Modernity promised control over nature through science, material abundance through technology and effective government through rational, social organization. Instead of leading to this promised land ...it has brought us to the brink of environmental and cultural disaster. Why has there been this gap between modernity's aspirations and its achievements? Development Betrayed offers a powerful answer to this question. Development with its unshakeable commitment to the idea of progress, is rooted in modernism and has been betrayed by each of its major tenets. Attempts to control nature have led to the brink of environmental catastrophe. Western technologies have proved inappropriate for the needs of the South, and governments are unable to respond effectively to the crises that have resulted. Offering a thorough and lively critiques of the ideas behind development, Richard Norgaard also offers an alternative co-evolutionary paradigm, in which development is portrayed as a co-evolution between cultural and ecological systems. Rather than a future with all peoples merging to one best way of knowing and doing things, he envisions a future of a patchwork quilt of cultures with real possibilities for harmony.
What started as a humble metaphor to help us think about our relation to nature has become integral to how we are addressing the future of humanity and the course of biological evolution. The ...metaphor of nature as a stock that provides a flow of services is insufficient for the difficulties we are in or the task ahead. Indeed, combined with the mistaken presumption that we can analyze a global problem within a partial equilibrium economic framework and reach a new economy project-by-project without major institutional change, the simplicity of the stock-flow framework blinds us to the complexity of the human predicament. The ecosystem services approach can be a part of a larger solution, but its dominance in our characterization of our situation and the solution is blinding us to the ecological, economic, and political complexities of the challenges we actually face.
Not yet two decades after the publication of
Our Common Future, the world's political and environmental landscape has changed significantly. Nonetheless, we argue that the concept and practice of ...sustainable development (SD)–as guiding institutional principle, as concrete policy goal, and as focus of political struggle–remains salient in confronting the multiple challenges of this new global order. Yet how SD is conceptualized and practiced hinges crucially on: the willingness of scholars and practitioners to embrace a plurality of epistemological and normative perspectives on sustainability; the multiple interpretations and practices associated with the evolving concept of “development”; and efforts to open up a continuum of local-to-global public spaces to debate and enact a politics of sustainability. Embracing pluralism provides a way out of the ideological and epistemological straightjackets that deter more cohesive and politically effective interpretations of SD. Using pluralism as a starting point for the analysis and normative construction of sustainable development, we pay particular attention to how an amalgam of ideas from recent work in ecological economics, political ecology and the “development as freedom” literature might advance the SD debate beyond its post-Brundtland quagmire. Enhanced levels of ecological degradation, vast inequalities in economic opportunities both within and across societies, and a fractured set of institutional arrangements for global environmental governance all represent seemingly insurmountable obstacles to a move towards sustainability. While these obstacles are significant, we suggest how they might be overcome through a reinvigorated set of notions and practices associated with sustainable development, one that explicitly examines the linkages between sustainability policies and sustainability politics.
Coevolutionary ecological economics Kallis, Giorgos; Norgaard, Richard B.
Ecological economics,
02/2010, Letnik:
69, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
This paper maps a coevolutionary research agenda for ecological economics. At an epistemological level coevolution offers a powerful logic for transcending environmental and social determinisms and ...developing a cross-disciplinary approach in the study of socio-ecological systems. We identify four consistent stories emerging out of coevolutionary studies in ecological economics, concerning: environmental degradation and development failure in peripheral regions; the lock-in of unsustainable production–consumption patterns; the vicious cycle between human efforts to control undesirable micro-organisms and the evolution of these organisms; and the adaptive advantages of other-regarding, cooperative behaviors and institutions. We identify challenges in the conceptualization of coevolutionary relationships in relation to: the interaction between different hierarchical levels of evolution; the role of space and social power; uneven rates of change and crises. We conclude with the political implications of a coevolutionary perspective based on the premises of pragmatism.
Damming the rivers of the Amazon basin Latrubesse, Edgardo M; Arima, Eugenio Y; Dunne, Thomas ...
Nature,
06/2017, Letnik:
546, Številka:
7658
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
More than a hundred hydropower dams have already been built in the Amazon basin and numerous proposals for further dam constructions are under consideration. The accumulated negative environmental ...effects of existing dams and proposed dams, if constructed, will trigger massive hydrophysical and biotic disturbances that will affect the Amazon basin's floodplains, estuary and sediment plume. We introduce a Dam Environmental Vulnerability Index to quantify the current and potential impacts of dams in the basin. The scale of foreseeable environmental degradation indicates the need for collective action among nations and states to avoid cumulative, far-reaching impacts. We suggest institutional innovations to assess and avoid the likely impoverishment of Amazon rivers.
Practicing Interdisciplinarity LÉLÉ, SHARACHCHANDRA; NORGAARD, RICHARD B
BioScience/Bioscience,
11/2005, Letnik:
55, Številka:
11
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
We explore the practical difficulties of interdisciplinary research in the context of a regional- or local-scale project. We posit four barriers to interdisciplinarity that are common across many ...disciplines and draw on our own experience and on other sources to explore how these barriers are manifested. Values enter into scientific theories and data collection through scientists' hidden assumptions about disciplines other than their own, through the differences between quantitative and interpretive social sciences, and through roadblocks created by the organization of academia and the relationship between academics and the larger society. Participants in interdisciplinary projects need to be self-reflective about the value judgments embedded in their choice of variables and models. They should identify and use a core set of shared concerns to motivate the effort, be willing to respect and to learn more about the “other,” be able to work with new models and alternative taxonomies, and allow for plurality and incompleteness.
Social and Natural sciences have, for the most part, ignored the existence of interlinked/interdependent evolutionary processes between cultural and biotic systems, both embedded in an overall ...dynamic biophysical environment. In this paper, we explore the potential of filling this gap by further developing a common coevolutionary framework based on earlier work in ecological economics. Our main concern is to contribute to the understanding of socioecological coevolution in two ways: (1) to find a general framework that accommodates advances in the explanation of sociocultural evolution in social sciences and, (2) to identify the specific mechanisms that could link this knowledge to what is known in the biological sciences.
Methodological pluralism has been a tenet of ecological economics since the journal's inauguration. Pluralism has fostered collaboration and forged new insights across disciplines. However, to ...counter the hegemonic voice of mainstream economics and inspire action on climate change and inequality, ecological economics requires coherence to produce meaningful knowledge from diverse research findings. This has to be done in a world that is increasingly complex and rapidly changing. In this article, we argue that ecological economists should keep multiple antennae up to foresee and respond to the uncertainties of rapid change. Methodological pluralism facilitates diversity of thought, which scholars require in times of rapid change. Responding to previous critiques that methodological pluralism lacks philosophical foundation, we offer tentative conceptual and historical foundations. We ground our understanding of reality and how we partially know that reality in coevolutionary thinking. We illustrate how economistic beliefs (Economism), economic knowledge (episteme), and social-economic reality coevolve together with nature to produce the current era–the Econocene. Our historical tale of the Econocene illuminates how the economic-centric beliefs guiding public and academic knowledge reproduce unsustainable and inequitable outcomes. Ecological economists, we argue, should support guiding beliefs centered on the biosphere, equity, and care while practicing a structured pluralism.
•We renew the case for methodological pluralism grounded in coevolutionary theory.•Economistic beliefs, economic knowledge, and social reality coevolve•Understanding coevolving social-ecological systems requires many ways of knowing.•Ecological economics must keep multiple methodological antennae up to adapt.•Guiding beliefs for ecological economics center on care, equity and the biosphere
Revisiting the Commons: Local Lessons, Global Challenges Ostrom, Elinor; Burger, Joanna; Field, Christopher B. ...
Science (American Association for the Advancement of Science),
04/1999, Letnik:
284, Številka:
5412
Journal Article
Recenzirano
In a seminal paper, Garrett Hardin argued in 1968 that users of a commons are caught in an inevitable process that leads to the destruction of the resources on which they depend. This article ...discusses new insights about such problems and the conditions most likely to favor sustainable uses of common-pool resources. Some of the most difficult challenges concern the management of large-scale resources that depend on international cooperation, such as fresh water in international basins or large marine ecosystems. Institutional diversity may be as important as biological diversity for our long-term survival.
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