Basile IMBERT

Thesis project

"The green shift in European conservatism?
Contribution to the study of conservative ecology in France and the United Kingdom"
Political science thesis by Basile IMBERT under the supervision of Mr. Christophe Roux

Abstract: In recent years, France and other European countries have witnessed a resurgence of conservatism, whether in the production of ideas, political parties, social movements, or electoral power relations. At the same time, the looming ecological crisis has led to the affirmation of political ecology, even in recent electoral victories. 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 thinking in the political arena.
The thesis proposal formulated here is a study of the mobilization of the ecological issue by European conservative parties, using French and British examples. Taking an approach that brings together intellectual and partisan fields, we will highlight the
driving the emergence of conservative political ecology, studying it from an intellectual perspective but also revealing the strategies of the actors who have enabled its recent affirmation in European conservative parties and movements, eager to catch up on their potential programmatic lag in this area.
In this study, we put forward the hypothesis that the reappropriation of the ecological issue by conservative parties serves a strategy of re-legitimizing their traditional programmatic corpus.