Basile IMBERT

Thesis Proposal

“The Green Turn in European Conservatism?
A Contribution to the Study of Conservative Ecology in France and the United Kingdom”
Political Science Dissertation by Basile IMBERT, supervised by Christophe Roux

Abstract: In recent years, France—as well as other European countries—has witnessed a resurgence of conservatism, whether in the development of ideas, within political parties, in social movements, or in the balance of electoral power. At the same time, the looming ecological crisis has led to the rise of political ecology, even resulting in recent electoral victories. While political ecology has traditionally
been linked to the cultural heritage of the liberal left, recent years have nevertheless been marked by the emergence of conservative ecological thought in the political arena.
The thesis proposal outlined here is a study of how European conservative parties have mobilized the ecological issue, using the French and British examples. Adopting an approach that explores the convergence of intellectual and partisan spheres, this study aims to shed light on the
driving forces behind the emergence of conservative political ecology, examining it from an intellectual perspective while also revealing the strategies employed by key actors that have enabled its recent rise within European conservative parties and movements, which are eager to make up for their potential programmatic lag in this area.
In this study, we hypothesize that conservative parties’ reappropriation of the environmental issue serves a strategy to re-legitimize their traditional policy framework.