Mobilising critical international political economy for the age of climate breakdown

Abstract

Globally accelerating environmental breakdown necessitates a large-scale mobilisation not only of the natural and engineering sciences, but also of insights generated from social sciences. Consequently, recent interventions in International/Global Political Economy (IPE) demand a gearing of the field towards putting climate breakdown centre stage. We respond to this call by drawing attention to the role critical IPE approaches can offer to the field to engage with climate breakdown more comprehensively and consistently. We argue that critical IPE can do so by combining problem-driven and praxis-oriented emancipatory perspectives, leading to systematic and concrete research programmes that are indispensable in the age of climate breakdown. We support our argument by documenting and systematising this potential across three core IPE themes:economic growth, state theory and global finance. In order to unlock its full potential for centring climate breakdown, we argue that critical IPE should better embrace multidisciplinarity and intersectional approaches, and produce more empirical work and methodological advances in future research.