Expecting Limits and Limiting Expectations – Economic Expertise, Environmental Policy and Consumption, 1970-2000

根据“经验与预期：经济行为的历史基础”优先计划的总体议程，该研究项目旨在通过发展一套新的基于经验的经济知识体系和新的经济实践，扩大我们对经济学家和经济行为者如何应对20世纪70年代生态危机的外生冲击的理解。它将决定经济专业知识对二十世纪最后三分之一时期西德环境政策设计的影响。探讨经济手段在影响环境行为方面的重要性在规则、教育和目前所谓的“助推”方面发生了怎样的变化，它还将把西德的环境政策置于其国际联系中，并与美国的环境政策进行不对称的比较。利用对监管和治理的广泛理解，它将询问环境政策是否以越来越依赖经济治理的趋势为特征，并确定经济学家、政治家、国家官员、利益集团和环保主义者如何促成政策工具组合的变化。申请人本人将分析经济学家如何应对20世纪70年代变化的生态和环境预期，询问他们如何论证支持和反对不同形式的监管。申请资助两个博士项目，该项目将位于优先计划的第四个核心领域“经济政策与监管”。从1971年的第一个联邦“环境计划”到1999年的“生态税改革”，他们将仔细研究经济知识和专业知识是否以及如何影响西德的环境政策制定。第一位博士研究员将分析经济激励对工业生产调节的重要性的变化。他/她将审查环境专家理事会对经济手段的态度如何改变，他们的建议是否以及如何转化为具体的政策措施，以及欧共体/欧盟和经合发组织在将经济手段纳入环境政策方面的重要性。第二个项目将重点从对工业生产的管制转移到对私人家庭消费的管制，分析随着对这一管制手段和其他管制手段的经验增加，对经济激励对环境行为的影响的预期如何发生变化。将审查国家机构和环境保护协会的环境教育运动是否依赖经济和其他战略。博士研究员将专注于产品标签和能源使用，并将审查市场和道德之间的对立随着对消费模式的行为决定因素的社会科学和经济研究的增加而失去其结构力量的假设。

In line with the overall agenda of the Priority Program on “Experience and Expectation: Historical Foundations of Economic Behavior,” the research project aims to broaden our understanding of how economists and economic actors reacted to the exogenous shock of the ecological crisis of the 1970s by developing a new body of experience-based economic knowledge as well as new economic practices. It will determine the impact of economic expertise on the design of environmental policy in West Germany in the last third of the twentieth century. Asking how the importance of economic instruments in influencing environmental behavior changed in relation to rules, education, and what are currently called “nudges”, it will also locate West Germany’s environmental policy in its international connections and asymmetrically compare it with that of the United States. Using a broad understanding of regulation and governance, it will ask whether environmental policy was characterized by a trend towards increasing reliance on economic governance and determine how economists, politicians, state officials, interest groups, and environmentalists contributed to changes in the mixture of policy instruments.The applicant himself will analyze how economists dealt with the changed ecological and environmental expectations of the 1970s, asking how they reasoned for and against different forms of regulation. Funding is requested for two PhD projects which will be located within the Priority Program’s fourth core area on “economic policy and regulation”. They will scrutinize if and how economic knowledge and expertise influenced environmental policy-making in West Germany from the first federal “environmental program” in 1971 to the “ecological tax reform” in 1999. The first doctoral researcher will analyze the changing importance of economic incentives for the regulation of industrial production. He/she will examine how the environmental expert councils’ attitudes to economic instruments changed, if and how their advice was translated into concrete policy measures, and how important the EC/EU and the OECD were for the introduction of economic instruments into environmental policy. The second project shifts the focus from the regulation of industrial production to private household consumption, analyzing how expectations concerning the power of economic incentives to influence environmental behavior changed as a consequence of increasing experience with this and other regulatory instruments. Environmental education campaigns by state agencies and environmentalist associations will be examined for their reliance on economic and other strategies. Concentrating on product labelling, as well as on energy use, the PhD researcher will review the hypothesis that the opposition between markets and morals lost its structuring force as social scientific and economic research on the behavioral determinants of consumption patterns increased.