Dictatorship and Environment: East Germany and the Limits of Change

Contemporary debates about ‘ ecological authoritarianism ’ underscore the relationship between physical environments and the political systems that seek to control and alter them. At the forefront of these issues, today is a political body ’ s ability to react to climate change and implement carbon-reducing policies. 2 As one of the world ’ s largest economies and an authoritarian state, China has been at the centre of the discourse on ecological authoritarianism. 3 This new attention to authoritarian regimes suggests that, over the last four or fi ve decades, scholarship has tended to privilege environmental movements and politics in democratic systems. The plethora of social science and historical literature on green movements and environmental regulation in liberal democracies, such as West Germany, Sweden and the United States, supports this assertion. 4 If the subject of dictatorship and environment was broached, it tended to be in the context of extreme pollution and ecological devastation. 5