Social Ecological Economics
Description
Max Koch & Hubert Buch-Hansen:
"Ecological economics, specifically what Spash (2020b) refers to as ‘social ecological economics’, is premised on an ontology according to which reality is hierarchically ordered into a number of strata and higher strata presuppose lower and less complex ones. Consistently with critical realist philosophy of science (Bhaskar, 2015), the mechanisms of higher strata (say, the social stratum) are held to possess emergent properties as a result of which they are irreducible to, and qualitatively different from, their lower stratum foundations (say, the physical stratum). While the laws of physics never cause social outcomes, the social is nonetheless subject to biophysical structures (Spash, 2020b). Reversely, social activities can impact biophysical structures. Unlike the anthropocentric ontologies underpinning mainstream economics/political economy, then, this deep ontology – which also in critical respects resonates with Marxist political economy (Buch-Hansen & Nielsen, 2020) – constitutes a worldview that has the potential to fruitfully underpin a postgrowth political economy."
(https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14747731.2020.1807837?)
More information
* Article: A future social-ecological economics. Clive L. Spash & Adrien O.T. Guisan. real-world economics review, issue no. 96, 2021.
URL = http://www.paecon.net/PAEReview/issue96/SpashGuisan96.pdf
"This paper describes the need for and content of an emerging paradigm termed Social Ecological Economics (SEE). In this paper we argue that SEE is the essential future direction for the economics profession, not least because of the social-ecological crises facing humanity and the need for transformation of capital accumulating economic systems. Economics as a discipline is a failure because of a long running inability to address, and tendency to marginalise, such things as power relations, social inequities and injustice (across gender, class and race), ethical social provisioning, the role of care and reproductive processes, the social implications of advancing technology, treatment of others with silent voices (e.g. future generations, children, the non-human world). SEE draws upon a wide range of literature with links to classical political economy and critical institutional economics. It relates environmental problems to economic structure via the work of Kapp (1950) on social costs and cost shifting, and Georgescu-Roegen (1971) on thermodynamics and dialectics, and connects to ecology to identify mechanism arising from ecosystem structure and function (Spash and Smith, 2019). These are common roots with some branches of ecological economics, but the fundamental difference is the emphasis placed on social structure. In this respect SEE shares concerns with feminist economics over care, reproduction and the role of unrecognised labour, and Marxist political theory over power, class and exploitation. The need is recognised for a social theory as well as a philosophy of science, neither of which have been adequately addressed by ecological economics."