اقتصاد محیطی و اقتصاد محیط زیست : کجا آنها می توانند همگرا شوند؟

Environmental economics and ecological economics share the common objective of understanding the human–economy–environment interaction in order to redirect the economies towards sustainability. In pursuing this objective, these two perspectives utilise different types of analytical framework and are opposed to each other on many of the fundamental theoretical and methodological issues. While the environmental economics has progressed within a narrowly, but sharply, focused neoclassical analytical approach, the ecological economics has expanded by adopting a ‘diversified approach’, which led to widen the gap between the two. This article makes an attempt to highlight the divergence between these two perspectives on different issues and identifies certain research avenues that would potentially bring convergence between these two perspectives.

The environmental economics has gradually become a full-fledged sub-discipline of economics after Pigou (1920) who dealt extensively with the analysis of ‘negative externality’ within the neoclassical framework to correct the ‘market failure’ (Verhoef, 1999). This Pigouvian neoclassical tradition still continues to dominate the analytical foundation of all stretches of environmental economics (Cropper and Oates, 1992) such as, Coasian solution (Coase, 1960); ‘second-best solution’ in the area of pollution control (Baumol and Oates, 1988); non-market valuation within micro cost-benefit analysis (Smith, 1993); sustainable development (Pearce and Turner, 1990) and environmental accounting (Ahmed et al., 1989) within macroeconomics of environment (Munasinghe, 2002), making this subject as an ‘economically holistic’ as well as a powerful branch of modern normative welfare economics. Though the Pigouvian neoclassical tradition embracing methodological individualism, unbounded rationality assumption and efficiency as a criterion for resource allocation had strengthened the analytical foundation of modern environmental economics, this sub-discipline has its own weakness as well. While its strength lies in its analytical rigour and its ability to provide concrete, first-hand solutions to some of the major environmental problems, its weakness is that it adopts a narrow approach which has prevented us from thinking about the ‘larger features’ (Lazear, 2000) of the environmental and ecological issues. On the other hand, the ecological economics (see Costanza et al., 1997a) emerged in the late 1980s to ‘capitalise’ this weakness by making effort to incorporate those ‘larger features’ in the analysis of human–economy–environment interaction. The ‘distinguished’ analytical approaches used in the ecological economics (see van den Bergh, 2001, Turner et al., 1997 and Sahu and Nayak, 1994) in the past have enriched our understanding of the importance of ecological dynamisms in the economic processes. But at the same time, the progress in ecological economics during the past one and half decades leads us to ask the following questions: Have the ecological economists succeeded in their objective of ‘capitalising’ the weakness of environmental economists, despite heavy opportunity cost incurred by them? Have the environmental economists responded adequately to the challenges provided by the ecological economists? Has the gap between these two perspectives converged? What common lessons that the environmental and ecological economists can learn from the recent developments in mainstream economics, especially from the behavioral economics so as to narrow down the gap? This present article makes an attempt to investigate these questions rigorously.

The environmental economics and the ecological economics aim at understanding the issues involved in human–economy–environment relationship in order to redirect the economies towards sustainability. While the environmental economics has pursued the relevant issues within the neoclassical approach in a systematic manner, the ecological economics progressed through using a ‘diversified approach’. This has resulted in making these two perspectives diverging from each other on many different aspects. Though a narrow path was followed, the environmental economics has proved to be ‘analytically rigour’ and more effective in influencing policymaking. The ‘pluralistic’ approach adopted in the ecological economics is considered to be highly ‘challenging’ but it seems that its scope has become ‘too vast’ focusing on too many areas. The ecological economics has not yet provided any concrete and widely accepted theoretical framework to deal with the ecological issues. Moreover, there are unresolved problems within other disciplines that make the ‘inter-disciplinary’ approach of the ecological economics a difficult task. Similarly, the strong ideological positions taken by the researchers not only among different disciplines but also within the ecological economics make hurdles for inter-disciplinary research. Therefore, the gap between the environmental economics and the ecological economics seems to be widening further. Now, the major challenge for the researchers is to narrow down this gap. The recent developments in mainstream economics provide more room for ‘intra-disciplinary’ research that would help us reduce the gap between these two perspectives. The developments in behavioral and experimental economics do challenge the very postulates of mainstream neoclassical economics and provide some useful insights that are relevant for the environmental and ecological economics research. The best way is to start looking at the interface between environmental economics, ecological economics and behavioral and experimental economics and set a common research agenda for an ‘intra-disciplinary’ research. This, however, would require the researchers to accept one aspect namely, the ‘human behavior’ as the central theme of the research agenda because, the entire focus of the behavioral and experimental economics is on human behavior with more emphasise on the ‘methodological individualism’. Since the neoclassical economics framework used in the environmental economics can readily be extended to incorporate the ‘behavioral issues’ into it, it may be somewhat problematic in the case of ecological economics since some of the ecological economists are still skeptical about individual behavior and methodological individualism. It should be noted that the mainstream neoclassical economics has indeed accepted ‘inter-disciplinary approach’ as a useful tool for economic analysis up to that level where the inputs from other disciplines could help the economists to understand ‘the human behavior’. So, subjects that do not contribute towards understanding the human behavior or that reject it will not be acceptable to the neoclassical economists and in this regard, the ecological economists can play a major role in making the neoclassical economists improve their understanding of the ecological issues, by way of focusing more on behavioral issues in future.