Beyond Environmental and Ecological Economics: Proposal for an Economic Sociology of the Environment

Corinne Gendron
Additional contact information
Corinne Gendron: UQAM - Université du Québec à Montréal = University of Québec in Montréal, ICN Business School

Post-Print from HAL

Abstract: The vast majority of approaches in environmental economics attribute the current ecological crisis to the fact that, from its inception, the industrial economic system was founded on premises that made no allowance for the limits and regulatory functions of ecosystems. According to these approaches, we must therefore remedy the historical error of dissociating the fields of economics from the natural sciences, notably by restoring the links between these two disciplines. Distinguishing themselves from the two historic approaches, environmental economics and early ecological economics, the emerging institutionalist schools evoke not only the constructed nature of the environmental crisis (generally viewed as an objective fact by both traditional environmental economists and ecological economists), but also the socially constructed nature of the economy and its institutions. An actionalist regulationist approach allows us to formalize this twofold construction and lays the groundwork for a new economic sociology of the environment in which the technical modalities of ecological modernization are studied in light of social relations, with the understanding that social relations are also affected by the materiality of the environmental crisis. This actionalist regulationist approach also lends itself to anticipating likely trajectories in the future ecological modernization of economic institutions.

Keywords: Environmental economics; Ecological economics; Economic sociology of the environment; Regulation theory; Social movement theory; Environmental policy; Ecological modernisation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Published in Ecological Economics, 2014, 105, pp.240-253

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

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:hal:journl:hal-01513956

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().