by Hubert Buch-Hansen and Martin Bæk Carstensen
Addressing the existential threat posed by the climate and biodiversity crises requires deep-seated transformative change. Such change necessitates political action far more radical than that characterising current mainstream policymaking. Yet what sort of policymakers and policymaking could foster the needed radical transformations towards ecological sustainability? This is the question we address in our recent article published in Policy & Politics entitled What kind of political agency can foster radical transformation towards ecological sustainability?
The paper takes “degrowth” as an example of a radical political project, contemplating the sort of political action that could bring about the type of policies its proponents call for. Degrowth involves deep transformations towards a society co-existing harmoniously within itself and with nature. To bring about such transformations, degrowth proponents, for instance, suggest eco-taxes and limits placed on advertising, caps on income and wealth, subsidies for organic agriculture and regulation making it illegal for companies to produce products that cannot be repaired.
We argue that the enactment of these and other degrowth policies requires political agency combining two general attributes. First, agency driven by a genuine appetite for deep change based on outlooks fundamentally different from currently prevailing ones. Second, agency of political actors who navigate in and act on the social world as it exists, i.e., agents who pursue change based on already existing resources, ideas, institutions, structures.
In this context, our article offers a reconceptualisation of a popular vision of agency in policy research: the bricoleur. The political agent we envision seeks to reinstate order in the world, rather than in capitalism, draws on a wide range of resources and engages with broad groups of actors in inclusive political processes.
You can read the original research in Policy & Politics at
Buch-Hansen, H., & Carstensen, M. B. (2024). What kind of political agency can foster radical transformation towards ecological sustainability?. Policy & Politics, 1-19 https://doi.org/10.1332/03055736Y2023D000000025
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