Eco-authoritarianism: new debates and changing premises

Ideas that liberal democracies are ill-equipped to handle the side effects of industrialisation and mass consumption have been around for at least 50 years. Resource depletion, pollution, and climate change are referred to as acute ecological problems that demand resolute action circumventing the deliberations and compromises of democratic governance. Recent debate on the Anthropocene has further stimulated normative challenges to conventional environmental policymaking and governance. Some go as far as blaming democratic governance for being a major part of the problem. This is not only a matter of suggesting coercive ecological governance as an imaginative policy model; a small group of writers advocates authoritarian governance. This chapter considers this new theoretical debate but also claims that an equally important outcome has been a growing field of empirical research into environmental governance in real-world authoritarian regimes, with a strong potential to make environmental political theorising better grounded.