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What would constitute a definitively "green"
state? In this important 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 years most environmental scholars
and environmentalists have characterized the sovereign state
as ineffectual and have criticized nations for perpetuating
ecological destruction. Going consciously against the grain
of much current thinking, this book argues that the state
is still the preeminent political institution for addressing
environmental problems. States remain the gatekeepers of
the global order, and greening the state is a necessary
step, Eckersley argues, toward greening domestic and international
policy and law.
The Green State seeks to connect
the moral and practical concerns of the environmental movement
with contemporary theories about the state, democracy, and
justice. Eckersley's proposed "critical political ecology"
expands the boundaries of the moral community to include
the natural environment in which the human community is
embedded. This is the first book to make the vision of a
"good" green state explicit, to explore the obstacles
to its achievement, and to suggest practical constitutional
and multilateral arrangements that could help transform
the liberal democratic state into a postliberal green democratic
state. Rethinking the state in light of the principles of
ecological democracy ultimately casts it in a new role:
that of an ecological steward and facilitator of transboundary
democracy rather than a selfish actor jealously protecting
its territory.
Robyn Eckersley is Senior Lecturer in
the Department of Political Science at the University of
Melbourne. She is the author of Environmentalism and
Political Theory: Toward an Ecocentric Approach.
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