Building a Sustainable and Desirable Economy-in-Society-in-Nature

By Robert Costanza, G. Alperovitz, H. Daly, J. Farley, Carol Franco, Tim Jackson, Ida Kubiszewski, J. Schor, P. Victor. 2013

165 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In this chapter we describe what an “ecological economy” could look like and how we could get there. We believe that this future can provide full employment and a high quality of life for everyone into the indefinite future while staying within the safe environmental operating space for humanity on earth. Developed countries have a special responsibility for achieving those goals. To get there, we need to stabilize population; more equitably share resources, income, and work; invest in the natural and social capital commons; reform the financial system to better reflect real assets and liabilities; create better measures of progress; reform tax systems to tax “bads” rather than goods; promote technological innovations that support well-being rather than growth; establish “strong democracy,” and create a culture of well-being rather than consumption. In other words, a complete makeover. Several lines of evidence show that these policies are mutually supportive and the resulting system is feasible. The substantial challenge is making the transition to this better world in a peaceful and positive way. There is no way to predict the exact path this transition might take, but we hope that painting this picture of a possible end-point and some milestones along the way will help make this choice and this journey a more viable option.

Subfields: Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f2feb8cc0c704d44007b1244ff35d96c7113a9f8

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law

Citations in the corpus

A review of methods, data, and models to assess changes in the value of ecosystem services from land degradation and restoration (2016, background): “Ecosystems contribute to human well-being in a number of complex ways at multiple scales of space and time (Costanza and Daly, 1992; MEA, 2005; Dasgupta, 2008; Lal, 2012; UNEP, 2012; Costanza et al., 2013).”
Modelling and measuring sustainable wellbeing in connection with the UN Sustainable Development Goals (2016, background): “These categories correspond to the three basic goals outlined in the framework of Ecological Economics (Daly, 1990; Costanza, 1991; Costanza et al., 2013, 2014e) and the three basic components of sustainability.”
Steering innovations towards a green economy : Understanding government intervention (2016, background): “5) Based on the work of Daly and Farley (2011) and Costanza et al. (2012), we furthermore assume that the entire societal system is a subsystem of system Earth, since all human activity is co-shaped and delimited by the resources available on planet Earth (Rockström et al., 2009; Steffen et al.,…”
Social, Environmental and Sustainable Entrepreneurship Research (2015, background): “This interrelationship must be acknowledged through a holistic and complex systems view of business and the wider economy (Costanza et al., 2013), a view that embraces nonlinearity, uncertainty and surprise (Berkes et al., 2003; Davidson-Hunt & Berkes, 2003).”
The ecological economics of land degradation: impacts on ecosystem service values. (2016, methodology): “Ecosystems, including those from agricultural land, contribute to human well-being in a number of complex ways at multiple scales of space and time (Costanza and Daly, 1992; MEA, 2005, Dasgupta, 2008; Lal, 2012; UNEP, 2012; Costanza et al., 2013).”
Transforming Consumption: From Decoupling, to Behavior Change, to System Changes for Sustainable Consumption (2015, background): “They call for principles of ecological and social responsibility for all actors, scale-matched governance for efficient action and integration across these scales, use of the precautionary principle, adaptive management, full-cost accounting, real democratic participation (77), and an eye toward equ”