Metacourses Home | Glossary | Contact

Introduction to
Ecological Economics

» Register

Societal challenges and paradigm shift

Course Learning Outcome

Construct the pre-analytic vision of ecological economics

Module Outcomes

  1. Evaluate the current societal challenges;
  2. Envision the next paradigm shift of economics.

      3. Activities

      1. Reading: Chapter 3 of Daly’s and Farley’s (2004) Ecological Economics: Principles and Applications.

      2. Discussion board: Consider one of the serious problems that society faces today.  Is there a relationship between this problem and conventional market economics?  Does ecological economics offer useful insights into this problem?  Would this problem have emerged if society had adopted an ecological economics perspective 100 years ago?  Why didn’t we adopt ecological economics 100 years ago? Why have we still failed to adopt it today?

      3. Reading: Chapter 1: Humanity’s Current Dilemma of Costanza et al. Introduction to Ecological Economics

      4. Video: Watch the Dana Meadows and Robert Costanza talks.

      5. Integrative project assignment: Workbook exercise 1.2 on desirable ends.

      6. Wiki: Building on your desirable ends exercise from module 1.1, together create one shared vision for the future. Try to be as specific as possible. Try to convince the others of your point of view. When you cannot achieve consensus over a portion of the vision, move it to a separate section of the page (i.e. you should end up with a consensus statement of a shared vision, followed by a separate list of vision statements about which you disagree.)

      7. Discussion board: Reflect on the difficulty of coming to a consensus about what the future should be like. How many of the shared elements do you think would be universally accepted?  How would such an exercise on a larger scale, between multiple countries, play out? Would a society guided by the principles of ecological economics be more or less likely to achieve this vision than one guided by neoclassical economics?  Why?

      8. Reading: Farley’s and Costanza’s “Envisioning shared goals for humanity: a detailed, shared vision of a sustainable and desirable USA in 2100”. How similar is the vision presented in this article to the vision you came up with as a group? If you have some interesting insights you’d like to share with the group, post them to the discussion board.

      9. Discussion board/Project assignment: Finish choosing a problem and your partners.

      10. Project work: Project team and general project description. Instructions on p. 33-34 of workbook.

      Self Check

      • What is uneconomic growth?
      • What is a pre-analytic vision?
      • What is the pre-analytic vision of ecological economics, and how does it contrast with that of neoclassical economics?
      • What is scale and what is optimal scale?
      • What is distribution?
      • What is allocation?