Creating an APSA Organized Section on Green Politics and Theory

We petition the American Political Science Association (APSA) to restore the Related Group on Green Politics and Theory (formerly the Organized Section on Ecological and Transformational Politics) to the status of an Organized Section. After four years of reorganization, we believe that the group is once again ready to fulfill its important role within the ASPA.

The purpose of the Section is:

--to foster the study of green politics and theory within the discipline of political science;
--to encourage innovative and rigorous research in the area of green politics and theory;
--to provide for the development of a supportive community of scholars within the larger political science and interdisciplinary academic community.

As the dimensions of the continuing global ecological crisis become better understood, with the accelerating melting of glaciers, IPCC data indicating more serious global warming, water shortages, air pollution, and environmental-caused diseases, the importance of encouraging the study of green politics and societal transformation becomes even greater. Recent events such as Al Gores Nobel Prize and the upcoming global meeting on climate change in Copenhagen emphasize the need for more focus on these issues within the APSA, and an important step is to restore the Green Politics and Theory section (now a Related Group) to its previous status as an Organized Section.

Such an increase in organizational visibility and stature will create more panels at the annual meeting so that scholars within Political Scienceand withoutstudying green and environmental politics can showcase their work and inform other political scientists about the relevance of this arguably the planets most important challenge and research subject. Also, it will give graduate students more space to present their work as they develop their research agendas.

The global ecological crisis not only cuts across disciplines, it is a discipline-wide, urgent subject within the discipline of Political Science: political theorists, Americanists, policy students, International Relations specialists, urbanists, comparativists, and social change advocates, all can find a component of this wide-ranging subject that is central to their concerns. Regional conferences regularly feature a substantial number of panels addressing issues of green politics, in particular a very active group on Environmental Political Theory at the Western Political Science Association meetings.

For these reasons, we petition the APSA to restore the Green Politics and Theory group to Organized Section status. With the signatures of 200 members attached to this petition, we will be taking another step in focusing more attention on this vital topic and giving it the central place in our discipline that it deserves.