Critically synthesising a range of disparate literatures and debates, this book asks what is at stake in mounting a decisive response to the ‘socio-ecological crisis’ - a crisis of humanity’s relationship with the rest of nature that places social life as we know it in jeopardy. Martin Craig proposes that political economists within and beyond the field of political ecology make an indispensable contribution to the diagnosis of this crisis and the formulation of prescriptions for its resolution. In a wide-ranging yet concise exposition, he assess the fraught relationship between capitalist societies and the biosphere of which they are a part, and urges a renewed emphasis on political-economic structure and strategy when considering responses to the crisis. The result is a proposal for a critical yet inclusive research enterprise – 'ecological political economy' – within which a wide variety of researchers can readily participate.
This chapter introduces the enterprise of ecological political economy, locating it within the broader fields of political economy and political ecology. In it, I begin to unpack the concept of ‘socio-ecological crisis’, drawing particular attention to the medical roots of the term ‘crisis’: a moment in which a ‘decisive response’ marks the difference between death or recovery. After considering what it means to speak of socio-ecological crisis in these terms, I summarise the broader aims and structure of the book.
In this chapter I turn to the conceptualisation of socio-ecological crisis. Different forms of social organisations have different ecological ‘conditions of possibility’. Socio-ecological crisis is a scenario in which these conditions of possibility can no longer be secured. To capture this in greater detail, I introduce two overlapping conceptualisations: socio-ecological crisis as ‘metabolic rift’ and socio-ecological crisis as the exhaustion of broader ‘socio-ecological relations’. I conclude that the second conceptualisation holds purchase on a broader range of issues that the first misses, describing a more intractable form of crisis with more expansive implications for the fashioning of a decisive response. Consequently, the question of which of these two conceptualisations best describes the socio-ecological crisis that is confronting contemporary societies is of great importance.
This chapter considers how the socio-ecological crisis confronting contemporary societies might be diagnosed. I address the ways in which these predominantly capitalist societies may be failing to secure their ecological conditions of possibility, drawing upon the two conceptualisations of socio-ecological crisis outlined in the previous chapter (crisis as metabolic rift, and crisis as exhausted socio-ecological relations) in order to do so. I conclude that in either case a decisive response to socio-ecological crisis necessarily implies moving to a post-growth form of political economy, but that the pace at which transition happens depends upon which of these two conceptualisations forms a better diagnosis of the crisis confronting contemporary societies.
In this chapter, my focus moves from diagnosis to prescription. I ask how a decisive response to socio-ecological crisis can be accomplished amid the structural diversity of contemporary capitalism. I emphasise political-economic structure and strategy, drawing attention to how the margin of manoeuvre for a decisive response is situated amid the neoliberalising and financialising tendencies that characterise contemporary capitalist accumulation strategies. Contrary to the prevailing embrace of market mechanisms of environmental governance, I argue that a more thorough-going form of political-economic change is necessary if contemporary capitalist societies are to be rendered less ecologically impactful and set upon a path to post-growth political-economic models. I explore the possibilities of ‘green industrial strategy’ as a means to this end.
By way of a conclusion I reprise the book’s major themes and reflect upon its implications. A decisive response to socio-ecological crisis entails a transition to post-growth political-economic models. Yet the precise diagnosis of socio-ecological crisis remains uncertain in crucial respects. Ecological political economists must address this lacuna as a matter of priority. In doing so, they will also define what an effective prescription entails. The issue of prescription raises many more questions still, requiring the participation of researchers of diverse areas of politics and policy in many national contexts. It is the fashioning of a coherent diagnosis and set of context-relevant prescriptions that constitutes the research programme of ecological political economy.
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