Political Ecological Economics

Description

Giorgos Kallis et al. :

"Mainstream accounts of growth's pre-paradigmatic view is that growth is good. Here, drawing from a synthesis of energetics, Marxian political economy and anthropology, we revisit the economic process through the concept of surplus, offering an ecological economic foundation to theorize growth and degrowth.

We call this synthesis a “political ecological economics” (PolEE): an ecological economics informed by a broadly defined political ecology, building on the tradition of ‘the Barcelona school of ecological economics and political ecology’ (Villamayor-Tomas and Muradian, 2023). If EE approaches human economies as a social metabolism, where people appropriate energy and apply it to transform organic and inorganic matter (Martinez-Alier, 2009), political ecology shows how this metabolism is shaped by power along the lines of class, gender, ethnicity and race; a power that is also exercised through claims to knowledge and truth (Forsyth, 2004; Robbins, 2019; Sletto, 2008; Swyngedouw and Heynen, 2003). This paper completes a series of contributions where we looked at the economic ideas behind the case for degrowth, having found a mix of ecological economic, Marxian and anthropological sources (Kallis, 2017, Kallis, 2018, Kallis, 2023). In reverse, we formalize these concepts here as the political ecological economic foundations of the theory of degrowth."

(https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800926002302)