Abstract
Environmental economics and ecological economics became established scientific fields as a result of the growth and the success of the environmental movement in the 1960s and 1970s. Using the strong programme in the sociology of scientific knowledge and the general theory of scientific/intellectual movements, this article compares four pairs of scholars (two pairs of scholars appropriated for these fields and fields' founders during the emergence and establishment of the fields). The article depicts how their institutional, ideological and scientific backgrounds contributed to the divergence of these fields. Practitioners of environmental economics and ecological economics were influenced by different strands of the environmental movement. Environmental economics has epistemological and institutional links with environmentalism and ecological economics with ecologism. Different types of interdisciplinarity were used in these fields—a bridge building type of interdisciplinarity in the case of environmental economics and a restructuring and integrative in the case of ecological economics.
Highlights
When in the 1920s the Nobel laureate chemist Frederick Soddy made inroads into the study of economics, he was met with strong resistance from leading economists
After Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen in the early 1970s published his work emphasizing the significance of the second law of thermodynamics in understanding the place of the economy in the natural system, this became one of the starting points for the emergence of a new field of ecological economics in the following decade and a half
Ecological economics encompasses social scientists, philosophers, and activists criticising market economy and imagining the future relations of humans with nature, and approaches which are closer to mainstream economics
Summary
When in the 1920s the Nobel laureate chemist Frederick Soddy made inroads into the study of economics, he was met with strong resistance from leading economists. Environmental economics and ecological economics are two scientific fields with, at first glance, a rather similar basic goal of combining the study of environmental degradation with the analysis of economic systems They are often at odds with each other as the different ideological backgrounds and scientific cultures of some of their protagonists have prompted them to analyse relations between the economy and environment through different perspectives and with different policy recommendations. Ideologies are treated here as an indispensable element of political and of social and scientific life as they enable a coherent understanding of the world, and they guide social actors towards action (Freeden, 1996) The latter feature was important in the development of environmental and ecological economics as scholars from both fields gave strong policy recommendations. The breadth of ecological economics’ policy proposals by some protagonists resembles the morphology of thick ideologies
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