This essay on Green party politics sets the broader perspective concerned with science, philosophy and ethics within political practicalities and realities. The rationale is that ‘Green politics’ is not just politics but is motivated by certain concerns, principles and goals. These are fundamental. Politics is not merely instrumental, it is the organisation of means to go somewhere, achieve something. So ideals and values matter. But politics is also about giving principles a critical purchase and effect within a given reality. The purpose of this inquiry is to examine the distinctiveness of Green politics as a ‘new politics’, whether that ‘new politics’ is endemic in a changing society, of which the Greens are an organisational expression, or an idealised vision of the future society which the Greens are attempting to lead society to. A ‘new’ politics implies a ‘new’ type of party organisation, yet Greens have to participate within the terms of the old politics. The ambiguous position of the Greens lies in having to create the new politics in context of the political systems they seek to change, necessitating a degree of adaptation to that system so as to win the electoral support crucial to influencing debates and policy outcomes. These questions need to be set within the context of the broad question of civilisation, for the realisation of Green ideals implies nothing less than a transition to a new social order, a low carbon world beyond systemic imperatives of accumulation and material power. The problematic of change and continuity is at the heart of this question.

A growing interest in environmental issues within the community has seen suburban backyards, streets, houses and curbsides become sites of experimentation around sustainable lifestyle practices. Drawing upon research on various grassroots green initiatives around inner urban and suburban Melbourne, this article discusses what the rise of these kinds of lifestyle politics might mean for conceptualizing scale, citizenship, and social change in the contemporary moment. Drawing on social practice theory and its focus on the embodied, habitual and more-than-human elements of everyday practices, I argue that green suburban lifestyle initiatives such as ‘permablitzes’ are transformational in a number of ways and that they embody, materialize and perform broader sets of changes in people’s lives as they seek to switch from practices of consumption to a focus on self-sufficiency and making do. Video-ethnography and photography are some of the ways in which I have sought to capture such enactments and, in this article, I discuss the ways in which such combined media methods can enable researchers to both document and participate in the politics and practices of lifestyle transformation. Finally, I conclude with a brief discussion of how such a participatory research agenda might be translated into an environmental planning and policy approach that draws upon and enables the distributed agency, creativity and performative energies of community-led green practices.

When organic crises hit, the existing ensembles of social relations start to disintegrate. There is a sequence of apparently unconnected crises, which occur in very different social fields. An organic crisis is a shifting, protracted crisis. Accordingly, the global financial crisis first became an economic crisis, then a debt crisis and a crisis of representation. Right now, as expected (Candeias 2010), the next act of the drama is about to commence: another recession in Europe. Up to now, the political leaders have refrained from addressing the fundamental economic causes of this multiple crisis, let alone its numerous other dimensions. Their attempts to manage the crisis politically are only about preventing the condensation of the multiple aspects of the crisis, about winning time. And yet, their containment strategy is effectively laying the foundation for the next conjuncture of crisis. In this text, I will look at three competing strategic projects in emergence. My aim is not to predict future events, but to determine empirical tendencies. I will discuss the political characteristics of the projects, and focus on how they address the organic crisis and its ecological aspects. Who are the social forces or supporters carrying out the projects? What kinds of coalitions are emerging? What are the economic contradictions and socio-ecological implications (scenarios) of the projects? What does all this mean for the current political situation?

Given certain reactions to the ecological crisis as part of the multiple crisis of capitalism (like the so-called energy transition in Germany), a new mode of development might emerge which can be called green capitalism. This would shift the terrain of social critique and emancipatory social struggles. The paper introduces the debate on “social–ecological transformation” which emerged as a radical part of a more comprehensive debate on “great” or “societal transformation” and highlights its core issues: the issue of a necessary attractive mode of production and living for all, the role of pioneers of change and changing political and economic institutions, the acknowledgment of shifting social practices, the requirement for alternative imaginaries or “stories” of a good life as part of a contested process which is called “futuring.” As an example for alternative imaginaries, the current debate on “degrowth” is outlined and evaluated. The second part of the paper focuses more concretely on issues around the formation and existence of a global green-left. After mentioning a crucial problem for any global alternative—i.e., the structural feature of economic and geopolitical competition which historically divided the global Left and pulled it into compromises at national or regional scales—four requirements or characteristics of a global green-left are highlighted: to weaken and change capitalistically driven competition and competitiveness, to push a social–ecological transformation in democratic ways and not at the back of ordinary people (like conservative and liberal proposals for transformation tend to do), to link more systematically green issues with labor issues and, finally, to transform the overall dispositive of political action from a “distributive” to a “transformative Left.” One dimension of such an enhancement, it is concluded, is a broader understanding of the “economy” itself by acknowledging the demands and achievements of a “care revolution” which will be crucial for an alternative mode of production and living.

Over the last two decades researchers have come to understand much about the global challenges confronting human society (e.g. climate change; biodiversity loss; water, energy and food insecurity; poverty and widening social inequality). However, the extent to which research and policy efforts are succeeding in steering human societies towards more sustainable and just futures is unclear. Attention is increasingly turning towards better understanding how to navigate processes of social and institutional transformation to bring about more desirable trajectories of change in various sectors of human society. A major knowledge gap concerns understanding how transformations towards sustainability are conceptualised, understood and analysed. Limited existing scholarship on this topic is fragmented, sometimes overly deterministic, and weak in its capacity to critically analyse transformation processes which are inherently political and contested. This paper aims to advance understanding of transformations towards sustainability, recognising it as both a normative and an analytical concept. We firstly review existing concepts of transformation in global environmental change literature, and the role of governance in relation to it. We then propose a framework for understanding and critically analysing transformations towards sustainability based on the existing ‘Earth System Governance’ framework (Biermann et al., 2009). We then outline a research agenda, and argue that transdisciplinary research approaches and a key role for early career researchers are vital for pursuing this agenda. Finally, we argue that critical reflexivity among global environmental change scholars, both individually and collectively, will be important for developing innovative research on transformations towards sustainability to meaningfully contribute to policy and action over time.

"Part of The Coming Ecological Revolution Pt 4 Political Philosophy and Ethics by Dr Peter Critchley This paper examines the Green claim that society - indeed, civilisation as we know it - cannot survive on the current basis and that a sustainable society must now be built on ecological principles. For O’Riordan, greens offer a ‘simple binary choice’ between two opposing 'world-views' (O'Riordan 1981: 300). Except that there is no real choice between survival or self-administered destruction. The argument contrasts the 'Life Necessities Society (LNS) to 'the 'Industrial Growth Society (IGS)' (Kvaloy 1990) in terms of competing 'Bioregional’ and 'Industrial-Scientific' paradigms (Sale 1985: 50). These are not choices but alternatives, with green values or principles as imperatives demanding a fundamental reconstruction of political society. For Ophuls, 'liberal democracy as we know it ... is doomed by ecological scarcity; we need a completely new political philosophy and set of institutions' (Ophuls 1977a: 3). This means that incremental reform and a piecemeal gradualism within existing political institutions is merely part of the general crisis of the existing techno-industrial system and not a coherent response to it. The paper argues that the Green failure to develop a new political philosophy and a new institutional framework derives from on an internal fracture within Green politics, split between an authoritarian vision based on fundamental green values and ecological imperatives on the one hand, and a democratic vision which, within an unchanged parliamentary and electoral politics, is based on people’s own opinions. Without a transformation of political institutions, green politics is extremely vulnerable, having to dilute its principles in order to widen electoral appeal, thus risking accommodation and absorption within the existing system, or even coming to supply the rationale justifying authoritarian government when the impact of ecological crisis starts to be felt. To accept the horizons of the existing political system is to limit aims to incremental tinkering within the system, with green politics reduced to little more than the attempt to manage and administer a mounting ecological crisis and disaster. The alternative to Green politics as a rescue squad is ecological praxis bringing about the ecological society, the idea that the practical transformation which brings about the ecological society is at the same time a political transformation in which the individuals composing the demos come to be capable of participating within communitarian direct democracy, thus uniting means and ends, form and content. As a goal abstracted from the constitutive praxis that brings it about, the ecological society is a utopia, incapable of realisation and lacking in electoral appeal. The same applies to all other ecological values. The notion of ecological praxis identifies the individual members of the demos as change agents bringing about the future sustainable society."

Climate change represents the entry of the planet and its inhabitants into uncharted territory, but a meaningful collective response is elusive. This thesis seeks to unravel this political deadlock, in both senses: to trace its structural causes and to transcend it. It aims to trace and to advance the fortunes of ecologism as a political ideology. It approaches climate change as a problem of cultural politics, as a contest to define climate change, as it is the meaning of climate change that sets the parameters of what action can appropriately be taken. Part One employs discourse theory to analyse the formation and reproduction of environmental discourses, how they recruit subjects, and the conflicts between them. Chapter one examines the climate sceptic movements in the US and Australia. It goes beyond analysis of the material bases of these movements to explain how they exploit deep-seated imaginaries of nation and frontierism to corrupt rational deliberation. At the other end of the scale, leading climate nations spruik their green credentials. Yet by analysing the official climate discourse of Great Britain, chapter two reveals a co-optive strategy aimed not at ecological crisis but at the legitimation crisis it poses to key market and state institutions. A third feature of climate politics is the ‘silent majority’. Chapter three enumerates the unfulfilled conditions that keep certain citizens from engaging in climate politics, even when they accept the science. Part One concludes that ecologism, which seeks to reconcile ecology and society, is caught in a triple bind of antagonism, fragmentation, and co-optation that preserves the hegemonic order of growth- and consumerism-based capitalism. Part Two assesses possible ways to transcend the triple bind. Chapters four and five pursue the promise of an ecological subject, a collective agent that retains a kernel of autonomy from hegemonic discourse. It suggests such a subject does not exist behind or before discourse – as a primordial, pre-linguistic subject – but in the spaces between discourses, spaces that are not, as such, natural, but social. Chapter six further develops this argument. Enlisting the burgeoning ‘post-nature’ literature, it contends that an ecological subject, as liberatory social subject, is held back by the overarching category of Nature. Nature is implicated in the hegemony of capitalist modernity, and engenders a transcendent, ‘monotheistic’ planet immune to the damage humans inflict upon it. Finally, I turn to the strategic question of how Greens may negotiate the choice between radicalism – ‘pure’ but irrelevant – and the Faustian bargain of reform. Chapter seven contends that a third strategic alternative exists. It suggests that co-opted environmentalism can undermine the binaries that exclude its radical wing through a strategy of ‘subversive rearticulation’. Through a carefully orchestrated series of discursive pivots, subversive rearticulation can incrementally deflect, and ultimately unravel, the hegemonic logic of the triple bind.

Stella Ghervas and David Armitage, “Introduction: From Westphalia to Enlightened Peace, 1648–1815”, in Ghervas and Armitage (eds), A Cultural History of Peace in the Age of Enlightenment (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020, paperback ed. 2023), pp. 1-18.