Centre for Research on Environmental Action and Thought

CREATe brings together academics and postgraduate students at Keele who do research on environmental politics with a particular focus on action and thought.

Action includes the actions of environmental activists in all parts of the world, the environmental actions of governments, business and those who may not see themselves as powerful or as activists, but who nevertheless take action on environmental issues.

Thought includes work on green ideology, environmental political theories and the discourses used by policy-makers and citizens when engaging in public debate on environmental issues at all levels of global politics.

CREATE stands out in the study of environmental politics in the UK because of the large number of researchers with common interests in environmental action and thought who have studied and worked at Keele over the past twenty years. We have extensive links with other groups of academics working in our field.

Three members of CREATe serve on the editorial board of Environmental Politics, a journal that has longstanding links with Keele. We are regular participants in UK and international conferences and provide frequent advice to government, media and environmental groups. Keele academics have also played an important role in developing future generations of environmental politics scholars by training our own PhD students, many of who now hold academic posts in other universities. Keele hosts the Environmental Politics and Policy Summer School for the European Consortium for Political Research every two years which brings together 20 international PhD students and leading academics for two weeks of intensive study on the latest research.

Keele also runs two unique masters programmes taught by CREATe members:

  • Environmental Politics
  • Climate Change Studies