Rate My Professor Mark Pennington

Professor Mark Pennington serves as Professor of Political Economy and Public Policy in the Department of Political Economy within the Faculty of Social Science and Public Policy at King’s College London. He has held this position since January 2012 and served as Head of Department from 2016 to 2020. Prior to King's, he taught for twelve years in the School of Politics and International Relations at Queen Mary, University of London. Pennington holds a PhD from the London School of Economics and Political Science, awarded in 1998 for his thesis titled Property rights, public choice and urban containment: A study of the British planning system. He is also Director of the Centre for the Study of Governance and Society at King’s College London.

Pennington’s scholarship operates at the intersection of philosophy, politics, and economics, with a focus on non-ideal theory, robust political economy, limited knowledge, bounded rationality, environmental governance, social capital, classical liberalism, libertarianism, democratic theory, and post-modernism including Foucault. His major publications include Foucault and Liberal Political Economy: Power, Knowledge and Freedom (Oxford University Press, 2025), Robust Political Economy: Classical Liberalism and the Future of Public Policy (Edward Elgar, 2011), and Planning and the Political Market (Continuum, 2001). Recent works encompass Climate Change, Political Economy and the Problem of Comparative Institutions Analysis in Climate Liberalism: Perspectives on Liberty, Property and Pollution (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) and Foucault and Political Philosophy in The Routledge Companion to Social and Political Philosophy: Second Edition (Taylor and Francis, 2024). He leads funded projects such as ‘Market Economies and Green Ideals’, a 33-month John Templeton Foundation initiative starting September 2025 with Roberto Fumagalli, and ‘The Ideal of Self Governance’ examining polycentric governance beyond markets and states. Pennington contributes to research groups including the Political Theory Research Group, Politics, Philosophy and Economics Research Group, Environment and Public Policy Group, and Centre for the Ecologies of Attention and Perception. His work has accumulated 1569 citations. He teaches undergraduate Ethics, Economics and Environmental Protection and postgraduate Key Concepts in Contemporary Political Economy.