Robyn Eckersley is a Professor and Head of Political Science in the School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Melbourne, Australia. She was previously a public lawyer, and a lecturer at Monash University until 2001. She studied at the University of Western Australia, Cambridge University, and did a PhD at the University of Tasmania.
Eckersley works on critical theory and political ecology. Her 1992 book was one of the first to argue for an ecocentric form of government.
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In her 2004 non-fiction book The Green State: Rethinking Democracy and Sovereignty, Eckersley proposes “critical political ecology” as a paradigm to explore what it might take to create a green state or green democratic state, a government where the regulatory ideals and democratic procedures of the democratic state are informed by ecological democracy. The sovereign state is recast in the role of ecological steward and facilitator of transnational democracy. The green democractic state is proposed as an evolutionary alternative to the liberal democratic state, the welfare state, and the neoliberal state.[1]
Eckersley's arguments are largely conducted in the domain of political theory, but have proven influential in environmental politics.