How Ecological and Neoclassical Environmental Economists Think about Sustainability and Economics

Following a recent lecture on Econ211 where I discussed the historical foundations of Neo-Classical based Environmental Economics and Ecological Economics this recent paper may be of interest.

The way we teach Environmental Economics is fundamentally neo-classical but where ever possible an ecological perspective is provided.

A Matter of Opinion : How Ecological and Neoclassical Environmental Economists Think about Sustainability and Economics
Date: 2006
By: Lydia Illge and
Reimund Schwarze

The differing paradigms of ecological and neoclassical environmental economics have been described in various articles and books and are also embedded in different institutional settings. However, we cannot take for granted that the paradigm debates described in the literatu-re are actually mirrored in exactly the same way in the perceptions and opinions of researchers looking at sustainability from an economic perspective. This paper presents empirical results from a German case study on how economists and others involved in economic sustainability research from different schools of thought think about the issues of sustainability and economics, how they group around these issues, how they feel about the current scientific divide, and what they expect to be future topics of sustainability research. Knowing that sustainability research is highly and still increasingly internationally intertwined, and assuming that the opinions of German economic sustainability researchers do not dramatically differ from those in other countries, we think that these results will be of interest to the inter-national scientific community [...]

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:diw:diwwpp:dp619&r=env