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 gains. While political ecology is traditionally
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 sphere.
The thesis proposal outlined here is a study of how European conservative parties have mobilized the ecological issue, using the French and British examples. Taking an approach that bridges intellectual and partisan spheres, the aim is to shed light on the driving forces behind the emergence of conservative political ecology, by examining it intellectually while also revealing the strategies of the actors who 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 propose the hypothesis that conservative parties’ reappropriation of the ecological issue serves a strategy to re-legitimize their traditional programmatic framework.