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Dr Fergus Green

Fergus smiles into the camera in front of a blue background
Associate Professor in Political Theory & Public Policy
Room: 3.01, 31 Tavistock Square
Email: fergus.green@ucl.ac.uk
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Website

Biography

I am an Associate Professor in the UCL Department of Political Science and School of Public Policy. My academic work, which focuses on climate change and low-carbon transitions, is informed by my training in law, political science and political theory, and by more than five years’ professional experience in law and public policy. I continue to undertake consultancy work in these areas.

I began my career as a lawyer in the Melbourne office of Allens Arthur Robinson (now Allens-Linklaters) from 2009 to 2012, where I specialised in climate change, energy, water and environmental regulation. I then spent seven years at the London School of Economics & Political Science (LSE) in various capacities: I obtained an MSc in Philosophy & Public Policy from the Department of Philosophy (2012-13); I was then a Policy Analyst and Research Advisor to Professor Nicholas Stern at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change & the Environment (2014-15); and finally I completed an MRes in Political Science and a PhD in Political Theory in the Department of Government (2015-19). From 2019 to 2021, I was a Postdoctoral Researcher on the Fair Limits Project at the Ethics Institute, Utrecht University, and spent a brief stint back at the Grantham Research Institute in mid-2021 before taking up my current position at UCL. I have also been a visiting researcher at Melbourne Law School and Melbourne Climate Futures.

Research

My research traverses political theory, political economy, public policy and law. 

My current research focuses on questions of justice, politics, law and governance that arise in the transition to a low-carbon economy, including what we owe the ‘losers’ from such transitions, the kinds of institutions and policies by which states can steer a ‘just transition’, and the political implications of such policies. This work has been published in the American Political Science Review, the Journal of Political Philosophy, and Climate Policy. I am also completing a book project provisionally entitled Justice in Transition: What We Owe the ‘Losers’ from Legal Change. Further research in this area is being progressed through two collaborative research grants in which I am a Co-Investigator: ‘AdJUST—Advancing the Understanding of Challenges, Policy Options and Measures to Achieve a JUST EU Energy Transition’ (2022-26); and ‘JUSTDECARB—Socially Just and Politically Robust Decarbonisation: A Knowledge Base and Toolkit for Policymakers’ (2020-24).   

In neighbouring work, I have written widely on the politics and governance of restricting and phasing out fossil fuels, including work on “anti-fossil fuel norms”, the case for supply-side climate policy, fossil fuel-based accountability frameworks for climate governance, and the need for a norm against new fossil fuel projects. This work has been published in journals including Science, Nature Climate Change, Climatic Change, and Global Environmental Politics. As a result of this work, I have been a co-author of three editions of the UN Environment Programme’s Fossil Fuel Production Gap Report, and am a member of the Just Transition Expert Group of the Powering Past Coal Alliance. I have also advised multiple NGOs on fossil fuel-related climate litigation and co-led a project that created Redline—a curated database of scholarly materials relevant to questions of fact arising in such litigation.

I am also interested in the linkages between climate change and other contemporary challenges, including not only other ecological crises but also socio-economic inequalities, the rise of populism, and (other) threats to democracy. I am undertaking related theoretical work to develop a paradigm of climate governance concerned with tackling the shared structural causes of these challenges (as opposed to the currently-dominant, much narrower paradigm focused on greenhouse gas emissions), including through Green New Deal-style policy programmes and democratic innovations. This line of research builds on my longstanding interest in the ways in which decarbonisation policies, far from being a “burden”, can provide a basis for building more equal, prosperous and sustainable societies.

I co-lead the Department’s research cluster on Climate Politics.

Selected publications

Journal articles
Book chapters
Policy publications

View a full list of publications on my website

Teaching

I teach on the ‘Ethics and Public Policy’ (POLS0063) and ‘Environmental and Climate Justice’ (POLS0101) undergraduate modules. The latter is a new module I designed and developed, for which I received a departmental and Faculty of Social & Historical Sciences Education Award (sustainability category). I also co-led, with Lisa Vanhala and Jared Finnegan, the development of our new masters (MSc) programme in Climate Change Policy and Politics (commencing in September 2025).

I am interested in supervising research students on contemporary political theory (especially the normative analysis of public policy), and on the politics and governance of climate change and low-carbon transitions.