Re-establishing an Ecological Discourse in the Debate over the Value of Ecosystems and Biodiversity

Clive Spash and Iulie Aslaksen

SRE-Disc from Institute for Multilevel Governance and Development, Department of Socioeconomics, Vienna University of Economics and Business

Abstract: The approach of conceptualizing biodiversity and ecosystems as goods and services to be represented by monetary values in policy is being championed not just by economists, but also by ecologists and conservation biologists. This new environmental pragmatism is now being pushed forward internationally under the guise of hardwiring biodiversity and ecosystems services into finance. This conflicts with the realisation that biodiversity and ecosystems have multiple incommensurable values. The current trend is to narrowly define a set of instrumental aspects of ecosystems and biodiversity to be associated with ad hoc money numbers. We argue that ecosystem science has more to offer the policy debate than pseudo-economic numbers based on assumptions that do not reflect ecological or social complexity. Re-establishing the ecological discourse in biodiversity policy implies a crucial role for biophysical indicators as policy targets e.g., the Nature Index for Norway. Yet there is a recognisable need to go beyond the traditional ecological approach to create a social ecological economic discourse. This requires reviving and relating to a range of alternative ecologically informed discourses (e.g. intrinsic values, deep ecology, ecofeminism) in order to transform the increasingly dominant and destructive relationship of humans separated from and domineering over Nature.

Keywords: Economic valuation; Intrinsic value; Pragmatism; Social ecological economics; Ecosystems; Biodiversity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A12 Q51 Q57 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 24 pages
Date: 2012
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www-sre.wu.ac.at/sre-disc/sre-disc-2012_05.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Re-establishing an Ecological Discourse in the Debate over the Value of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (2012)
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:wiw:wiwsre:sre-disc-2012_05

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in SRE-Disc from Institute for Multilevel Governance and Development, Department of Socioeconomics, Vienna University of Economics and Business Welthandelsplatz 1, 1020 Vienna, Austria.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Gunther Maier ().