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Between Scylla and Charybdis? On the place of economic methods in sustainability science

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Abstract

The flaws of mainstream economic methodology are becoming widely acknowledged. Should we, therefore, reject all of its concepts within the quest for sustainability? A predicament looms: neither would it make sense to neglect useful tools, nor to redundantly replicate the mainstream’s narrow perspective on sustainability problems. We argue that avoiding both fallacies is possible because power of judgment facilitates non-dogmatic methodological decisions: the scientists’ judgment, that is, the capacity to apply general concepts to specific situations, supports their decisions concerning which methods are suitable for tackling a given sustainability problem. The intersubjective quality of judgment prevents the resulting methodological pluralism from drifting toward arbitrariness.

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Notes

  1. For an overview on the conflicts that shaped the history of Ecological Economics, see Røpke (2005).

  2. Naturally, by indicating what counts as beyond debate within the mainstream, one enters contested terrain. For instance, one might reasonably argue that what economists advocate in practice—allocating resources following purchasing power-weighted preferences—is a long way from the original goal of utilitarianism, that is, the greatest happiness of the greatest number (Farley et al. 2015). Furthermore, mainstream economists often resort to strategies of self-immunization by referring to the diversity of strands within the discipline, thereby displaying “perverse resilience” (Green 2014). At the same time, some critics brush aside different currents within economics by pointing to a “neoclassicism” whose purported hyper-dominance transforms theoretical failure into discursive strength (Arnsperger and Varoufakis 2005). Against this background, we refrain from giving all-encompassing definitions and rather concentrate on the mainstream’s methodological focus.

  3. There is no consensus on this question; see the discussion in Hands (2003).

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Bartosz Bartkowski, Stefan Baumgärtner, Malte Faber, John Gowdy, Tom Green, Dick Norgaard, Inge Røpke, Clive Spash and Jan Christoph Suntrup, two anonymous referees and the editor for critical discussions and helpful comments on earlier versions of this manuscript. All opinions expressed (and any errors made) in this article are solely those of the authors.

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  1. Department of Economics, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research-UFZ, Permoser Str. 15, 04318, Leipzig, Germany

    Sebastian Strunz, Bernd Klauer, Irene Ring & Johannes Schiller

  2. International Institute Zittau, Technische Universität Dresden, Markt 23, 02763, Zittau, Germany

    Irene Ring

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  1. Sebastian Strunz
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Strunz, S., Klauer, B., Ring, I. et al. Between Scylla and Charybdis? On the place of economic methods in sustainability science. Sustain Sci 12, 421–432 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-016-0407-z

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