PEDIGREE

Project "PEDIGREE" data sheet

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 Project objective

The question of which economic framework (or sets of frameworks) is (are) appropriate for providing policy prescriptions conducive to ecological sustainable has gained renewed interest within the community of ecological economists and political economists. To help answer this question I propose to investigate the suitability of four economic frameworks — neoclassical environmental economics, non-Walrasian neoclassical environmental economics, institutional ecological economics, and ecological Marxian political economy, for providing effective and coherent policy prescriptions for renewable and sustainable energy resources, specifically for electricity generation. The inquiry will be both philosophical/methodological and empirical. The four frameworks will be interrogated against case studies of the UK, Germany, Norway, France, Canada, and the US. The case studies will be comprised of analyses of the socio-economic, historical, political, and cultural backdrop of energy resources in each country. The results of this interrogation will then be used to assess the suitability of the four frameworks for providing policy prescriptions conducive to ecological sustainability with regards to their respective methodologies including ontology, epistemology, methodology (to include methods as well), and ideology. The case for methodological pluralism will be assessed and a notion of pluralism developed for economic frameworks concerned with ecological sustainability. The benefits that will be gained from undertaking this research program at the ERA level will accrue to economists and social scientists first by giving them better analytical and conceptual tools, and all those, including policy makers, politicians, and business leaders who depend on those tools afterwards through better results.