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Dr Fergus Green

Fergus smiles into the camera in front of a blue background
Lecturer 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 a Lecturer in Political Theory and Public Policy in the UCL Department of Political Science and School of Public Policy. Much of my research is concerned with the politics, governance and ethics of low-carbon transitions. My academic work builds on more than five years’ professional experience in law and public policy, and 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 work focuses on questions of justice in the transition to a low-carbon economy, including what we owe the ‘losers’ from such a transition, the kinds of institutions and policies by which states can steer a ‘just transition’, and the political implications of such policies.

I am currently a co-investigator and principal investigator, respectively, on two ESRC-funded projects exploring these issues: ‘JUSTDECARB—Socially Just and Politically Robust Decarbonisation: A Knowledge Base and Toolkit for Policymakers’ (2020-23) and ‘AdJUST—Advancing the Understanding of Challenges, Policy Options and Measures to Achieve a JUST EU Energy Transition’ (2022-26). I am also completing a book project provisionally entitled Justice in Transition: What We Owe the ‘Losers’ from Legal Change. In neighbouring work, I have written widely on the politics and governance of restricting and phasing out fossil fuels, including on “anti-fossil fuel norms”, the case for supply-side climate policy, and fossil fuel-based accountability frameworks for climate governance. As a result of this work, I have been a co-author of all three editions of the UN Environment Programme’s Fossil Fuel Production Gap Report, and am member of the Just Transition Expert Group of the Powering Past Coal Alliance.

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, and the rise of populism. I am developing a political theory of climate agency that seeks to direct attention toward the shared structural causes of these challenges (as opposed to the currently-dominant, much narrower climate mitigation agenda focused on greenhouse gas emissions), and in that vein I am researching Green New Deal-style policy programmes. 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.

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 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.