Political ecologies of the Green New Deal: Critiques, contentions and radical appropriations

Abstract

The Green New Deal (GND) emerged forcefully around 2019 as an ambitious, movement-inspired policy framework. Put forward by progressive political parties in the US and Europe, GND programs promised to tackle climate change while advancing social justice through state-led decarbonization efforts. The concrete achievements of such policies have proven disappointing. Yet, the GND framework sparked important debates and ideological and programmatic elaboration within climate justice, feminist, Indigenous, ecosocialist and degrowth movements across the global North and South. This, we argue, contributed to pushing political ecologists out of the comfort zone of abstract critique, and towards engaging with issues of strategy for radical socioecological transformation. The articles in this Special Issue provide a critical overview of, and contribute to advancing, political ecology's engagement with the GND framework. They critically unpack mainstream GND proposals, and the contentions engendered by their implementation, while at the same time exploring processes of — and providing insights for — the elaboration of alternative GNDs informed by anticolonial, anticapitalist and feminist principles. Taken together, these contributions present a comprehensive view of what a GND compatible with political ecology's radical outlook could look like.