Ecological Macreconomics: Introduction and Review

The Great Recession of the past years has brought macroeconomics back. Many of the recession's phenomena, causes and consequences alike, cannot be understood using solely microeconomic decisionmaking. Over the past decades the economics profession has pursued the implications of rational choices and enshrined them in so-called "micro foundations" as a hallmark of modern economic theory. By focusing on the choices and actions of individual consumers, firms, or the government, however, one can easily miss important determinants of the economic system which only arise at the meso- or the macroeconomic levels where institutions, coordination, and complexity in general are important and sometimes even can take on a life of their own. To lesser extent, ecological economics has fallen prone to similar pitfalls by mostly focusing the unit of investigation on low-level, small-scale subsystems of the economy. There are, of course, notable exceptions including the early contributors Boulding and Georgescu-Roegen and the general interest of ecological economists in the field of (ecological) macroeconomics has been increasing. (authors' abstract)Series: Ecological Economic Paper

Work-sharing for a sustainable economy

Achieving low unemployment in an environment of weak growth is a major policy challenge; a more egalitarian distribution of hours worked could be the key to solving it. Whether worksharing actually increases employment, however, has been debated controversially. In this article we present stylized facts on the distribution of hours worked and discuss the role of work-sharing for a sustainable economy. Building on recent developments in labor market theory we review the determinants of working long hours and its effect on well-being. Finally, we survey work-sharing reforms in the past. While there seems to be a consensus that worksharing in the Great Depression in the U.S. and in the Great Recession in Europe was successful in reducing employment losses, perceptions of the work-sharing reforms implemented between the 1980s and early 2000s are more ambivalent. However, even the most critical evaluations of these reforms provide no credible evidence of negative employment effects; instead, the overall success of the policy seems to depend on the economic and institutional setting, as well as the specific details of its implementation. (authors' abstract)Series: Ecological Economic Paper

List of well-being indicators

This milestone presents a pool of available indicators and indicator systems which go beyond the narrow concepts of national economic accounts as well as a structuring of the indicators and indices according to central areas of well-being. The milestone builds the basis for Task 202.2, where a subset of indicators will be selected based on different theoretical frameworks, e.g. services / functionings, needs. Some of the indicators will be included in the macro-economic models in order to account for key dimensions of sustainability.Series: WWWforEurop

Towards an operational measurement of socio-ecological performance

Questioning GDP as dominant indicator for economic performance has become commonplace. For economists economic policy always aims for a broader array of goals (like income, employment, price stability, trade balance) alongside income, with income being the priority objective. The Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi Commission argued for extending and adapting key variables of macroeconomic analysis. International organisations such as the EC, OECD, Eurostat and UN have proposed extended arrays of macroeconomic indicators (see 'Beyond GDP', 'Compendium of wellbeing indicators', 'GDP and Beyond', 'Green Economy', 'Green Growth', 'Measuring Progress of Societies'). Despite these high profile efforts, few wellbeing and environmental variables are in use in macroeconomic models. The reasons for the low uptake of socio-ecological indicators in macroeconomic models range from path dependencies in modelling, technical limitations, indicator lists being long and unworkable, choices of indicators appearing ad hoc and poor data availability. In this paper we review key approaches and identify a limited list of candidate variables and - as much as possible - offer data sources.Series: WWWforEurop

Policy responses by different agents/stakeholders in a transition: Integrating the Multi-level Perspective and behavioral economics

This short paper considers all possible stakeholders in different stages of a sustainability transition and matches their behavioral features and diversity to policies. This will involve an assessment of potential or expected responses of stakeholders to a range of policy instruments. Following the Multi-Level Perspective framework to conceptualize sustainability transitions, we classify the various transition policies at niche, regime and landscape levels. Next, we offer a complementary classification of policies based on a distinction between social preferences and bounded rationality. The paper identifies many barriers to making a sustainability transition and how to respond to them. In addition, lessons are drawn from the case of Denmark. The detailed framework and associated literature for the analysis was discussed in Milestone 31 of the WWWforEurope project (Gazheli et al., 2012).Series: WWWforEurop

Extremism propagation in social networks with hubs

One aspect of opinion change that has been of academic interest is the impact of people with extreme opinions (extremists) on opinion dynamics. An agent-based model has been used to study the role of small-world social network topologies on general opinion change in the presence of extremists. It has been found that opinion convergence to a single extreme occurs only when the average number of network connections for each individual is extremely high. Here, we extend the model to examine the effect of positively skewed degree distributions, in addition to small-world structures, on the types of opinion convergence that occur in the presence of extremists. We also examine what happens when extremist opinions are located on the well-connected nodes (hubs) created by the positively skewed distribution. We find that a positively skewed network topology encourages opinion convergence on a single extreme under a wider range of conditions than topologies whose degree distributions were not skewed. The importance of social position for social influence is highlighted by the result that, when positive extremists are placed on hubs, all population convergence is to the positive extreme even when there are twice as many negative extremists. Thus, our results have shown the importance of considering a positively skewed degree distribution, and in particular network hubs and social position, when examining extremist transmission

Understanding Peri-urban Sustainability: The role of the resilience approach

Resilience is a term that is widely used by scholars from different disciplines who promote action research between science and policy. This paper is largely concerned with how resilience approaches can be used as a practical tool in helping to understand complex dynamic socio-ecological systems in an urbanising world and, in particular, how resilience approaches can contribute to initiatives with normative development agendas to enhance environmental integrity and social justice. Some key debates around differing understandings and uses of the term resilience are summarised, and criticisms discussed. An initial case study demonstrates how the resilience approach can be a useful tool in understanding key interactions between social and ecological systems that impact on the management of protected areas. Further case studies examine how resilience approaches might help in understanding more complex peri-urban situations, characterised by increasing social exclusion and environmental degradation. A final case study from Varanasi India, examines relationships between water management in the peri-urban interface and urban food systems. It utilises a resilience framework to illustrate the lack of recognition by formal institutions of actual peri-urban water use practices and the many informal transactions that occur, and to highlight some implications in relation to urban food security, environmental policies and particular marginalised groups. These examples seek to demonstrate opportunities for the use of resilience approaches as an integral part of initiatives that seek to identify opportunities for enhancing sustainability (in relation to environmental integrity and social justice) in dynamic urbanising situations.ESR

Bioeconomy Transitions through the Lens of Coupled Social-Ecological Systems: A Framework for Place-Based Responsibility in the Global Resource System

Bioeconomy strategies in high income societies focus at replacing finite, fossil resources by renewable, biological resources to reconcile macro-economic concerns with climate constraints. However, the current bioeconomy is associated with critical levels of environmental degradation. As a potential increase in biological resource use may further threaten the capacity of ecosystems to fulfil human needs, it remains unclear whether bioeconomy transitions in high income countries are sustainable. In order to fill a gap in bioeconomy sustainability assessments, we apply an ontological lens of coupled social-ecological systems to explore critical mechanisms in relation to bioeconomy activities in the global resource system. This contributes to a social-ecological systems (SES)-based understanding of sustainability from a high income country perspective: the capacity of humans to satisfy their needs with strategies that reduce current levels of pressures and impacts on ecosystems. Building on this notion of agency, we develop a framework prototype that captures the systemic relation between individual human needs and collective social outcomes on the one hand (microlevel) and social-ecological impacts in the global resource system on the other hand (macro-level). The BIO-SES framework emphasizes the role of responsible consumption (for physical health), responsible production (to reduce stressors on the environment), and the role of autonomy and selforganisation (to protect the reproduction capacity of social-ecological systems). In particular, the BIO-SES framework can support (1) individual and collective agency in high income country contexts to reduce global resource use and related ecosystem impacts with a bioeconomy strategy, (2) aligning social outcomes, monitoring efforts and governance structures with place-based efforts to achieve the SDGs, as well as (3), advancing the evidence base and social-ecological theory on responsible bioeconomy transitions in the limited biosphere