Imagination and critique in environmental politics

Journal Paper by Marit Hammond
Environmental Politics, 30th Anniversary Special Issue | February 2021

Against environmentalism’s roots in radical re-thinking of society, mainstream environmental politics has become a largely technical, problem-solving matter of realising concrete targets. Environmental politics scholarship seems to have followed suit, with most publications in journals such as Environmental Politics focusing on realist analyses of mainstream politics as opposed to radical and critical thought.

This article contends a solely target-driven discourse loses sight of two vital dimensions of environmental politics: radical imagination and ideology critique. Insofar as the late-capitalist mainstream drives both environmental destruction itself and forms of political domination entwined with it—such as depoliticisation and colonisation—critical and imaginative research that challenges this is urgently needed.

Marit Hammond argues that environmental politics scholarship, and thus the journals that give it its platform, have a responsibility to actively withstand the biases produced by ideology, by promoting critical and radical work and engaging with the movements for democratisation and decolonisation of academic practice.