Abstract
We present a new evolutionary political economy approach to the study of transition dynamics based on a co-evolutionary model of differential citizen contributions to competing ‘utopias’—market fundamentalism, socialism, and environmentalism. We model sustainability transitions as an outcome of ‘utopia competition’ in which environmentalism manages to coexist with the market, while socialism vanishes. Our simulation-based framework suggests that the individual economic contributions of citizens to the battle of ideas—both the distribution within a utopia, and the interaction between different utopias—are crucial but much overlooked micro-factors in explaining the dynamics of sustainability transitions.
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Notes
Citizens may not only devote their resources (time, effort, money, reputation, and so forth) to persuade others in the so-called Public Sphere (Habermas 1989). Citizens can also devote their resources to direct engagement in other promotional actions, such as becoming members of civil activist organizations, or founding new firms or organizations committed to these goals. In this sense, Dopfer’s (1991) conception of ideas as time-less and space-less entities with morphic power, comes to mind. Extending our proposal along this line of ideologies (or entire world-views and utopias) as “closure judgements” suggests a useful path for future research.
Specifically, we set a model in which several population dynamics systems are interwoven (coupled). Some technicalities and definitions regarding “coupled replicator equations”—although in an evolutionary game-theoretic context—can be seen in Sato and Crutchfield (2003).
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This research was supported by Australian Research Council (Grant No. FT120100509).
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Almudi, I., Fatas-Villafranca, F. & Potts, J. Utopia competition: a new approach to the micro-foundations of sustainability transitions. J Bioecon 19, 165–185 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10818-016-9239-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10818-016-9239-2