A Matter of Opinion : How Ecological and Neoclassical Environmental Economists Think about Sustainability and Economics
A Matter of Opinion : How Ecological and Neoclassical Environmental Economists Think about Sustainability and Economics
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意见问题:生态和新古典环境经济学家如何思考可持续性和经济学
DOI：
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发表时间：
2006
期刊：
影响因子：
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通讯作者：
R. Schwarze
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
L. Illge;R. Schwarze
生态和新古典环境经济学的不同范式已经在各种文章和书籍中描述，并且也嵌入了不同的机构设置。然而，我们不能想当然地认为，文献中描述的范式辩论实际上是以完全相同的方式反映在研究人员从经济角度看待可持续性的看法和意见中。本文介绍了德国案例研究的实证结果，经济学家和其他参与经济可持续发展研究的人从不同的思想流派思考可持续发展和经济学的问题，他们如何围绕这些问题，他们如何看待目前的科学鸿沟，以及他们期望什么是未来的可持续发展研究的主题。我们知道，可持续性研究在国际上的联系越来越紧密，并且假设德国经济可持续性研究人员的观点与其他国家的研究人员的观点没有显着差异，我们认为这些结果将引起国际科学界的兴趣。我们使用聚类分析来分析数据。基于文献调查，我们产生了40个与可持续发展相关的声明，并询问了196个经济可持续发展研究人员对这些声明的同意或不同意程度。在评估我们的调查结果时，我们讨论了我们确定的集群在多大程度上代表了生态和新古典环境经济学的两个思想流派。我们还提出了一些研究概念，可以帮助弥合经济可持续发展研究人员之间的差距，以及其他更适合科学的“思想的竞争”。研究的主要结果是：我们确定了两个主要的科学集群，一个明确证实了生态经济学思想流派的存在，另一个在很大程度上捕捉了新古典主义环境观。然而，也有一些令人惊讶的例外：这两个思想流派都有一个可持续发展的概念定义，该定义综合考虑了生态、社会和经济层面（“三大支柱概念”），并以保护社会的发展潜力为基础。我们还发现，在我们的样本“纯经济增长”战略的共同批评。这些商定的意见可以在不同的思想流派之间提供桥梁概念。此外，这两个集群同意在可持续性研究的广泛的未来领域。然而，生态经济学专题组的研究议程包含大量其他专题，主要涉及可持续发展的社会、分配和演变方面，以及一个强有力的微观经济重点。
The differing paradigms of ecological and neoclassical environmental economics have been described in various articles and books and are also embedded in different institutional settings. However, we cannot take for granted that the paradigm debates described in the literature are actually mirrored in exactly the same way in the perceptions and opinions of researchers looking at sustainability from an economic perspective. This paper presents empirical results from a German case study on how economists and others involved in economic sustainability research from different schools of thought think about the issues of sustainability and economics, how they group around these issues, how they feel about the current scientific divide, and what they expect to be future topics of sustainability research. Knowing that sustainability research is highly and still increasingly internationally intertwined, and assuming that the opinions of German economic sustainability researchers do not dramatically differ from those in other countries, we think that these results will be of interest to the international scientific community. We analyze the data using cluster analysis. Based on a literature survey, we generated forty sustainability-related statements and asked 196 economic sustainability researchers about their degree of agreement or disagreement with these statements. In evaluating our survey results, we discuss to what extent the clusters that we identified do or do not represent the two schools of thought of ecological and neoclassical environmental economics. We also propose some research concepts that can help to bridge the gaps amongst economic sustainability researchers as well as others more suitable for a scientific ‘competition of ideas’. Key results of the study are: We identify two primary scientific clusters, one clearly confirming the existence of the ecological economics schools of thought, and the other largely capturing the neoclassical environmental view. Yet, there are some surprising exceptions: Both schools of thought share a conceptual definition of sustainability that is integrative in considering ecological, societal and economic dimensions (‘three pillar concept’) and is based on preserving the development potentials of society. We also find a shared critique of ‘pure economic growth’ strategies in our sample. These agreed opinions may provide bridging concepts between the schools of thought. Also both clusters agree with respect to a wide range of future fields of sustainability research. Yet, the research agenda of the ecological economics cluster contains a large number of additional topics, primarily related to social, distributional and evolutionary aspects of sustainable development as well as a strong microeconomic focus.