Paradigms and Environmental Decision-Making

Abstract

This chapter discusses the paradigmatic aspects relating to environmental-economic issues. It outlines the tenets of ecological economics (ECE). The chapter suggests that ECE is concerned with sustainability, scale, distribution and allocation issues. The focus on allocation is shared with neo-classical environmental economics which is also concerned, although to a lesser extent than ECE, with distribution. The chapter focuses on the image of Homo oeconomicus assumed by neo-classical economics and its implications for decision-making process envisaged by neo-classical economists. Environmental economists work primarily within the environmental economics paradigm but may also draw on other paradigms. The concepts of environmental sustainability and sustainable development are clearly different. Methodological individualism makes no reference to objects and phenomena not definable in terms of human individuals, and it considers only laws of individual behaviour or laws that may be reducible to laws of individual behavior. Behaviour mode refers to the type of processes underlying the choice of goals and means made by individuals and institutions.