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Sustainability of agriculture or agricultural practices can only be defined with respect to specific contexts. In reference to well-being of the living labour in question, for this paper a practice is deemed to be sustainable when it can ensure adequate Calorie intake …
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This paper surveys the points where economics, as conventionally understood and taught, leads to conclusions which are less than helpful in relation to environmental policy decisions, with particular reference to the urgent problem of climate change. In particular, the fact …
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The consumerist and predatory style of development has been strongly accentuated this last decade in South America where we are leaving the weaker indigenous people of the continent “out-of-the-game”, deprived of their culture. We interfere with their ways to make …
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After an outline of the questions to be addressed there will be considerations on our own political-economy oriented approach to the transformation debate, on the purposeful search for possibilities of action and thus on what is transformational in everyday social life. The contribution presents …
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The pre-analytic vision, world views or ontologies we hold determine how we perceive the world, its problems and possible solutions. Comparing neoclassical environmental economics and ecological economics, two elements of their respective ontologies turn out to explain their diverging recommendations: the topology (is the environment …
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The sustainable development paradigm has failed. Ecological overshoot is accelerating and breaching the intergenerational equity criterion which requires humanity to live within safe planetary ecological limits. The equity gap between rich and poor also continues to grow wider breaching the …
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Adaptation to climate change has attracted increasing interest as a necessary complement to greenhouse gas mitigation. Economic approaches to climate adaptation are rarely articulated and discussed explicitly despite the many benefits of such a framework-level discourse. Addressing this gap the …
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The world is in the middle of a massive global financial crisis. However, the main policy science – economics – has failed to predict or adequately explain the crisis. Nonetheless, no real questioning of the fundamentals of economics has occurred. …
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Over the last quarter century, since the Brundtland Commission proposed their definition of ‘sustainable development’, the dialogue about sustainability has failed to reduce the threat that human activities pose to the global ecosystem. The time has come to question deep- …
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The perception that we have already entered a necessarily transitional phase of overshoot, beyond the planet’s limits, has become a central subject, which is growing in quantity and impact, in the literature about the present environmental predicament of humanity. This …
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This paper draws on institutional and evolutionary economics and contributes to an approach to environmental policy which diverges from mainstream prescriptions. The ‘socio-technical system’ is the core concept: this is a complex made of co-evolving institutions, technologies, markets and actors …
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This paper explores some of the material, social and theoretical aspects of sustainable development. It starts from a critical scrutiny of some methodological and conceptual weaknesses or flaws of mainstream approaches. It also discusses the limitations of ecological reforms and …
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Seaports are historic and commercial infrastructures and significant nodes in the logistics and transport chains that form the backbone of national and regional economies. However, ports are also sites of environmental pollution originating from land-based activities, ship movements and ports‘ …
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This paper explores some of the more controversial conceptual issues surrounding ecosystem valuations in monetary terms along with their role in the greater decision-making process. I argue that there is an urgent need to be explicit about the underlying social …
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Neoclassical economics argues that environmental sustainability and economic growth in GDP terms are compatible through increased technological innovation and efficiency; however, exploring past data and observations as well as projections of future carbon emissions the increasingly prominent discpline of ecological …
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Criticisms of the neoclassical economic framework and perpetual growth in GDP terms are not a new phenomenon, although recent years have seen increasing interest in alternative and ecological discourses including degrowth, steady state and circular economics. Although these may initially …
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This paper attempts to offer new insights into the concept of qualitative growth. We argue that quality is more than an outlying variable addressed by adding a term (or two) to the utility function and question whether quality is adequately …
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Most of the literature analyzing the sustainability of China’s economy tends to be directed at whether the country can maintain its unprecedented high rates of economic growth. Too little concern has been given to the sustainability of China’s ecosystem, and …
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