal democracy and the rights of nature
Is there a necessary, in‐principle connection between ecocentric values and democracy or is the relationship merely contingent? Is it possible to incorporate the interests of the non‐human community into the ground rules of democracy? Through an immanent ecological critique of the regulative ideals and institutions of liberal democracy, it is suggested that ecocentric values and democracy can be connected to some extent ‐ at least in the same way…
National identities, international roles, and the legitimation of climate leadership
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 …
The Politics of Carbon Leakage and the Fairness of Border Measures
The article critically examines domestic political concerns about the competitive disadvantages and possible carbon leakage arising from the introduction of domestic emission trading legislation and the fairness of applying carbon equalization measures at the border as a response to these concerns. I argue that the border adjustment measures proposed in the emissions trading bills that have been presented to Congress amount to an evasion of the U…
The discourse ethic and the problem of representing nature
This article critically explores what it might mean to ‘represent nature’ in discursive dialogue and whether such representation must necessarily be anthropocentric in a substantive rather than merely trivial sense. The analysis also examines whether, and to what extent, it is legitimate to inscribe ecocentric norms into the procedures of discursive dialogue as a matter of justice. Against Habermas, it is argued that the capacity for self‐directe…
Free market environmentalism
‘Free market environmentalism’ proposes that environmental problems can be solved by creating and enforcing tradeable property rights in respect of common environmental assets. But while the market can allocate resources efficiently, it cannot by itself perform the task of setting an optimal (in the sense of just) distribution of income nor an optimal (in the sense of sustainable scale) of the economy relative to the ecosystem. There are certain …
Subjective Wellbeing
Green versus Ecosocialist Economic Programmes
Since the crumbling of the Berlin Wall there has been a chorus sounding the death of the command economy and the triumph of liberal capitalism. It does seem to be the case that ‘capitalism is everywhere receiving the flattery of imitation’.1 It is also the case that socialist thought – both western and eastern – is undergoing a profound shake-up in response to the economic and ecological challenges of the late twentieth century. Whether a new soc…
The Green State in Transition
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 ext…
Responsibility for Climate Change as a Structural Injustice
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.…
Diving Evolution
Green Politics and the New Class
The predominantly new middle-class social composition of the green movement has become a matter of increasing interest in the wake of the success of green parties and the growth of an international green movement. This paper considers the concept of the ‘new class' in relation to two explanations for the social composition of the green movement. The class-interest argument seeks to show that green politics is a means of furthering either middle-c…
Habermas and green political thought
Green versus Ecosocialist Economic Programmes
Since the crumbling of the Berlin Wall there has been a chorus sounding the death of the command economy and the triumph of liberal capitalism. It does seem to be the case that ‘capitalism is everywhere receiving the flattery of imitation’.1 It is also the case that socialist thought – both western and eastern – is undergoing a profound shake-up in response to the economic and ecological challenges of the late twentieth century. Whether a new soc…
Free market environmentalism
‘Free market environmentalism’ proposes that environmental problems can be solved by creating and enforcing tradeable property rights in respect of common environmental assets. But while the market can allocate resources efficiently, it cannot by itself perform the task of setting an optimal (in the sense of just) distribution of income nor an optimal (in the sense of sustainable scale) of the economy relative to the ecosystem. There are certain …
Tasmania's labor-green accord 1989-91
Natural Justice
Liberal democracy and the rights of nature
Is there a necessary, in‐principle connection between ecocentric values and democracy or is the relationship merely contingent? Is it possible to incorporate the interests of the non‐human community into the ground rules of democracy? Through an immanent ecological critique of the regulative ideals and institutions of liberal democracy, it is suggested that ecocentric values and democracy can be connected to some extent ‐ at least in the same way…
The political challenge of left green reconciliation
Environmental security Dilemmas
Ultimate Security: The Environmental Basis of Political Stability by Norman Myers. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1993. Pp.xi + 308; index. £17.95 (hardback). ISBN 0 393 03545 X Green Security or Militarized Environment edited by Jyrki Kakonen. Aldershot: Dartmouth, 1994. Pp.xii + 207; index. £35 (hardback). ISBN 1 85521 464 4 Environment, Security and UN Reform by Mark F. Imber. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994. £40 (hardback); £11.95 (pap…
Portraits of youth
The Death of Nature and the Birth of the Ecological Humanities
The fabulous four go green
Social Theory and the Environment by David Goldblatt. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996. Pp.xii +247; index. £45 (hardback); £14.95 (paperback). ISBN 0 7456 1326 8 and 1328 4
Dreams and expectations
The discourse ethic and the problem of representing nature
This article critically explores what it might mean to ‘represent nature’ in discursive dialogue and whether such representation must necessarily be anthropocentric in a substantive rather than merely trivial sense. The analysis also examines whether, and to what extent, it is legitimate to inscribe ecocentric norms into the procedures of discursive dialogue as a matter of justice. Against Habermas, it is argued that the capacity for self‐directe…
The State and Fate of Nations
Economic Progress, Social Disquiet
Surveys of social attitudes are revealing a perhaps unprecedented paradox: a booming economy but persistent community disquiet. The puzzling coincidence is fuelling interest in what is perhaps the ultimate public policy question: is life getting better ‐ or worse? The relationship between economic growth and human development is not as clear‐cut as conventional wisdom and government policy assume. Public opinion surveys suggest that the driving d…
Symposium - Green Thinking - from Australia
The Constitution and Democracy in Victoria
This article provides a broad overview and critical appraisal of the major changes to the role and rationale of government and public administration in Victoria brought about by the Kennett Liberal‐National Coalition government (1992–99). It does so in order to revisit and highlight the fading relevance and viability of the Westminster system of 'responsible government' in the constitutional systems of the States. We show how the Victorian Consti…
Cultural correlates of youth suicide
Developing a National Index of Subjective Wellbeing
The Green State
What would constitute a definitively "green" state? In this important new book, Robyn Eckersley explores what it might take to create a green democratic state as an alternative to the classical liberal democratic state, the indiscriminate growth-dependent welfare state, and the neoliberal market-focused state—seeking, she writes, "to navigate between undisciplined political imagination and pessimistic resignation to the status quo." In recent yea…
The Big Chill
The increasing scope and disciplinary force of international trading rules have generated concern in the international environmental community concerning how far different types of trade restrictions in multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs) are compatible with the rules of the World Trade Organization (WTO). Environmental Nongovernment Organizations (ENGOs) have argued that the WTO exerts a form of disciplinary neoliberalism that has a ‘ch…
Translating Science and Restoring our Sense of Wonder
Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature still stands as an exemplary case of environmental journalism in the way it translates complex scientific ideas into an accessible form and engenders a deep sense of wonder about the natural world. Nonetheless, this article suggests that McKibben’s core claim that we have reached the end of nature (as a human experience of the wild; as an independent, creative force and identity-fixing force; and as a reasonably …
Climate change negotiations at the crossroads
Political science (50 works) · Law (42 works) · Sociology (41 works) · Politics (33 works) · Law (24 works) · Environmental ethics (20 works) · Philosophy (20 works) · Political economy (17 works) · Economics (15 works) · Epistemology (14 works)