Lab 6: Sustainability Politics

Lab Lead: Dr Gareth Dale, Senior Lecturer in Political Economy

Mission: The concern of this research lab is environmental sustainability in the age of climate emergency. While its focus is policy and politics, its scope is interdisciplinary: participation is invited from across the social and natural sciences, and the humanities too. Adopting a twin-track approach, the lab explores, on the one hand, the specific aims and policy reforms of the UK Government’s decarbonisation strategy, and, on the other, politics in the broader sense of interest groups, social forces, power structures and ideologies. It will evaluate decarbonisation policies, analysing their design and purposes, and assessing their effectiveness, but will also feature research on the vested interests and institutional obstacles that are obstructing a consistent politics of sustainability.

Gareth Dale teaches politics at Brunel University. He writes occasional columns for The Ecologist and he co-edited Green Growth: Ideology, Political Economy and the Alternatives (with Jose de Oliveira & Manu Mathai, Zed Books 2016). Gareth is a former editor of the Journal of Sustainable Development and he co-convened the ‘Green Growth & Global Environmental Change’ conference at the United Nations University in Tokyo. He serves as funding reviewer for the British Academy’s Sustainable Development Programme, and as a peer reviewer for Sustainability, Ecological Economics, and Journal of Cleaner Production. His work on green growth and sustainability has been supported, inter alia, by a British Academy fellowship and by the Asia Pacific Network for Global Change Research.