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Potential Contributions of Political Science to Environmental Economics

Environmental and Resource Economics volume 48, pages 391–411 (2011)Cite this article

Abstract

While political science has much to offer, at least some of its contributions might be difficult to incorporate into economic models. Nevertheless, we argue that environmental economics might benefit from supplementing, combining, or sometimes even replacing the rational choice approach with other approaches commonly used in political science. We develop our argument by examining three core components of political science analysis: ideas, power, and institutions. For each component we review political science approaches and propositions with a view to determining “what’s in it” for environmental economics.

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Acknowledgments

We thank the guest editors and two anonymous reviewers for many helpful comments. Frank Azevedo provided excellent editorial assistance.

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This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Political Science, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

    Jon Hovi & Arild Underdal

  2. CICERO Center for International Climate and Environmental Research, Oslo, Norway

    Jon Hovi

  3. Department of Government, University of Essex, Colchester, Essex, UK

    Hugh Ward

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  1. Jon Hovi
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  2. Arild Underdal
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  3. Hugh Ward
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Correspondence to Jon Hovi.

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Open Access This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0), which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.

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Hovi, J., Underdal, A. & Ward, H. Potential Contributions of Political Science to Environmental Economics. Environ Resource Econ 48, 391–411 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10640-010-9453-7

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Keywords

  • Environmental economics
  • Ideas
  • Institutions
  • Political science
  • Power