Does ecological economics have a future?

Ecological Economics 84 (2012) 37–48

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Ecological Economics journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ecolecon

Survey

Does ecological economics have a future? Contradiction and reinvention in the age of climate change Blake Anderson a, Michael M'Gonigle b,⁎ a b

Institute for New Economics (INE), Canada Environmental Law and Policy, University of Victoria, Canada

a r t i c l e

i n f o

Article history: Received 7 March 2012 Received in revised form 4 June 2012 Accepted 7 June 2012 Available online 23 October 2012 Keywords: Climate change Growth Mainstream economics Discourse Contradiction Paradigm

a b s t r a c t This paper addresses the role of neoclassical methodologies in ecological economics and the contradictions these methodologies pose to the field's critical founding principles. We first consider Robert Costanza's treatment of Nicholas Stern's Global Deal and then survey climate change-related articles published in this journal over the past five years. This survey reveals how mainstream (neoclassical) methodologies dominate discourse, and do so by marginalizing more critical (political economy) analyses. This situation imperils the field's founding vision of a no-growth ‘steady state’; it also fails to address the (related) growth dynamics of capitalism. Without such a critical treatment, the field's formal embrace of ‘methodological pluralism’ actually entails an ideological empiricism that renders ecological economics theoretically incoherent. This situation undermines the field's historical promise as an alternative economic paradigm. Ecological economics now faces a problematic future. Its survival in a form faithful to its founding vision will require an explicit choice to address its internal contradictions, and reinvent itself in ways relevant to our contemporary context. Without such a choice, ecological economics will likely succumb to an implicit acceptance of the hegemony of mainstream economic methodologies and their pro-growth imperatives. © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction Many today believe that ours has become a world without a future— we are, they say, “living in the end times” (Zizek, 2010). Of any established discipline in the global academy, however, ecological economics can justifiably claim to having been founded on, and long pursued, the goal of avoiding just such a fate. Its precursory promise was to lay the foundations for a ‘low throughput’ economy that could thrive within the earth's limits. This recognition of physical (and thus economic) limits underpinned Georgescu-Roegen's (1971) treatment of the entropy laws that constrained the material processes of production, Boulding's (1973) conceptualization of the economy of ‘spaceship earth’ and Daly's (1977) blueprint for the steady state economy. As Daly argued in 1977, the field's ‘pre-analytic vision’ is that of the economy as an open subsystem of a materially finite planetary ecosystem.1 This vision distinguished the insurgent field of

⁎ Corresponding author. E-mail address: [email protected] (M. M'Gonigle). 1 When we use the term limits we are thus speaking to the physical limits to growth of an economy that, as a subset of a materially finite world, was subject to the laws of thermodynamics, as described by the early ecological economists (Daly, Georgescu-Roegen). On the historical and continuing linkage between the growth in global GDP and both the consumption of specific physical resources and the impacts on diverse environmental resources, see Speth (2008). 0921-8009/$ – see front matter © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2012.06.009

ecological economics from the already established field of environmental economics, the latter oriented to achieving greater efficiency within the capitalist marketplace, the former seeking to resituate the marketplace itself. Despite its potentially revolutionary point of theoretical departure, the new field's subsequent journey embraced a broader ‘methodological pluralism’ that could accommodate a wide catchment of scholars and a diversity of forms of economic, social and ecological reasoning. The field successfully stimulated on-going debate about the intersections of economics and ecology, over the years allowing its professional society and journal to grow and attain a level of institutional acceptance, public policy relevance and intellectual credibility within the dominant (high throughput) political economy (Røpke, 2005). Over time, however, this pluralism led to an increasing neoclassical presence that has diminished the power of the field's original break with mainstream orthodoxy. Meanwhile, the pace and scope of global ecological decline has increased (as predicted) to the point that today the sustainability of the dominant political economy is itself in jeopardy. In response, ecological economics works to develop new practical mechanisms by which it might internalize environmental costs within this now ‘neoliberal’ framework of economic growth and political management. In this work, many questions that would be of relevance to the founders of the field remain unresolved. On what basis, for example, could the growing size and scale of the modern infrastructures of growth be ‘decoupled’ from the ‘entropic’ impacts of resource uses? How does the world's

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increasingly financialized wealth creation relate to the ‘real’ economy of material production and consumption? And how would the maintenance of functioning ecosystems be achieved throughout these developments? If the field's methodological pluralism is to be more than a token connection to such ‘ecological’ concerns, answering these questions in a coherent way is imperative for the field. This paper offers a discursive and paradigmatic critique of such recent work. The primary concern is to assess how the field's ‘methodological pluralism’ has shaped its dominant discourses and affected its potential to achieve its inceptive concern to open up new economic and political possibilities. We suggest that an underlying contradiction exists between the field's founding pre-analytical vision and its current methodological commitments. We begin with a consideration of Robert Costanza's critique of Nicholas Stern' Global Deal (Section 2), but our primary focus for this assessment is in reviewing the articles on climate change that have been published in Ecological Economics over the last five years (Section 3). This survey is a snapshot that covers a specific timeframe (five years) and a single topic (climate change) from just one outlet for ecological economic research, the journal of Ecological Economics. This focus is, however, a significant one—addressing the most prominent ecological/economic topic of our times in one of the academy's most prominent forums for such discussions. With this focus, we offer a characterization of the Journal's ‘critical’ orientation today (Section 4) that allows us to examine the state of ecological economics in terms of the ‘paradigm conflict’ that besets it (Section 5). We assess the implications of theoretical contradiction in terms of the substantive coherence of the field since its inception, or lack there of. To conclude (Section 6), we look at the strategic implications of our analysis. 2. The Stern Blueprint: To Grow or Not to Grow In a review of Stern's (2009) recent book, A Blueprint for a Safer Planet: How to manage climate change and create a new era of progress and prosperity, 2 Robert Costanza, one of the world's most prominent ecological economists and the founding editor of this journal, praised the completeness of Stern's strategy while he also drew attention to its profound limitations (Costanza, 2009a). Lord Stern is widely considered a preeminent global expert on climate change economics and policy. He gained fame within economic and policy circles (and a peerage) as the lead author of the 2006 U.K. Governmental report The Economics of Climate Change, more commonly known as the Stern Review. In its comprehensive analysis, the Stern Review was touted as a landmark, and is regularly cited by governments, academics, business leaders and environmental non-governmental organizations. Building on the success of the Review, Stern published Blueprint for a Safer Planet where he proposed a “Global Deal” to square a longstanding circle by transforming the economic growth that has driven the climate crisis into the economic growth that will solve it. Stern views climate change as the greatest ‘market failure’ in history, and thus something that should be resolved by having its costs internalized within the market. Through this pricing strategy, Stern tells us that his is “a pro-growth strategy for the long term” for which there are billions of dollars in profits to be made (Stern, 2006, p. viii). With a modest investment of 2% global GDP, Stern (2009) concluded that the world can stabilize atmospheric concentrations of CO 2 at 500 ppm, and, in the process, grow past the problem. Within the bounds of neoclassical logic, this argument makes sense. Neoclassicism rejects the notion that there are absolute limits to growth, putting its faith in the ability to address temporary resource scarcities through rising prices that change economic behaviors, technological innovations that allow for greater efficiencies, substitutions away from declining resources, and so on. The field points to the 2 In North America this book was published under the title The Global Deal: Climate change and the creation of a new era of progress and prosperity.

history of ever-increasing global production and wealth despite the ‘limits to growth’ debates of the 1970s (to which some early ecological economists were contributors). As no logic is self-enclosed, the strength of Stern's neoclassical framework necessarily rests on numerous assumptions concerning constant discount rates, technological change, abatement costs, acceptable ecological impacts, and so on (Gowdy, 2008; Spash, 2007). For example, it assumes that complicated variables (the value of a life, or an ecosystem, or future generations, or uncertainty) can be assigned appropriate monetary values which, when gotten right, will generate the efficiencies and innovation that will ‘decarbonize’ the economy while maintaining its structure and function. Thus will the growth trajectory continue ad infinitum by ‘internalizing’ hitherto bothersome external costs rather than simply continuing to displace them. Stern's analysis and the neoclassical framework he employs remain a touchstone for the economic treatment of climate change even as basic problems with it have become apparent. In 2006, for example, the Stern Review called for the allocation of 1% of GDP per year to stabilize atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide at 550 ppm, approximately 150 ppm above present levels. Just three years later (2009) the speed of the advance of climate change and its forecasted impacts led Stern to revise these figures, doubling the costs of stabilization (to 2%), while reducing by approximately one-third the acceptable level of increase in carbon dioxide (to 500 ppm). Nevertheless, Stern's chosen target still vastly exceeds the 350 ppm level that the scientific community, including Costanza (2009b), has settled on as necessary for stabilization. Stern himself acknowledges that the human species has never experienced such atmospheric concentrations of CO 2, thus revealing the high uncertainty in his own prescriptions. Many critical scholars challenge the whole exercise as fanciful. Not a solution to climate change, they instead argue that it is largely a new opportunity for growth into what Peter Newell and Matthew Paterson call a new era of “climate capitalism” (2009, 2010). 3 This era would be: [b]ased on a fundamental and transformative shift away from the use of fossil fuels to underpin economic development in which de-carbonization is defined as an opportunity to reconcile capitalist accumulation with the requirements of climate change mitigation. It is still capitalism—organized through markets, private property, wage labor and so on, and with economic growth as imperative to its survival (2009, p. 81). In their 2008 article “Accumulation by Decarbonization”, Bumpus and Liverman, 2008 (like Newell and Paterson) addressed Stern's market strategy as yet another incarnation of prior pro-growth environmental strategies of ‘sustainable development’ and ‘ecological modernization’. As we discuss below, these have failed to square the environment/growth circle. The concept of ‘sustainable growth’ has long been a point of dissension for many ecological economists. Georgescu-Roegen (1993), for example, described it as “oxymoronic,” while Daly (1993) argued that the idea was “thought-stopping.” It is also with the notion of outgrowing climate change that Costanza takes issue with Stern. He writes that if Stern's Global Deal has one “fundamental shortcoming” it is its “uncritical acceptance of economic growth as the only path to future prosperity.” Growth, continues Costanza, “is merely a means to the goal of sustainable human well-being. [It] is not—and should not be—an end in itself” (2009a, p. 1078). Costanza's criticism, however, comes only after he praises Stern's Global Deal as having “positive implications for global capitalism”, writing that it is a “roadmap for managing the climate crisis” (2009a, p. 1078). The obvious query is 3 For a laudatory perspective on this strategy, see Hunter Lovins and Boyd Cohen's 2011 book Climate Capitalism: Capitalism and the Age of Climate Change.

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how one can praise the roadmap while rejecting its destination. Nevertheless, Costanza challenges Stern to reconsider the unlimited utility of growth, to “move beyond” GDP as a measure of social wellbeing, and even to consider alternative property regimes. But if Costanza ultimately envisions some sort of no-growth capitalism, it is unclear what it might look like, let alone how the Stern strategy could play a part in fostering it. Costanza's review of Stern's strategy points to a contradiction at the core of ecological economics, a contradiction between mainstream means and heterodox ends, with a confused space in between. In the reconciliation of these oppositions, and in the co-operative pursuit of a common goal that one would expect in a shared discipline, one would hope to see these questions being debated in the pages of Ecological Economics. That would certainly be an interesting, and potentially productive, conversation. But no such conversation appears to be happening, at least, in the Journal.

3. The Stern Reality: Pluralism and Incoherence In the five years since the Stern Review was released, Ecological Economics has published 147 articles that focus on climate change. 4 To try to understand the conundrum in which the issue of growth/ no-growth places ecological economics (as seen through this journal), we categorized 97 articles that can be seen (explicitly or implicitly) either to support or challenge mainstream economic approaches to climate change. 5 Of these 97articles, 86 of them (or 89%) employ analyses that fit under the mainstream (neoclassical) framework, with 11 articles (11%) fitting within a critical paradigm. 6 Fig. 1, depicts the distribution of these articles according, first, to where each fits into one of many widely discussed topics within climate change economics and, second, to how each can be broadly distinguished between ‘critical’ and ‘mainstream’ approaches. One of the most common themes found in the journal is that of the application of cost–benefit analysis (CBA) to climate change, including articles examining discounting, marginal costs, GDP losses, and so on. As the most widely accepted approach to evaluating climate change amongst mainstream analyses, CBA is foundational to the Stern Review and his Global Deal. 22% of the articles reviewed made a case for its expansion and/or the improvement of climate change CBA. While some articles question aspects of CBA, and even specifically challenge Stern's analysis (for example, Hourcade et al., 2009), their criticisms address the quality of the numbers, assumptions or models while staying within the premises of the CBA framework. In contrast, an extensive body of literature—much of which has come from other ecological economists—argues that the CBA methodology is structurally flawed (Ackerman and Heinzerling, 2001; Aldred, 2009; Funtowicz and Ravets, 1994; Lohmann, 2010; Nelson, forthcoming; Spash, 2002, 2007). Their criticisms address what they see as the value-laden assumptions that underpin the monetary valuation of life, ecosystems, the future, risk and uncertainty, and argue generally that the solution

4 Our survey covers those articles for which climate change is the primary topic of discussion published between December 2007 (Volume 60, Issue 3) and January 2011 (Volume 72). 5 Of the remaining 50 articles, many have important economic implications for climate change but cannot be classified as critical/mainstream as they articulate largely technical and social concerns, such as how to measure emissions more accurately, how to identify the social and economic impacts of climate change, or how to set appropriate consumption levels for well-being. These articles are listed in Appendix A along with a more detailed explanation of how and why they were categorized as they were. This categorization is necessarily based on qualitative judgments and, given the wide range of contributions and styles, the objectives of each article are not always clear cut, nor easily comparable. Nevertheless, we believe that our selection process provides an accurate portrait of the orientation of these pieces in the journal. 6 For an article-by-article breakdown, see Appendix B.

Fig. 1. Distribution of articles on climate change in Ecological Economics.

to the problems with CBA is not to be found in better numbers or more robust assumptions, but in different frameworks.7 Such concerns are not addressed in the articles in this category. Extending from the CBA framework are discussions of how to apply market-pricing mechanisms to combat climate change. 29% of all the articles fit under this wide umbrella, with the most common topics being emissions-trading schemes (13 articles), carbon taxation (10 articles) and transfer payments (5 articles). The attention accorded to carbon pricing is consistent with the dominant economic approach to climate change (Bernstein et al., 2010; Newell and Paterson, 2010) while criticisms of these mechanisms are unacknowledged. Such criticisms include the broader concern for the incommensurability of natural values, or the prejudicial biases that marketization would impose on structural changes that some see as necessary for ending fossil-fuel dependence (see for example, Dempsey and Robertson, 2012; Kosoy and Corbera, 2010; Lohmann, 2010). Underpinning both CBA and market mechanisms is the goal of ‘decoupling’ carbon emissions from economic activity. If the appropriate prices are assigned, it is assumed that efficiency improvements, substitution and behavioral changes will help to decarbonize the economy. This is the cornerstone of climate capitalism. It is also a specific application of ‘ecological modernization’ theory that promotes efficiency improvements in lieu of structural reforms. 15% of the articles directly pursue some notion of decoupling economic growth from carbon emissions, with the majority of the analyses focusing on case studies of decoupling, fossil fuel substitution, and the environmental Kuznets curves for emissions.8 Evidence of limited (‘relative’) decoupling occurring in specific regions and industries exists. Elsewhere, however, the ‘absolute’ decoupling that is necessary for continuing economic growth without increasing emissions has been dismissed as not having happened in the past, and not being possible in the future. Indeed, some call the expectation that it will happen ‘delusional’ because efficiency gains are consistently outrun by an ever-growing demand for energy (Jackson, 2009). Thus while decoupling is seen to make growth less carbon intensive (i.e. ‘greener’), its contribution to the long-term sustainability of growth-based capitalism remains at best theoretical. The final mainstream theme is carbon offsetting. 22% of the 97 articles concern themselves with improving and expanding carbon offsets. Offsets are a form of payment for ecosystem services, an

7 We return to the criticism of CBA of climate change in Section 4 more thoroughly, using Clive Spash's critique of Stern that appeared in the pages of this journal not long after the Stern Review was released. 8 Two additional articles—Stern, 2010; He and Richard, 2010—call into question the existence of an EKC with emissions.

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increasingly popular topic, and one on which ever greater reliance is being made to counter (‘offset’) growing carbon emissions. This development has occurred even as the body of critical literature grows that questions the efficacy of offsets and the dangers of an increasing reliance on them (Kosoy and Corbera, 2010; Spash, 2010). Critics outside the Journal point, for example, to the problem of ‘equivalence’. Can planting trees in a plantation in Kenya reliably capture future emissions so as to offset the releases from longburied oil reserves that are liberated to power an SUV in the United States? Implementing offsets also generates a range of problematic socio-economic impacts—land privatization, community displacement, environmental commodification—that leads many to characterize it as another manifestation of neocolonial oppression (Bachram, 2004; Lohmann, 2010; Paterson, 2010; Smith, 2007). As Norgaard (2010) argues, carbon offsets are a frivolous salve to the “delusion of continuing consumption along its old path in the rich countries” (p. 1219). Finally, 11% of the articles can be classified as critical. Amongst these, several illuminate the structural deficiency of mainstream economic thinking on ethical (Nelson, 2008; Nelson, 2009) or methodological grounds (Curtis, 2009; Hampicke, 2011; Spash, 2007) or because it eschews consideration of the associated structural issues of political economy (DeCanio, 2009; O'Hara, 2009). Others argue that climate change has rendered mainstream economics so wanting that a new economic paradigm is needed, be it one situated in the insights of Buddhist economics (Daniels, 2010a, 2010b), co-evolutionary economics (Foxon, 2011), or a social justice paradigm (Bina and La Camera, 2011). This simple categorization points to two important conclusions that have long been of concern to ‘socio-economic’ (i.e. critical) ecological economists: the predominance in this journal of mainstream over critical analyses, and the lack of engagement of mainstream (technical) treatments with critical (structural) analyses (Burkett, 2005). Rather than challenging mainstream economics, or laying the foundation for new economic paradigms, the field's seed journal widely employs and reinforces the concepts, assumptions, models and solutions that are used in the journals of environmental economics. In the last five years, more articles have been published on each of the carbon offsets, carbon pricing, and CBA than have been published in total on critical analyses of the mainstream's implicit acceptance of the pursuit of “accumulation by decarbonization.” For those who view ecological economics as a conceptual innovation, and Ecological Economics as a space within which to challenge the hegemony of mainstream economic discourse and to imagine alternative futures (new ‘imaginaries’), the question arises as to whether ecological economics (both as a discipline and a journal) remains an alternative to mainstream environmental economics—or has become a legitimation of it. 4. Is Ecological Economics Eco-logical? Not surprisingly, given their substantive (and methodological) diversity, ecological economists are a tough group to characterize. Presenting and encouraging a variety of competing ideas have long been part of the field's goal of “methodological pluralism”.9 The intersection of ecology and economics entails complex problems that, epistemologically, are seen to benefit from diverse approaches that can stimulate wide-ranging debate, encourage the clarification of the substantive nature of one's theoretical assumptions and methodologies, prevent premature consensus, and leave space for new ideas to emerge (Norgaard, 1989; Söderbaum, 2011; Van den Bergh, 2001). Yet diversity can also become a source of fuzziness and thematic incoherence insofar

9 A goal that remains in Elsevier's description of the Journal: http://www.journals. elsevier.com/ecological-economics/.

as it obfuscates a discipline's unifying foundations and purposes, leading as it has in ecological economics to a lack of “serious attention to theoretical contradiction” (Spash, 2012). Is ecological economics now essentially a “special branch” of environmental economics that embraces the tenets of neoclassicism with a special attention to placing economic value on the ‘services’ provided by natural ecosystems (see Røpke, 2005 p. 274)? Or is it a pragmatic approach that merges a rhetorical allegiance to the field's substantive pre-analytic vision with the use of mainstream methodologies that might have public policy purchase (Van den Bergh, 2011)? Costanza's assessment of the Stern's Global Deal, his high-profile promotion of pricing ecosystem services, and his new online journal, Solutions, would seem to embody both of these positions. Or is it still a field that relies on its founding tenets in the pursuit of a new economic paradigm (Gowdy and Erickson, 2005; Spash, 2011), be it some form of steady state (Daly, 1977, 2010) or degrowth economics (Kallis, 2011), a new behavioral economics (Gowdy, 2008), ecological socialism (Burkett, 2005), or a new ecological political economy (Gale, 1998; M'Gonigle, 1999; Söderbaum, 2011)? Many have expressed the concern that the field's catholicity impedes the development of a consensus about its acceptable parameters, that is, a coherent intellectual identity with consistent unifying characteristics and delimitations that can guide its evolution (Burkett, 2005; Funtowicz and Ravets, 1994; Gale, 1998; Krall and Klitgaard, 2011; M'Gonigle, 1999; Røpke, 2005; Söderbaum, 1999; Spash, 2011). Its history of trying to balance ‘neoclassical-friendly’ with critical positions, argues Julia Nelson (2009), has put ecological economics in a unique position “which holds the potential for the sorts of creative insight that can only come about from opposites held in tension” (p. 1). If so, it would be justified as a “post-normal” science (Silva and Teixeira, 2011) that can achieve its objectives by embracing its mainstream and critical voices with an attitude of “both/and” rather than “either/or” (Nelson, 2009, p.7). This assessment, however, begs the question as to how the ‘opposites’ can be held in tension where (as we have seen) one side dominates the discourse not by virtue of debate or soundness of the argument but by the imbalance of published output and the lack of engagement with critical perspectives. Neither is the disparity between critical and mainstream publications limited to climate change discourse, as others have observed it runs throughout the Journal (Spash, 2011). It has been noted that the methodological divide (neoclassical vs. critical) mirrors a geographical one (American vs. European) (Røpke, 2005; Spash, 2009, 2011) where “the active socio-economists were European” who have felt marginalized by what they “perceived as the American ‘ownership’ of the international society” and its conferences (Røpke, 2005, p. 284). Instead of reflecting a cultural divide, many early ecological economists argued that, with a shared empirical and theoretical base, the displacement of neoclassical economics should be a principled goal for the field (Spash, 2011). Understanding the disparities in the Journal, and what if anything should be done about them, is not easy. Some would argue that the choice of publications in the Journal may result not from biased intentions and choices on what to include and not to include, but from the origin and topic of submissions and non-submissions. Others would point to the evolution of the Journal's editorial board as suggesting that an explicit political element is at play. Both Røpke (2005) and Spash (2011) document the declining role of socio-economists in the Journal and the broader society. Notably, in 2002, the incoming editor Cutler Cleveland expelled the more heterodox European representatives from the Journal's editorial board, including Røpke who was then associate editor and Spash who was the president of the European Society for Ecological Economics and the board's most recent appointee. The Board was restructured again in 2009 and, while still a minority, it includes seven members from the socioeconomic branch, including both Røpke and Spash. While there remains an explicit commitment to openness—to which the publication of this article serves as a testament—the effect is that a de facto

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consensus is forming not through debate and empirical accountability, but through disparities in membership numbers, institutional power, thematic representation, and dialogical neglect. These factors would themselves affect submissions, peer-review processes, topic development and, in the end, what is published and how the field develops. One can see and assess what is present; one can only imagine what authors and debates are absent, and why and to what effects. Take, for example, Clive Spash's critique of the Stern Review that appeared in this journal in 2007. In it, Spash deconstructs Stern's cost–benefit analysis using many of the concepts that have been a key to the development and differentiation of ecological economics. He argues that Stern's use of CBA effectively limits the acceptable responses to climate change to those that maintain consumption growth and profitable returns on investment (Spash, 2007, p. 713). Yes, notes Spash, the Stern Review acknowledges a range of methodological and ethical complexities with its approach—accounting difficulties, unprecedented uncertainties, incommensurability, diverse value positions, poverty impacts, spatial and temporal inequalities, and so on. It then, however, ignores the wide body of critical literature that addresses the implications of these problems. These include the problematic nature of the linkage between GDP, growth and wellbeing, a linkage that provides the essential underpinning for the Stern Review's methodology but which, if unfounded, goes to the heart of the purpose and momentum of capitalist-driven growth. The Stern Review does not consider the literature championed by critical ecological economists on issues ranging from the limitations of cost–benefit analysis to incommensurability to decoupling to the rebound effect (Gowdy, 2008). “At the end of the day”, concludes Spash “ the Stern Review is a standard economic approach to weighing-up costs and benefits on the basis of over-simplification, adopting narrow ethical positions and sidelining much of what the authors themselves state is important to consider” (p. 713). That Stern eschews a re-examination of this linkage is unsurprising; that ecological economists regularly follow his lead is more problematic. In what could be seen as a direct challenge to these ecological economists, Spash writes; The fact that Stern conduct[s] a global [Cost Benefit Analysis] regardless of all theoretical limitations and ethical concerns might then be regarded as less important than [his] call for mitigation. Those ecological economists who have been placing large numbers on global ecosystem services may be comforted to find other environmental pragmatists arguing that this is the way in which environmental problems should be articulated, i.e., an investment opportunities set in a marketplace (p. 707). It is now five years on and, despite regular references to Stern throughout the Journal, Spash's direct critique has been cited only once, and in passing.10 His challenge to mainstream climate change economics goes unanswered, even as the number of articles that employ the mainstream methods championed by Stern and deconstructed by Spash pile up. In light of the positive reception accorded to the Stern Review, and its uptake in the journal and more broadly, the concerns expressed by Spash and others cannot be dismissed as a minor academic squabble or even as an exceptional situation. Academic discourse plays an active role in constituting broader social knowledge and choices and, for the public, ecological economics has a critical and powerful, no-growth ‘brand’. Such discourse—especially ‘authoritative’ discourse—has real material and institutional effects. But what ecological economists choose to consider is affected by the context in which they operate—

10 See: Nelson, 2009, Between a rock and a soft place: Ecological and feminist economics in policy debates, Ecological Economics, Vol 69 (1) pp. 1–8.

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the rewards they enjoy and audiences they reach–and thus they, like other economists, make the world that makes them (see for example, Mitchell, 2005). In this interaction, some discourses become dominant— ‘hegemonic’—while others are marginalized. Ironically, adopting a principled openness to methodological pluralism may itself have helped to neutralize the critical thrust of ecological economics since ‘neoclassical’ economics is not a pluralistically tolerant perspective. Such hegemonic neoclassical discourse extends well beyond just what is happening in the pages of Ecological Economics. Consider, for example, the evolution over the past 3 decades in the knowledge and movements for sustainable development, ecological modernization, the green economy and clean energy. The common orientation in these movements is apparent in the terminologies employed—in the ‘hard’ nouns that set the direction (development, modernization, economy, energy) in comparison with the ‘soft’ modifying adjectives that offer a pleasant and meaningless gloss (sustainable, ecological, green, clean). New disciplines and their associated institutional embodiments are always under the pressure of hegemonic forces. This was certainly the experience of economists who first articulated the need in the 1970s to address the ‘limits to growth’. Discourses (and their institutional embodiments) can rationalize power, or challenge it. In this light, the conflicted discourse of ecological economics, and its manifestation in this journal, matter. 5. The Paradigm, and the Half-Anomaly In her review of the founding and development of ecological economics as a new discipline with a designated society and journal, Røpke (2005) detailed how this package was shaped (and bounded) by the underlying concern to create a ‘reputational organization.’ Such an organization is oriented to gain adherents, raise money for institutional growth, and keep an eye not just on academic argument but on public policy impacts. Such intentions undoubtedly played out in the growing embrace of mainstream economic methodology even if time, and the planet's declining health, seem to have validated the field's more critical vision. As Norgaard (2010) wrote recently in this journal: We have experienced three decades of free market fundamentalism during which public understanding has been reduced to ideology extolling markets while government agencies have been denigrated and their budgets shrunk. During this period, markets have been guided and regulated more by internal power and market mythology, less through democratic institutions and informed reason (p. 1225). Yet the evolution of the field was shaped not only by what might be needed to become a reputational organization in the era of neoliberal hegemony, but by the limitations of its founding vision. It is one thing to criticize growth on the basis of the science of thermodynamics; it is another to situate the sources of that growth in the real world of political economy. Over a decade before the era of ‘sustainable development’ was launched, another '70s economist concerned with scale, impacts and real socio-ecological welfare, Schumacher, 1973, made a telling distinction between an economics that provided the (inside) operating system for the growth economy and one that articulated how that system contributed a set of driving values and processes to the operation of the larger (outside) world of which it was a part. His concern was where a technically functioning (internal) system does not produce a healthy (external) political economy, in which case the neoclassicist needed to step outside the self-referential confines of the field: If the economist…remains unaware of the fact that there are boundaries to applicability of the economic calculus, he is likely

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to fall into a similar kind of error as that of certain medieval theologians who tried to settle questions of physics by means of biblical quotations. Every science is beneficial within its proper limits, but becomes evil and destructive as soon as it transgresses them. (p. 42) Taking such a ‘paradigmatic’ step has always been the challenge of ecological economics. In the neoliberal world, however, where global climate change, widespread biodiversity loss, and countless other environmental losses accelerate, taking this step is more necessary now than ever. The word ‘paradigm’ is well worn (and overused), but is still remarkably helpful when considered in the way it was originally conceived by Thomas Kuhn (1962). Kuhn argued that scientific thinking evolved not through linear processes but through contradiction and revolution. He noted that scientific practitioners working within a discipline did so according to an implicit set of rules (the paradigm) of which they were not fully aware but to which they (and their institutions) were nonetheless firmly attached. One cannot see the paradigm from within because one is so much a part of its assumptions and values. The paradigm defines the world of those doing their ‘normal science’ of ‘solving’ the various ‘puzzles’ that the world presents. In this process, however, some puzzles emerge that resist solution; they present an ‘anomaly’ which does not fit within the paradigm but which points to a hidden and defective premise on which that paradigm depends. This creates the necessity for a new paradigm. However, because the livelihoods of the existing paradigm's practitioners depend upon it, as do powerful institutions and even whole societies that have embodied it, the development of a new paradigm is not only intellectually challenging, but institutionally threatening. Thus, the need for a ‘scientific revolution’. In this Kuhnian light, the environmental challenges that emerged in the 1960s can be seen to have posed a paradigm challenge to the dominant economic model of development that flourished in the postwar era, a model premised on global growth. As the founders of ecological economics noted, environmental decline (entropy) was a necessary byproduct of economic activity per se. More activity meant more entropy, like a skyscraper growing taller by drawing materials from beneath its own foundations. For neoclassicists working within the skyscraper construction manual, options were limited to, for example, learning how to build more floors from a smaller quantity of materials. But for those concerned with the erosive effects of the construction process itself, the architectural model was the issue, suggesting the need to minimize resource throughput (not only make it more efficient) by building to a limited scale. Ecological economics thus posed a daunting challenge for the growth-driven operating system of capitalism, especially in the United States where critical discouse is not part of either the country's broad political or narrow economic traditions. A partial accommodation was achieved, however, by casting the problem in terms of simply too much economic activity per se. Such a critique could be justified on the non-ideological, natural scientific grounds of the laws of thermodynamics that avoided any direct connection to the dynamics of capitalism. On the contrary, this approach could point to the more visible entropic effects of brute socialist economies like the Soviet Union in comparison to capitalism's penchant for efficiency and innovation. Others were not so circumspect, however. The prominent Marxist geographer, Harvey (2010), for example, has long criticized the focus on entropy as neo-Malthusian insofar as it attributes scarcity to some natural factor (the laws of thermodynamics). In so doing, it does not address the social demand for growth to generate the returns that are essential for capital regardless of their wasteful and inequitable social character. Indeed, by diverting attention away from this underlying cause of ecological decline, ecological economics can actually be counterproductive, its half-embrace of the growth anomaly

leaving space for the ‘internal methodologies’ to continue their work of constructing the skyscraper, with all its ongoing effects. The eventual result was the market failure of all market failures, climate change. The building is leaning. Climate change has thus brought ecological economics to a time of reckoning that logically will lead either to its assimilation within mainstream economics or a transformational break from it. A lot is at stake here; the brand is valuable. The situation is ironic insofar as the arrival in a most pressing form of the crisis of entropy long ago predicted by incipient ecological economists (and that the field was created to avoid) would now possibly become the field's undoing. Kuhn would have recognized the sources of this undoing in its half-embrace of the anomaly of economic growth: ecological economics identifies growth's entropic effect but not its capitalist cause. In a pattern common to the ‘reputational’ and institutional struggles of scientific revolutions, the neoclassical paradigm that the ecological insurgent was born to challenge instead redefined the challenge to fit within the existing paradigm, under the protection of a façade of critical openness. Neoclassicism is, after all, a truly ‘inside the box’ methodology that accepts “only ‘one pattern of thinking… the market model’ [producing a] tendency to reduce phenomena to forms treatable with neoclassical market concepts…” (Burkett, 2005 p. 93–94, citing Norgaard, 1989 p. 37). This pattern of thinking, “ignores the inner connections between capitalist relations of production, nature valuation, and the development of technologies that deplete and despoil natural wealth” (2005, p. 41). In contrast to this inside the box ideology, a ‘true’ ecological economics is particularly threatening because its ‘limits to growth’ argument is less about the limited quantity of resources available for growth than about the accumulated impacts of processing these resources even if they could be found. Thus the current industrial mobilization to overcome the limits to inputs (getting beyond ‘peak oil’ with new fossil fuels from fracking or tar sands or ‘clean coal’) actually increases the importance of the field's arguments about there being acceptable limits of outputs (high entropy) even with new resources. This makes it all the more important that the paradigmatic challenge of the field be recaptured by conservative methodologies that can bring it safely back inside the ideological field. It is beyond the scope of this paper to consider in detail the empirical deficits and ideological assumptions of neoclassicism (recently well reviewed in any event by Beder (2011) and Spash (2012)). It is, however, important to understand more clearly the entropic core of capitalism that renders a neoclassical/ecological accommodation impossible. As Polanyi (1944) pointed out in his classic work of economic anthropology, The Great Transformation, markets that trade in goods and services have existed in virtually all societies, and need not grow where they are submerged in a larger set of cultural calculations and constraints. That is, they can be maintained in a steady state, because they are intended to, and do, meet the needs of their society. To do this, they must meet social needs, producing real ‘use values’. Such markets exchange tomatoes for wheat not for profit but to provide food for both parties (a tomato sandwich) and, in so doing, to support the livelihoods of both farmers. In contrast, markets driven by capital needs are designed for one end, to seek returns to capital, that is, to maximize ‘exchange values’ that can grow the quantum of capital. These markets must grow by their nature because the point of any investment of capital is to return more capital to it, and they do this only through the exchange process itself. Exchange activity (and all its entropic effects) is the basis of their mode of operation, and the more such activity, the more that capital is generated. One does much better buying tomatoes not for a sandwich but to turn around and sell them again for more money than one had initially. Capitalism prizes the middleman and the ‘value-added’ processor; its momentum ends with final consumption and it is positively threatened by the self-provision and thrift that eschews exchange per se.

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The quest to grow the quantum of capitalized value has become the meta-narrative of planetary economics, everyone endlessly investing, trading, buying and selling. Whether one is investing in coal mines or renewable energy, whether one is trading in carbon offsets or shark fins, the motivation is the same: accumulating more capital than one invested in the first place—and doing so endlessly (Trainer, 2010). No relationship needs to exist between increasing welfare (‘use values’) and increasing capital (‘exchange values’). And so the problem lies not in economic activity per se but in the compulsive dependence on such economic activity to fuel capital growth and accumulation. In the half-embrace of growth (not capitalism) as the paradigmatic anomaly to be resolved, growth is mistakenly treated as a disposable add-on, an addiction to be cured (Booth, 2004), or a spell to be exorcized (as Bill McKibben wrote in the introduction to Tim Jackson's Prosperity without Growth). But growth is not an add-on; it is inherent to capitalism. “[W]ithin modern capitalist economies a lack of growth is the definition of a crisis” (Paterson, 2000 p. 45). Capitalism's economic dominance today is two-fold, on the one hand capitalist markets representing an increasing proportion of all human economic activity while, on the other hand, the scale of such activity is itself increasing overall. This dominance was propelled from the 18th century on by the rise of industrial capitalism that was able to harness resources, especially energy, to power machines, increase ‘efficiency’ and produce more goods (Alcott, 2005; Ayres, 2008; Jackson, 2009). In other words, today's activity-based, exchangedependent capitalism is itself something else—a “fossil fuel mode of production” (Huber, 2008). As a result, even accounting for the various carbon-pricing mechanisms being put in place in recent years, greenhouse gas emissions keep going up—except when economic activity itself contracts. The continuous quest for capital growth helps to explain the support for the paradigmatic move by some ‘ecological’ economists (including Costanza) to price the world's “ecosystem services”. This is the only way that the neoclassical model knows how to ‘protect’ these services (by pricing them) but, more importantly, ecosystem pricing opens up a new source of capital accumulation. Both intellectually and practically, what is outside the market must be brought within. As Dempsey and Robertson (2012) note (referring to Smith, 2007): [E]merging environmental markets in ecosystem services like water purification or carbon sequestration accomplish the capitalization of the natural world more deeply and more intensely than either extractive resource capitalism or agricultural capital, and engage nature in a form that can be fully abstracted into exchange value and financialized. (p. 5) As Beder (2011) concluded in her comparison of environmental economics and ecological economics, the success of the latter seems to “have been limited to areas where it retains the standard economics view of environmental problems (for example ecosystem services)” because it has also been unable “to overcome the power of vested interests” (p. 149). In contrast, those who take seriously “the idea of natural limits [as] fundamental to ecological economics” argue that, rather than extending the reach of capitalist markets, they need to be reduced by “turning down the economic drivers” (Norgaard, 2010, p. 1226). By our count, however, few are heeding Norgaard's proscription with only 11% of the Journal making the systemic arguments that need to be debated, at least in relation to climate change. If so, like the modern world generally, the trends in ecological economics reflect the insight of the renowned American cultural theorist, Frederic Jameson, that we can more easily imagine the end of the planet than the end of capitalism. 6. Beyond Methodological Pluralism Through a consideration of climate change in the recent years of Ecological Economics, this paper has provided a snapshot of the

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demise of the promise of the field—from the evident contradiction embedded within Costanza's approach to Stern's Global Deal, to the dominance of environmental over ecological economic analysis in the journal, to the façade of methodological pluralism that masks this dominance, to the lack of engagement with critical voices and insights by the field's mainstream, to the half-embrace of the anomaly represented by the field's original insight, to its paradigmatic (and empirical) failure to extend this embrace to an analysis of the dynamics of capitalism, to the revitalized colonization of the ecological frontier through the move to price ecosystem services. In practice, this has led to the process today of what Tim Luke calls ‘sustainable degradation’ where so-called ‘solutions’ that arise from within the dominant structures are meant to reconfigure changing environmental conditions to the needs of capitalist production (Luke, 2006). This phenomenon is itself typical of a diversity of new mechanisms oriented to maintain the functioning of today's complex social systems in the face of world-ending capitalist processes. Citing the landmark work of systems theorist, Niklas Luhmann, a recent critique of the colonizing impact of the burgeoning field of ‘resilience theory’ noted: By metabolizing critique into its internal dynamic, the complex adaptive system remains self-referential even when it encounters the most violent of shocks…defy[ing] critique, forcing all wouldbe critics to inhabit the system they set out to challenge. … [Such] thinking cannot be challenged from within the terms of complex systems theory but must be contested, if at all, on completely different terms, by a movement of thought that is truly countersystemic. (Walker and Cooper, 2011, 157) If this is accurate, social (i.e. critical) ecological economists have a chance of success only by becoming, finally, a “movement of thought that is truly counter-systemic.” In this regard, we are now able to respond to the question that this article posed—Does ecological economics have a future? In its neoclassical guise, the answer is clearly “No”, with ecological economics already having only a minimal ‘present’ here. In its critical guise, the answer is “Perhaps” to the extent that it becomes a forum for deconstructing methodological pluralism in a continuing debate over what might better be understood as the “ideological empiricism” of a neoclassicism that constructs the acceptable boundaries of what is considered to be worthy as ‘true’ knowledge, indeed of what might be considered at all. Insofar as such a challenge remains but a minor counter-hegemonic force in the journal, however, it is counterproductive, actually helping to legitimize the misleading claims of methodological pluralism. Finally, within a re-formed organization and journal that eschews the ideological empiricism that now dominates, the answer is most assuredly “Yes”. If ecological economics is to have a future worth having, its real contribution will surely lie in both dismantling the hegemony of neoclassical economics and in helping to move to a post-hegemonic (post-capitalist) exploration of what can and must take its place. Whether the discipline's structure of power can be re-formed is at best an open question given the historic imbalances. 7. Conclusion: A New Economics for the Era of Climate Change More broadly, the challenge for the field is to generate what Michel Foucault long ago described as a new ‘politics of truth’, and this demands that critical ecological economics must be able to reach beyond the Journal, the institution, and the academy: Each society has its own regime of truth, its ‘general politics’ of truth: that is, the types of discourses which it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and false statements, the means by which

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each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what is true. (1980, p. 131) Such a new politics would, we suggest, have a two-pronged strategy. On the one hand, it should continue to deconstruct the ideology of neoclassicism, including from within the institutions of ecological economics and its hegemonic colonization of that field. It can achieve this deconstruction only by re-inscribing the distinction between environmental economics and ecological economics, the latter being a field that takes seriously the anomaly of growth including the inevitable contradiction it poses for capitalism. Critical political economists have long understood that rational debate with neoclassicists is a lost cause. It is as productive as asking a car mechanic to fix the engine's carbon-spewing exhaust by getting rid of the private automobile. On the other hand, this reinvigorated, counter-systemic ecological economics must reach beyond the limits of both a critical discourse and a largely academic audience. It would do this by taking up the cause of prescriptive analysis and transformative public practice. Today ecological economics is stuck in the embrace of a managerialism bounded by a neoclassical rationality. In his recent book, Anthony Giddens complained that “we have no politics of climate change” because the politics being applied to this global threat remains rooted in an earlier world, now past (Giddens, 2009, p4). Commenting specifically on the Stern Review, Giddens notes that its economics is absent of any understanding of the real interplay of knowledge and power, treating the issues in a technical way as if Stern's solution will “be reached as soon as the nations of the world see reason” (p. 201). In other words, as we have seen with the articles that dominate this journal, we similarly have ‘no economics of climate change!’ A renewal—and re-invention—of ecological economics could help remedy this absence by situating its mission, and the field's future, in a larger post-growth and post-capitalist ‘discursive project’ of social education and political mobilization. In this mode, the field would actually be able to explore seriously the economic practices needed for an ecologically balanced and socially equitable ‘steady state’. What might a cost– benefit analysis look like without using capital as the single denominator? What new forms of economic exchange (community currencies, cooperatives, complementary trade, and so on) might minimize entropic effects while supporting dynamic local economies that generate newly understood forms of social and ecological welfare? How might ecological economics ‘denaturalize’ the ideologies that are now so embedded within modern culture while it ‘renaturalizes’ substantive cultural understandings that have long underpinned steady-state cultures? What might it look like if ecological economics took up the cause not of economic growth but of economic security (Barry, 2012)? The goal of such academic work would not be the false one of trying to internalize externalities (that really function as shifted costs) but to produce new economic forms that would not generate such intentional displacements in the first place. Such concerns would inevitably bring together, and be oriented to, a wider array of non-institutional ecological ecologists–advocates for climate justice not just experts on carbon markets, people of the South as well as of the North, non-Americans as well as Beltway Americans, deGrowth advocates and Marxists as much as left liberals, social activists not only corporate environmentalists, political ecologists not only neoclassical economists, and globalizers from below, as much as globalizers from above. A reinvigorated ecological economics must leave behind the compromises of its history. The world is well past that history, as is evident in both the escalating environmental consequences of growth and its increasingly unstable macro-economic foundations. How one ‘frames’ a reinvented ecological economic discourse will be important not only for gaining popular support (Van den Bergh, 2011) but for opening up new economic and political possibilities. The potential for ‘deGrowth’ (Kallis, 2011), ‘post-capitalism’ (Gibson-Graham, 2006), and the ecological economics of the ‘steady state’ is something

that can be achieved only by shuffling off the timidity and false promise of its organizational reputationalism. In the relentless context of global instability, academic and popular forums sprout up everyday as do counter-hegemonic movements taking on the complex problems fuelled by capitalist growth. Ecological economists must retool their analysis to account for the problematic areas of capitalism and to do so in ways that are useful to these emerging movements. There is much to be learned from decades of critical socio-economic work. One of the most insightful critics of neoclassical carbon politics, Larry Lohmann, argues for just such an expanded conversation. It is now absent, he writes, as a result of “a failure attributable not only to governments, corporations and mainstream environmentalism, but also to the institutions supporting social science research itself” (Lohmann, 2008 p. 3). Ecological economics is one of these discourse institutions. Lohmann continues: In the intensive debate that will be needed to build this understanding, there is a deep need for social scientists critical of the neoclassical consensus to take a greater part than they have done to date. Not only must economics be subjected to more searching and informed criticism in climate policy discussions; other social sciences including sociology, history, anthropology and political science must also see their role expanded (p. 3). David Harvey has written in similar terms although he comes from a very different vantage point than that of the ecological economist: Ideas have consequences and false ideas can have devastating consequences…We need new mental conceptions to understand the world.... The deeply entrenched mental conceptions associated with neoliberal theories and the neoliberalisation and corporatisation of the universities has played more than a trivial role in the production of the present crisis….Plenty of people, including many scientists, see the looming environmental constraints as insuperable. A steady state global economy and global population has for them to be the long-term aim. A new political economy of nature has to be constructed. This means radical reconfigurations of daily life, in urbanisation as well as in dominant social relations, production systems and in institutional arrangements (2010, p. 236, 237, 240). Having shed their entanglement with a deconstructed neoclassicism, ecological economists would be free to develop a new collective understanding and, with it, a more specific agenda not merely for reform but for re-formation. Again, Foucault (1980) saw the essential problem for modernity as: … that of ascertaining the possibility of constituting a new politics of truth. The problem is not changing people's consciousnesses— or what's in their heads—but the political, economic, institutional regime of the production of truth…. of detaching the power of truth from the forms of hegemony, social, economic, cultural, within which it operates at the present time (p. 133). With such a commitment comes the best chance we may have to devise a robust path toward a truly sustainable future. There is much work to be done. The successful reputational organization of today remains beholden to the institutions and intelligence constructed by a collective history embedded in a fossil-fuel mode of production that is inevitably passing away. In its early years, ecological economics was looked to as a sort of ‘movement intelligence’ for environmentalists unable to abide with the hegemony of neoclassicism. Today, it is only by addressing its own contradictions, and moving beyond them, that ecological (or deGrowth, or post-capitalist, or steady state) economics can build on its historic mission in the service of a radically changing world.

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Acknowledgments

Appendix B

The authors would like to acknowledge Jessica Dempsey, Thomas Green, Louise Takeda, and three anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful contributions to earlier manuscripts.

This table depicts all the articles that fall under the umbrella of the mainstream economic treatment of climate change epitomized by the Stern Review and later by his Global Deal.

Appendix A This table groups the articles published in Ecological Economics that, while on the topic of climate, and while offering analyses that may have important implications, they do not fit into the categories of explicitly supporting or challenging the mainstream approach to climate change. Take for example Steinberger and Roberts' (2010) and Druckman and Jackson's (2010) analyses into the consumption levels, and subsequent emission levels, necessary to achieve well-being and human development. The findings from these studies could be applied within a mainstream or critical framework. Likewise, the largest category in this group is on input–output analysis, which is focused primarily on developing better emission inventories at a variety scales. Whether it is from a mainstream or critical vantage point, anyone with an interest in reducing emissions will benefit from better inventorying. Indeed, the very existence of this table is an indication of the diversity of the ideas presented in the Journal, and the difficulty of placing contributors into rigid boxes. Despite the inherent subjectivity of such an exercise, we have tried to supply an honest distribution of the articles by concerning ourselves not with the mindset that this article is “good” and this article is “bad,” but rather to help us understand the trends in the discussion, by attaching the contribution to a particular paradigm, when it is clear.

Input–output analysis? (16)

Land-use changes (9)

Emissions and demographics (5) Attitudes and actions: individuals (4) Attitudes and actions: businesses (1) Urbanization and emissions (3) Sequestration (3) Transportation and emissions (2) Climate change and human health (2) Emissions levels and well-being (2) Climate change and environmental history (1) Climate change and global governance (1) Resource flow (1)

Alcántara and Padilla (2009); Andrew and Forgie (2008); Druckman. and Jackson (2009); Druckman, et al. (2008); Edens et al. (2011); Gavrilova and Vilu (2012); Koskela et al. (2011); Lixon et al. (2008); McGregor et al. (2008); Muñoz and Steininger (2010); Peters (2008); Rueda-Cantuche and Amores (2010); Serrano and Dietzenbacher (2010); Su and Ang (2010), (2011); Wiedmann (2009) Alpizar et al. (2011); Fleischer et al. (2008); Kabubo-Mariara (2009); Mestre-Sanchis and Felijoo-Bello (2009); Omann et al. (2009); Seo (2011); Seo and Mendelsohn (2008); Seo et al. (2010); Withey and van Kooten (2011) Coondoo and Dinda (2008); Feng et al. (2009); Kronenberg (2009); Papathanasopoulou and Jackson (2009); Puliafito et al. (2008) Attari et al. (2009); Botzen et al. (2009); Kim and Neff (2009); Tjernstrom and Tietenberg (2008) Bleda and Shackley (2008) Larsen and Hertwich (2010); Martinez-Zarzoso and Maruotti (2011); Poumanyvong and Kaneko (2011) Benitez et al. (2007); Gutrich and Howarth (2007); Lafforgue et al. (2008) Cadarso et al. (2010); Grazi and van den Bergh (2008) Ackerman and Stanton (2008); Michaelowa and Dransfeld (2008) Druckman and Jackson (2010); Steinberger and Roberts (2010) Fraser (2011) Dryzek and Stevenson (2011) Fujimori and Matsuoka (2007)

Cost–benefit analyses of climate change (21)

Aaheim (2010); Anthoff et al. (2009); Busch and Hoffmann (2007); Cha et al. (2008); del Rio Gonzalez (2008); González-Eguino (2011); Hallegatte et al. (2007); Hasson et al. (2011); Hof et al. (2010); Hourcade et al. (2009); Huber (2008); Knoke et al. (2011); Kuosmanen et al. (2009); Maddison and Rehdanz (2011); Moslener and Requate (2009); Müller-Fürstenberger and Stephan (2011); Ng and Zhao (2011); Pittel and Rübbelke (2008); Solomon and Johnson (2009); Verbruggen (2009); Vermont and De Cara (2010) Carbon pricing: taxation (10) Bristow et al. (2010); Ebert and Welsch (2011); England (2007); Hammar and Jagers (2007); Kerkhof et al. (2008); Sælen and Kallbekken (2011); Timilsina et al. (2011); Tscharaktschiew and Hirte (2010); Vollebergh (2008); Wissema and Dellink (2007) Pricing: carbon/emissions Cason and Gangadharan (2011); Chernyavs'ka trading schemes (13) and Gulli (2008); De Cara and Jayet (2011); Eyckmans and Kverndokk (2010); Lund (2007); Monjon and Quirion (2011); Oberndorfer (2009); Östblom (2009); Rogge et al. (2011); Shammin and Bullard (2009); Starkey (2012a), (2012b); Van den Bergh (2011) Pricing: transfer Bosetti and Buchner (2009); Liu (2008); payments/allocations (5) Nagashima et al. (2009); Rübbelke (2011); Barua et al. (2012) Ecological modernization: Ang (2009); Agnolucci et al., 2009; Apergis et al. decoupling (13) (2010); Butnar and Llop (2011); de Freitas and Kaneko (2011); Fan et al. (2007); Leimbach and Baumstark (2010); Li (2010); Lozano and Gutiérrez (2008); Soytas and Sari (2009); Zhang (2009); Zhang and Cheng (2009); Zhang et al. (2009) Ecological modernization: Lankoski and Ollikainen (2011) substitution (1) He and Richard (2010); Stern (2010) Ecological modernization: against the EKC for emissions (2) Carbon offsets (21) Akter et al. (2009); Bellassen and Gitz (2008); Brainard et al. (2009); Castro and Michaelowa (2010); Coomes et al. (2008); Couture and Reynaud (2011); Glomsrød et al. (2011); Gong et al. (2010); González-Estrada et al. (2008); Guitart and Rodreguez (2010); Hunt (2008); Karky and Skutsch (2010); Kim et al. (2008); Lederer (2011); Markowski-Lindsay et al. (2011); Combes Motel et al. (2009); Palmer (2011); Rickels et al. (2010); Rosendal and Andresen (2011); Torres et al. (2010); Wendland et al. (2010)

Appendix C This table depicts all the articles that challenge the mainstream economic treatment of climate change, a detailed description is offered in the text.

Climate change and the need for a new economic paradigm (4) Climate change and the limitations of mainstream economics (5) Climate change and political economy (2)

Bina and La Camera (2011); Daniels (2010a), (2010b); Foxon (2011) Curtis (2009); Hampicke (2011); Nelson (2008), (2009); Spash (2007) Decanio (2009); O'Hara (2009)

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