ABSTRACT

When university scholars are unhappy with the current state of affairs in some particular field, they tend to look for similarly inclined colleagues and arrange workshops or conferences. In 1982, two respected ecologists at Stockholm University arranged a symposium on the relationship between ecology and economics. The two were concerned about environmental issues and invited ten well-known ecologists and other natural scientists and an equal number of economists, most of them traditional. Each presented his or her view of environmental problems along with proposed solutions. The result is presented in Jansson (1984). Traditional environmental economists already had their journals and research associations and were not particularly impressed by the arguments proffered by ecologists. A minority of economists, notably Herman Daly (and some of us not present at the symposium but informed afterwards in a meeting with journalists), advocated something new. In 1989, the International Society for Ecological Economics (ISEE) was formed and its first international conference was held in 1990 under the auspices of the World Bank. In addition to scientists demanding new thinking, students have opinions, as exemplified in other parts of this book, and even politicians may voice concerns. In 2003, for example, the German Ministry for Education and Research turned to a respected traditional economics research institute in Berlin, Deutsches Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung (DIW), expressing demand for ‘sustainability economics’ while at the same time highlighting the inadequacy of traditional economics. Partly in response, the DIW leadership initiated workshops to solicit more useful alternatives for sustainability issues. Ecological economists like me were among the participants in these workshops (www.sustainableconomics.de). Given the monopoly of traditional economics across the globe, the initiative of the German government is extremely important and other governments should follow this example. But for present purposes, the main issue is not the usefulness of traditional economics in relation to a particular category of problems but rather to open the door for competing approaches. Among ecological economists, some have argued vigorously for pluralism (Norgaard 1989; Sneddon et al. 2006), since an open, rather than dogmatic, attitude to different schools of thought will increase the chances of successful research. Limiting university

research and education to traditional economics, or any one approach for that matter, is incompatible with democracy. A university department should not become a political propaganda centre; rather, it should to some extent reflect society’s different ideological orientations (Söderbaum 1999, 2004a, 2008a).