Contemporary Populism and the Environment

Abstract

This review engages with literature on authoritarian populism, focusing specifically on its relationship to the environment. We analyze hybrid combinations of authoritarianism and populism to explore three themes from the literature: environmental governance, social and political representations of nature, and resistance. In the environmental governance section, we analyze how governments have increasingly resorted to populist politics to expand extractivism; certain commodities with national security implications have become key commodities to be protected; and borders, frontiers, and zones of inclusion/exclusion have become flash points. In the social and political representations of nature section, we analyze settler colonialism and sacrifice zones as organizing principles for relations with the environment. In our final section on resistance, we review literature highlighting pushback to authoritarian populism from peasant, indigenous, and worker movements. Variants of populism and authoritarianism are likely to persist amid increasing competition over resources as components of responses to environmental and climate crisis. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Environment and Resources, Volume 47 is October 2022. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

Conservative and Far-Right Thought: Toward an Endangered State

“…A brief sample of different contemporary radical movements that have attracted the interest of scholars might include the white identity movement (Belew 2018;Hartzell 2020), the altright (Forscher and Kteily 2020;Hawley 2018;Main 2018;Nagle 2017), Christian nationalism (Baker, Perry, and Whitehead 2020;Berry 2017;Johnson 2018;Philip Gorski and Samuel Perry 2022), fascism (Eco 1995;Griffin 2018;Nilsson 2017), ecofascism (Biehl and Staudenmaier 2011;Campion 2021;Lubarda 2020;Moore and Roberts 2022), authoritarian populism (Berezin 2019;Berman 2021;Bonikowski 2017;Goldwag 2012;İnal 2022;Ofstehage, Wolford, and Borras Jr 2022), and the hard right (Karell et al 2023). For those interested in the contemporary far-right, making any sense at all of this explosion sometimes feels like trying to grab and classify ideological shrapnel as it flies by.…”

Introduction

“…Such populist tendencies have for several years been an expression in climate and environmental policy (see e.g. Allen, 2021;Bosworth, 2021;McCarthy, 2019;Ofstehage et al, 2022). We are unlikely to have heard the last word from this brand of the far right, with its various inflections of denying the realities of the climate crisis.…”

Peter Staudenmaier, Ecology Contested: Environmental Politics Between Left and Right

“…Staudenmaier also spends time critiquing and locating the manifesto in the complicated politics of anarchism, which should demand more attention as global politics continue to evolve and could add to the often vague theoretical conversations around populism (Ofstehage et al, 2022). This chapter’s bibliography functions as a wonderful starting point for any sociologist starting a project on tech skepticism, whether historical or contemporary.…”