The limits of climate populism

: Politics in the Anthropocene

Abstract

This thesis examines the limits of existing approaches to climate populism in the context of the Anthropocene, a moment when the ecological consequences of human activity demand urgent political responses. While populism has become a central category for interpreting contemporary politics, current approaches to populism struggle to address the complexities of how climate change is politicised. The dominant ideational approach reduces populism to a set of ideas about “the people” and “the elite,” often equating climate populism with denialism. This narrow framing obscures both the right’s capacity to rearticulate environmentalism in nationalist or exclusionary terms, as well as left populist attempts to mobilise climate action through demands for justice and redistribution.
The discursive approach offers a more flexible means of analysing how climate is articulated in populist politics, but it too remains constrained by anthropocentrism and the Human/Nature binary. This binary sustains an extractivist approach to the earth. The green neo-extractivism that it relies upon prioritises “the people” over Indigenous peoples and over more-than-human worlds. To examine these tensions, the thesis draws on knowledge and political practices from Brazil, Colombia, and Chile. These cases were selected because each has witnessed attempts to construct left climate populisms that contest exclusionary politics, while simultaneously forwarding extractivist logics that underpin the so called global green transition.
Through close analysis of political discourse, institutions, and socio-ecological conflicts, I show how left climate populism struggles to move beyond developmentalist and extractive frameworks. In contrast, Indigenous ontologies of reciprocity and relationality, which are already present and politically active in these contexts, offer alternative ways of imagining political community beyond the Human. These ontologies point toward more effective political responses to climate breakdown.
The novel contribution of this thesis is twofold. First, it places populist theories in direct conversation with ontological critiques of the Human/Nature divide. It treats extractivism as the central expression of this divide. Second, it foregrounds Indigenous alternatives that have too often been dismissed as unscientific or unrealistic, despite having survived centuries of attempted erasure. In doing so, the thesis demonstrates both the limits of left climate populism and the importance of rethinking counter-hegemonic politics in light of more-than-human ontologies.

Date of Award	Feb 2026
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Brighton
Supervisor	Mark Devenney (Supervisor), Andy Knott (Supervisor) & Emma-Louise Jay (Supervisor)