2026/07/08 by Troy Vettese, Isabel Oakes · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · Environmental Science · Social Sciences · #Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature #Sustainability and Climate Change Governance #Water Governance and Infrastructure
paper · doi:10.1017/s1479244326100626
openalex publication_date 2026/07/08 · openalex created_date 2026/07/09 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/09
The introduction to this forum outlines the many ways neoliberal thinkers have apprehended nature over the past century and why this oeuvre has been largely overlooked by historians. The intellectual history of neoliberalism and the study of the environmental crisis have both become sprawling but largely unconnected academic corpuses. This forum has been assembled to act as a conduit and thus help cultivate a new subfield of neoliberal environmental thought. By studying neoliberals as a “thought collective,” an approach pioneered two decades ago by Dieter Plehwe and Bernhard Walpen, it becomes possible to perceive how their environmental frameworks were conceived, debated, and disseminated. The existence of a neoliberal thought collective does not mean that there is a single market-conforming approach to managing environmental problems; rather, there is a wide array of frameworks cohered by a shared canon and worldview. The articles in this forum hint at the creativity and eclecticism of neoliberal bricoleurs, whose arguments range from climate denial, to selfish bees, to privatizing the Moon. As editors, we suggest three reasons for studying neoliberal environmental thought: to better perceive and thwart the thought collective’s objectives, to guard oneself against unconsciously adopting “green” neoliberal frameworks, and to engage fruitfully with the work of a worthy adversary to further the construction of post-neoliberal frameworks and their adjunct intellectual infrastructure.