From Liberal Paralysis to Green Republican Resolution? Conceptualising, Illustrating, and Addressing Problems of Governability in Eco-Social Politics

Veith Selk^*Niklas Klüh

• Darmstadt University of Technology, Darmstadt, Germany

The phenomenon of ungovernability is by no means new and had already been described fifty years ago in the literature, but awareness of its importance has only recently been reawakened. From that starting point, this paper develops a conceptual scheme of the problems governments are currently facing in their efforts to address eco-social issues, namely politicisation overload, political inequality, the "freedom-first trap", and a structural legitimacy deficit. The heuristic potential of this scheme is then illustrated by way of the debates on the Buildings Energy Act in Germany. Given the inability of liberalism as a political paradigm to solve these problems, this paper offers initial suggestions as to whether republicanism, as an alternative paradigm for environmental politics, can respond to the structural challenges of governing.We prefer our article to be formatted in British English. of the worsening ecological problems (Richardson et al. 2023) and intensifying social and political disintegration (Turchin 2023).This paper therefore focuses on the macro-structural problems of governing today. Below, we will refer to these problems as governmental problems or, synonymously, problems of governing. We define governing as the process of making collectively binding decisions on practical norms and material and immaterial values by public officials in a legitimate and effective manner to solve public issues.Against this backdrop, our paper offers a conceptual scheme for identifying governmental problems of eco-social politics in times of (neo)liberal exhaustion. The second section uses the themes raised in the literature on ungovernability as a basis for a deeper inquiry of four problems of governing. In the third section, we illustrate the heuristic value of this conceptional scheme by analysing the debates surrounding the Buildings Energy Act in Germany between 2020 and 2025. In the fourth section, we then explore the potential of green republicanism for dealing with the challenges we have outlined. In the concluding section, we set out the key questions emerging from our analysis and suggest directions for further research.