Andy Scerri

• PhD
• Professor (Associate) at Virginia Tech

In the 1970s, deep ecologists developed a radical normative argument for ‘ecological consciousness’ to challenge environmental and human exploitation. Such consciousness would replace the Enlightenment dualist ‘illusion’ with a post-Enlightenment holism that ‘fully integrated’ humanity within the ecosphere. By the 2000s, deep ecology had fallen out...

Since the global financial meltdown in 2008, moralizing stereotypes of white working-class citizens have proliferated across the United States, the United Kingdom, Australasia, and Europe. Both conservatives and liberals use concepts such as the Appalachian hillbilly, the council estate-dwelling chav, and the outer-suburban bogan to allege white wo...

Contemporary 'crisis studies' seek to advance democracy by emphasizing the threats that technocracy and populism pose to a specific form of it, liberal-democracy. Crisis studies argue that, since the 1970s, technocratic policymaking has deepened economic inequality. This has fostered citizenly anger, which populists exploit. Four well-known iterati...

Efforts to ‘green’ civic republican thought link environmentalist with democratic ends. Suchefforts cast both as contributions to virtuous world-making that contests ‘actually existingunsustainability’ and, so, seeks to realize freedom as nondomination. In the context of theerosion of both democratic and environmentalist achievements since the 1970...

Encyclopedia entry on Ecological Citizenship

The concept “democracy” arose in Ancient Athens. It describes a constitutionally governed polity that sanctions the political power of the organized poorer majority of citizens. Athenians contrasted democracy with positive and negative iterations of two regime types; aristocracy and oligarchy, rule by wealthy or high-born citizens, and monarchy and...

A growing genre of ‘crisis studies’ traces liberal-democratic instability to technocratic reformism and populist reaction to it. Most contributions recommend restoring economic growth, rebuilding civic culture and eschewing populist ‘us-versus-them’ narratives. This literature relies on a problematic way of thinking we label irenicism, and show to...

This chapter recasts normative debates over liberal environmental, and republican ecological citizenship in light of recent efforts to enliven the radical, democratic, or Machiavellian strand of republicanism.

Review Article on Anne Fremaux's After the Anthropocene: Green Republicanism in a Post-Capitalist World, forthcoming in Radical Philosophy Review.

Book review: McQueen, Alison. (2018) Political Realism in Apocalyptic Times, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 244 pages. USD$105.00 (hardback), $27.99 (paperback), $22.00 (eBook). http://www.whpress.co.uk/EV/reviews/253_Scerri.pdf

Book Review: Jedediah Purdy, This Land is our Land, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press (2019)

Michael Roberto’s book offers a riposte to mainstream liberals and so-called #NeverTrump conservatives such as William A. Galston, Madeleine Albright, David Frum, and Yascha Mounk, who have lately taken to fretting about the descent of liberal-democracy into fascism. Roberto shows that much of this wailing and gnashing of teeth stems from a failure...

Book review: Arran Gare 'The Philosophical Foundation of Ecological Civilization: A Manifesto for the Future'

POSTPOLITICS AND THE LIMITS OF NATURE Critical Theory, Moral Authority, and Radicalism in the Anthropocene Andy Scerri Explores why past generations of radical ecological and social justice scholarship have been ineffective, and considers the work of a new wave of scholarship that aims to reinvent the radical project and combat injustice. In Postpo...

Individualism is the social value system that gives precedence to the ethical desires, moral norms and political demands of singular human beings, over those expressed collectively, such as by local communities, religious sects, nationalities, or class groupings. Individualism arose in Western Europe in the 16 th and 17 th centuries, and has been c...

The concept of the “ecological footprint” represents an empirical assessment of the amount of biologically productive land and sea area that is necessary to supply the resources consumed by a human population, and to assimilate the waste associated with that consumption, and to relate these to an assessment of global resources stocks and waste sink...

Given concrete meaning only through international negotiations held in the 1980s, the concept “sustainable development” unites two once disparate ideas. On the one hand, industrial and postindustrial economic practices are depleting the ecosphere upon which society depends, and must be rendered “sustainable.” On the other hand, industrialization an...

Shareholder capitalism can be regarded as a product of the Reagan‐Thatcher “neoliberal revolutions” of the 1980s. Stakeholder capitalism can in many senses be regarded as a response to some of the excesses of the Reagan‐Thatcher era, developed by the center‐Left Third Way parties in the 1990s. By the 2010s, it became clear that both reform programs...

Individualism is the social value system that gives precedence to the ethical desires, moral norms, and political demands of singular human beings, over those expressed collectively, such as by local communities, religious sects, nationalities, or class groupings. Individualism arose in Western Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and...

The academic discipline of anthropology aims to increase knowledge of human society as both a moral community and a feature of the “natural” world. In general, anthropologists have sought to understand how and why some things are valued over others and to interpret what this implies for those communities and for the human community overall. In the...

Abstract The chapter links the concept of ‘biopolitical disaster’ with Foucault’s 1979 argument that liberal government tends towards de-statification—the reduction of liberal state governmentality and growth of neo-liberal party governmentality. The link is developed by considering the part played by the sustainable logistics industry in the neoli...

Lessons from two leaders in the liveable cities race, Vancouver and Melbourne, demonstrate that these cities have followed a quite similar development, policy and planning path and now ride the crest of the wave while facing comparable challenges in preparing for the future. Success in urban liveability speaks to the conditions of life for the luck...

Large-scale waterfront redevelopment projects, an urban development phenomenon that originated in the 1970s, are attractive to a growing suite of cities worldwide. But why? These mega-projects are full of pitfalls, broken promises, cost overruns, disappointments and are often accused of promoting inequality. In this article, we consider the specifi...

It is becoming increasingly clear that neoliberal ideological efforts to depoliticize politics have come to incorporate arguments once associated with radical communitarian, localist and existential critiques of capitalism. This article contributes to cross-disciplinary discussion of how and on what terms this process of assimilation has taken plac...

Cities are home to the most consequential current attempts at human adaptation and they provide one possible focus for the flourishing of life on this planet. However, for this to be realized in more than an ad hoc way, a substantial rethinking of current approaches and practices needs to occur. Urban Sustainability in Theory and Practice responds...

A framework for assessing cities as contributors to sustainable development (SD) is proposed. Differentiating between SD and ecological modernization (EM), we contend that even the weakest EM reforms prompt ecological restructuring (ER). Once unleashed, ER creates four problematics—ecological, economic, political and cultural—which governments at d...

The outcomes of urban redevelopment projects are never predictable, nor do they conform perfectly to any single ideological expression of contemporary development approaches, whether that of rational master planning for the public interest, a market-driven neoliberal approach in the name of the competitive world class city or some other vision of u...

This article seeks to understand the ‘critical capacities’ of actors involved in public disputes by focussing on one such case in Melbourne, Australia. The dispute centred on a non-government school's proposal to develop classrooms in a heritage listed building on public land sublet from a charitable foundation. Following local council's rejection...

This article makes a case for the importance of social learning in urban planning and development practice, particularly in the context of attempts to achieve higher standards of sustainability. We proceed by comparing learning outcomes in Vancouver’s Southeast False Creek and Melbourne’s Docklands urban redevelopment projects. We find that the ins...

We consider the prospect of a trans-Atlantic alliance for a social theory of critical pragmatism, seeking the specific value that French critical pragmatism can offer American pragmatists, and vice versa. We proceed through a discussion of the ontological and methodological keys to French critical pragmatism: the architecture of justification, the...

Lessons from two leaders in the liveable cities race, Vancouver and Melbourne, demonstrate that these cities have followed a quite similar development, policy and planning path and now ride the crest of the wave while facing comparable challenges in preparing for the future. Success in urban liveability speaks to the conditions of life for the luck...

Existing approaches to sustainability assessment are typically characterized as being either “top–down” or “bottom–up.” While top–down approaches are commonly adopted by businesses, bottom–up approaches are more often adopted by civil society organizations and communities. Top–down approaches clearly favor standardization and commensurability betwe...

Efforts to measure social and community sustainability confront a series of methodological dilemmas. We present four key distinctions that tend to orient such efforts: between objective and subjective assessment; between “communities” as the sum-of-their-parts, or as holistic and distinct entities in themselves; between present and future aspects t...

Recent debate on sustainability indicator development has centred upon top-down and bottom-up methods. In practice, a key difficulty is the establishment of defensible issues and indicators to use. Here, we present a structured approach for transitioning from initial community consultation designed to elicit issues to the downstream definition, com...

Over recent decades, normative theories of green citizenship have drawn upon observations that a long-prevalent dualistic understanding of society, as completely subjecting nature, is being displaced by growing political and cultural support for a holistic view of society, as participating in nature. Differences between avowedly liberal and civic-r...

In light of recent interest in theories of green citizenship, citizens' reported values in relation to policy for household sustainability are examined. Theory is combined with an empirical study of citizen attitudes in order to ask how established conceptions of citizenship might obstruct or foster opportunities for the practices that greens advoc...

While 'traditional' scientific endeavor seeks to avoid the problem, Ecological Economics and the broader emergent field of Sustainability Economics (E/SE) are explicitly grounded in a particular ethico-moral assertion, one that defines sustainability as "a normative notion about the way how humans should act towards nature, and how they are respons...

How do 'we' in the wealthy parts of the world rationalize our constant deferral of doing anything much, beyond symbolic moments of ameliorative action, about the problems starkly presented every night on the world news? Intensifying globalization, from electronic capitalism to techno-science, has drawn the fate of the world into an ever-tightening...

First, I briefly examine the genesis of debate to define the World Social Forum (WSF) as a contributor to the global justice movement (GJM), since its emergence in Brazil in 2001. I then consider Geoffrey Pleyers' argument identifying a central tension within the WSF, and the GJM in general, between actors seeking to achieve non-domination by expre...

By the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the unprecedented expansion of industrial production increased the importance to social reproduction of manufacturing workers as a social class. Increased global inter-state competition for markets and resources, as well as concerns over military security, created a sense of urgency around questions of wor...

In some ways motivated by Andrew Dobson’s claim that ‘the form of citizens’ daily lives — their “participation” in the widest sense — is what shapes the contours of sustainability itself’,1 the key normative theories of green citizenship that emerged in the 1990s and 2000s seek to inform policy and practice by outlining the kinds of rights and/or d...

By the 1980s, what was seen by post-Marxists such as Habermas as the dissolution of the political power of a form of life that takes into account the generalizable interests of all individuals pointed to a more comprehensive transformation of the legitimation imperative of state. While ‘old’ social movements continued to engage in civil actions tha...

In the preceding chapters, I have reflected on a situation in which normative aspirations for the greening of citizenship, which outlined a clear emancipatory agenda in the context of the industrial state, have seemingly come to assume a far more ambiguous meaning in the context of the postindustrial ecomodernizing state. As an alternative to norma...

In the 1980s and 1990s, political parties began to enunciate new discourses in their appeals to citizens. In short, across the postindustrial states, the major parties began in earnest to place modernist concerns with self-realization at the centre of their public representations and, eventually, their social policies. Indeed, where the normalizing...

Drawing on secondary and theoretical literature, discussion in this chapter builds upon Dumont’s concept of ‘modern artificialism’ to focus upon the links between citizenship, the state and what is most often discussed in green political theory as nature/culture dualism. In particular, the discussion draws attention away from the dualistic split be...

A transformation of citizenship and, with it, the state and ideology has taken place in the West over the late 20th and into the 21st centuries. Central to this transformation has been a cultural ideological shift, one that has deeply affected possibilities for acting on criticisms of injustice. Concerns with ‘distribution’ that had been central to...

The greening of citizenship, the state and ideology has created both opportunities and bottlenecks for progressive political movements. Scerri argues that these are pursuing justice by making holistic demands for: fair distribution and status recognition, adequate representation and effective participation.

Indicator-based projects have become central to community development initiatives. The quantitative basis of such projects means that achieving ‘sustainability’ can be reduced to a technical task – that of gathering data and ticking boxes. The size, scope, and sheer number of indicators mean that indicator sets are often unwieldy and resist effecti...

Indicators‐based projects are currently central to many local, city‐wide, national and international sustainability initiatives. The quantitative basis of many such projects means that achieving sustainability through them is often undertaken as a technical task. The size, scope and sheer number of indicators included within many such projects mean...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explain and demonstrate the importance and usefulness of mixing qualitative and quantitative approaches in participatory residential sustainability policy and practice. Design/methodology/approach – The approach uses a theoretical model, developed through engagements with cultural and political sociology,...

Since the 1990s, politicising the environment has often involved the development of green concepts of citizenship. Informed by these concepts, cultural anthropology is used to examine prevailing ideas and practices of stakeholder citizenship. Of central concern are conditions wherein heightened individuation coincides with increased awareness of en...