Basile IMBERT

Thesis project

"Le tournant vert du conservatisme européen?
Contribution à l'étude de l'écologie conservatrice en France et au Royaume-Uni"
Political science thesis by Basile IMBERT under the supervision of M. Christophe Roux

Abstract: In recent years, France and other European countries have witnessed a revival of conservatism, whether in the production of ideas, in political parties, in social mobilizations or in electoral power relations. At the same time, the looming ecological crisis has led to the affirmation of political ecology in recent electoral victories. While political ecology is traditionally
attached to the cultural heritage of the liberal left, recent years have seen the emergence of conservative ecological thinking in the political field.
The thesis proposed here is a study of the mobilization of the ecological question by European conservative parties, using the French and British examples. Using an approach based on the convergence of intellectual and partisan fields, the aim is to shed light on the
driving forces behind the emergence of a conservative political ecology, by studying it on an intellectual level and also by revealing the strategies of the actors who have enabled its recent affirmation in European conservative parties and movements, eager to catch up with their potential programmatic lag in this field.
In this study, we formulate the hypothesis that the reappropriation of the ecological question by conservative parties serves a strategy of relegitimizing their traditional programmatic corpus.