ABSTRACT
Critical political economy approaches to the study and practice of global environmental politics take a range of different forms, but often have as their starting point a set of questions about who governs and how, what is to be governed and on whose behalf. Less concerned with governance per se, other critical political economy approaches from ecological Marxism questioned the premise of ecological modernization and other liberal approaches such as liberal environmentalism, which argued that capitalist growth could be compatible with responding to the ecological crisis. They suggested instead that a second contradiction of capitalism was its tendency to destroy its own ability to reproduce the ecological conditions necessary for its own survival. Academics then sought to develop theoretical approaches to explain the way in which challenges to capitalism were muted and managed by powerful actors and interests to protect the prevailing economic order.
