Contested social-ecological transformation: shortcomings of current debates and Polanyian perspectives

Ulrich Brand, Christoph Görg and Markus Wissen

Chapter 13 in Capitalism in Transformation, 2019, pp 184-197 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: In recent years, manifold ways to deal with the ecological crisis are subsumed under the header “transition/transformation to sustainability†or even “Great†transformation. This chapter critically discusses the current debate from the perspective of a Polanyian understanding of a Great Transformation. The authors argue that the current debate suffers from a narrow analytical approach to transformation ignoring the dynamics of global capitalism and the power relations involved. Thus, a “new critical orthodoxy†of knowledge about transformation is emerging which runs the danger of contributing to ecologizing capitalism while ignoring the root causes of social-ecological crises. Based on Polanyi, but also on regulation theory, the authors distinguish between three types of transformation which focus either on an adaptation of the current institutional systems or on a new phase of green capitalism. Beside these two types, however, a post-capitalist Great Transformation requires more profound structural changes and exceeds the accumulation imperative as much as other structural constraints of capitalist development.

Keywords: Economics and Finance; Politics and Public Policy Social Policy and Sociology (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.elgaronline.com/view/edcoll/9781788974233/9781788974233.00020.xml (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:elg:eechap:18596_13

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.e-elgar.com

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Chapters from Edward Elgar Publishing
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Darrel McCalla ().