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年代生态危机的外部冲击的理解。它将确定经济专业知识对20世纪最后三分之一的西德环境政策设计的影响。在询问经济工具在影响环境行为方面的重要性如何与规则、教育和目前所称的“推动”有关时，它还将把西德的环境政策定位于其国际联系中，并不对称地将其与美国的环境政策进行比较。利用对监管和治理的广泛理解，它将询问环境政策是否具有日益依赖经济治理的趋势，并确定经济学家、政治家、政府官员、利益集团和环保主义者如何推动政策工具组合的变化。申请者本人将分析经济学家如何处理20世纪70年代发生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。需要为两个博士项目申请资金，这两个项目将位于优先计划的第四个核心领域“经济政策和法规”内。他们将仔细审查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，从1971年的第一个联邦“环境计划”到1999年的“生态税收改革”。第一位博士生将分析经济激励对工业生产调控的重要性的变化。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/欧盟和经合组织对将经济手段引入环境政策的重要性。第二个项目将重点从对工业生产的监管转移到私人家庭消费，分析了随着对这一监管工具和其他监管工具经验的增加，人们对经济激励影响环境行为的力量的预期是如何改变的。将审查国家机构和环保主义者协会的环境教育活动对经济和其他战略的依赖。专注于产品标签以及能源使用，这位博士研究员将回顾这样一个假设，即随着对消费模式行为决定因素的社会科学和经济学研究的增加，市场和道德之间的对立失去了结构性力量。

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.