Elsevier

Ecological Economics

Volume 69, Issue 3, 15 January 2010, Pages 445-450
Ecological Economics

Commentary
What is sustainability economics?

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2009.11.019Get rights and content

Abstract

While economists have been contributing to the discussion of various aspects of sustainability for decades, it is just recently that the term “sustainability economics” was used explicitly in the ecological, environmental, and resource economics community. Yet, the contributions that use the term “sustainability economics” do not refer to any explicit definition of the term, and are not obviously joined by common or unifying characteristics, such as subject focus, methodology, or institutional background. The question thus arises: what is “sustainability economics”? In this essay, we systematically define and delineate “sustainability economics” in terms of its normative foundation, aims, subject matter, ontology, and genuine research agenda.

Introduction

With climate change, biodiversity loss, a global water crisis, and many other manifestations of global environmental change becoming more and more apparent, there is a widespread and increasing feeling among both economists and society at large that economics should address issues of sustainability. Sustainability is a normative notion about the way how humans should act towards nature, and how they are responsible towards one another and future generations.1

Some twenty years ago, the international society and the journal of Ecological Economics have been established out of the concern that economics so far had not adequately addressed issues of human–nature relationships and of sustainability.2 Ecological economics aims to “study how ecosystems and economic activity interrelate” (Proops, 1989: 60; similarly Costanza, 1989: 1). However, ecological economics goes beyond a merely functional and descriptive analysis of this interrelationship, in that it is oriented toward the normative vision of sustainability: it understands itself as “the science and management of sustainability” (Costanza, 1991).

While up to now there exist some contributions of economists — including, but not limited to, ecological economists and environmental and resource economists — to the discussion of specific aspects of sustainability, so far neither a unifying idea (notion, concept) nor coherent structures (scientific community, institutions, curricula, conferences, etc.) of something like sustainability economics do exist — at least not to any significant extent.3,4

Interpreting the existing economic contributions in view of the overall idea of sustainability, we argue that the emerging field of sustainability economics can be defined by four core attributes:

  • 1.

    Subject focus on the relationship between humans and nature.

  • 2.

    Orientation towards the long-term and inherently uncertain future.

  • 3.

    Normative foundation in the idea of justice, between humans of present and future generations as well as between humans and nature.

  • 4.

    Concern for economic efficiency, understood as non-wastefulness, in the allocation of natural goods and services as well as their human-made substitutes and complements.

In this essay, we take this preliminary definition as a starting point for a systematic discussion of the question: “What is sustainability economics?” In particular, we develop a concrete and operational notion of sustainability economics from the above four core attributes, which are largely normative in nature, and the societal need and demand for something like sustainability economics. That is, we propose a normatively rooted vision of what sustainability economics should be, rather than giving a descriptive survey of the contributions that do actually already exist.5 In particular, we discuss the aims, subject matter, ontology, and genuine research agenda of sustainability economics.

Section snippets

Normative Foundation of Sustainability Economics

Terminologically, “sustainability economics” derives from the combination of the two terms “sustainability” and “economics”. We therefore ask, what are the normative foundations of these two?

Subject Matter and Aims of Sustainability Economics

The subject matter of sustainability economics are human–nature systems in which scarce natural resources, goods and services, as well as their human-made substitutes and complements, are being employed over a long time and, consequently, under uncertainty. With the normative orientation described in the previous section, the basic question of sustainability economics may then be cast as follows:

How can we understand and manage the relationships between humans and nature over the long run so

Ontology of Sustainability Economics

Sustainability economics — like all other scientific endeavors and fields of human action — is based on a specific basic understanding of the world. The basic structure of reality, that is the systematic of basic types of entities (objects, properties, processes) and their structural relationships — is not universal and a priori given, but it derives from the specific perspective of sustainability economics on the world. It therefore differs from the basic understanding of the world of other

Genuine Sustainability-Economic Research Questions

What has been said so far implies a number of specific and genuine sustainability-economic research questions that may be grouped into larger research fields. All of these research fields have been opened by pioneering contributions and, in most cases, a growing literature is addressing the specific research questions. We explicitly refrain from giving a survey of this literature here, as this is a paper on its own.

Research field #1: Interpretation, concretization and operationalization of the

Conclusion: Characteristic Properties and Foci of Sustainability Economics

From our discussion of the normative foundation, aims, subject matter, ontology, and genuine research agenda of sustainability economics, it is apparent that sustainability economics is characterized by particular properties and foci that distinguish this field of science and management from others in the area of general economics or general sustainability science.

First, the subject focus is on the relationship between humans and nature. This implies a systemic perspective on the relationships

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Stephan Bartke, Malte Faber, Joachim Fünfgelt, Stefanie Glotzbach, Bernd Hansjürgens, Nikolai Hoberg, Bernd Klauer, Reiner Manstetten, Thomas Petersen, Johannes Schiller, Thomas Schulz, Reimund Schwarze, Sebastian Strunz and two anonymous referees for critical discussion and constructive comments. Financial support from the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research under grant 01UN0607 is gratefully acknowledged.

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