Economic Strategies for Sustainability 2.0

Summary: The ESS 2.0 web site explains how conventional economics undermines sustainability and how economics might be used strategically for building sustainability. Version #1 of Economic Strategies for Sustainability can be downloaded here as a MS Word file. ESS 2.0 extends and deepens V. 1.0 but is presented as an evolving web site. (Working notes can be found in the build page.)

The Strategy Within Economic Strategies for Sustainability

The purpose of Economic Strategies for Sustainability, both 1.0 and 2.0, is to unpack economics for sustainers, so that they might promote sustainability. The premise is that economics (like politics, engineering, and technology) provides means to achieve ends that are determined outside of the realm of the economy. The economy purports to serve, but historically the economy dominates society and degrades nature. Economics therefore assumes the role of the master, not the servant. Subverting this domination is the intention of Economic Strategies for Sustainability 2.0.

The subserviance of economics to sustainability remind us that a basic definition of sustainability itself is "to support from below." The notion of hierarchy and displacement of ends, therefore ethics, is fundamental to sustainability. The strategy in all this is thus revealed.

Further, as I write this page, the U.S. economy stagnates in virtual recession with an unemployment rate above 9%. The economic meldown since September 2008 has not been internalized into either the economics of sustainability or into ecological economics, meaning that the actual behavior of the economy remains outside that analysis. Rather, an economic analysis that supports sustainability must explicitly recognize real-world economics, otherwise called by its correct name: capitalism. Little in the economics of sustainability or in ecological economics specifically recognizes the nature of capitalism. Not so here: A strategic consideration of political economy must acknoweldge that the extant economic arrangements are capitalistic, plural, and that these arrangements are crisis-prone and produce assymetrical distributive outcomes, i.e. inequalities on a vast scale. Indeed, tackling the nature, perhaps the contradictions, of capitalism, not explicit in ESS 1.0, must be undertaken here.

Sustainers must be knowledgeable and clever. The world that they wish to promote will not come about easily or obviously. I regard political economics of capitalism as the principle focus for learning and for devising effective strategies. Understanding substantive and ecological economics as a form of political economy, rather than arid formal economics, animates this effort.

The Mission of Economic Strategies for Sustainability

How can the economy be harnessed to serve sustainability? What makes this question so ironic is that the growth in the physical scale of the economy under the prevailing regime of economic globalization has depleted resources, destroyed ecosystems, overwhelmed natural waste disposal sinks, waged war on subsistence cultures, and produced shocking maldistribution of wealth and income. How, then, can the economy be turned around to reinforce sustainable development rather than to destroy ecosystems, resource endowments, and indigenous cultures? This alchemy must be resolved to promote sustainability.

The now familiar definition of sustainable development from the Brundtland Commission Report (World Commission on Environment and Development) defines sustainable development as: "development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs." How operational is this definition? What economic strategies can promote sustainability? Can the precept adequately define guidelines for policy prescription and ethical principles? Does it ensure justice? Will democracy be nurtured?

Ecological economics takes up the challenge of working out a functional analysis from which to base public policy and normative legitimacy. The global economy, a robust engine of change, must generate sustainable development rather than amplify entropy. The USA, the single most powerful economy in history, must be given foremost consideration. With only 4.5% of the world's people, the USA consumes about 25% of global resources and produces the same proportion of greenhouse gases. The USA dominates the Bretton Woods institutions--the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization --- which shape the global economy, enforcing its ideology of neo-liberalism.

The purpose of this essay is to provide sustainers an overview of how economics might appropriately relate to sustainability. The reader will find aspects of the intersection of economics and sustainability throughout the Economic Strategies for Sustainability web site.

Table of Contents of Economic Strategies for Sustainability 2.0

 


©Wayne Hayes, Ph.D. | Initialized: 12/8/2010 | Last Update: 02/23/2013 | V. 2.4 Build #9