Environmental Policy and Societal Aims
Sustainable development and environmental improvement are often regarded as intrinsically valuable a priori. As a result, the policies by which these goals are to be attained is often inadequately scrutinised. In this book, ecological economics addresses
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STUDIES IN ECOLOGICAL ECONOMICS VOLUME 2
Environmental Policy and Societal Aims edited by
DENIS REQUIER-DESJARDINS Centre d'Economie et d'Ethique pour V Environnement et le Developpement, Universite de Versailles-St. Quentin, France
CLIVE SPASH Cambridge Research for the Environment, Department of Land Economy, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom and
JAN VAN DER STRAATEN Department of Leisure Studies, Tilburg University, European Centre for Nature Conservation, Tilburg, The Netherlands
KM
If SPRINGER SCIENCE+BUSINESS MEDIA, B.V.
A CLP. Catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-94-010-5928-2 ISBN 978-94-011-4521-3 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-94-011-4521-3
All Rights Reserved © 1999 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht Originally published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 1999 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1999 No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner.
PREFACE
Denis Requier-Desjardins, Clive L. Spash and Jan van der Straaten
Many books and articles have been published about the ecological economic dimension of various environmental problems. In most cases, authors pay particular attention to approaches which fmd their origin in economic theory. Sustainable development and environmental improvement are often regarded as of value in themselves as given phenomena and as a result the policy process by which these goals are to be achieved fails to receive full attention. Our belief is that ecological economics should be addressing the institutional and policy making aspects of environmental problems and so covering a broad socioeconomic research agenda which differentiates it from mainstream economic approaches. This can be compatible with research conducted by environmental economists or natural scientists but goes beyond the limitations of a positivist approach, is open to multiple perspectives on the same issue, sees conflict resolution as a social process and accepts the need for research addressing political economy. In this book, the aims of society itself are given a high profile. We are convinced that an in-depth analysis of the policy process is necessary to understand the pitfalls and barriers which society will confront in the process of sustainable development. This means the chapters of this book discuss topics which are commonly regarded as more or less exogenous to the mainstream defmition of economic process. The book starts by dealing with issues related to local development and environmental policy. Environmental policy is seen to be more than a national or international concern, and in particular modem environmental concepts, such as sustaining robust ecosystems, are recognised as having numerous implications for local development. In the following chapters
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Preface
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