Beyond environmental and ecological economics: Proposal for an economic sociology of the environment ¬リニ

a r t i c l e i n f o Keywords: Environmental economics Ecological economics Economic sociology of the environment Regulation theory Social movement theory Environmental policy Ecological modernisation The vast majority of approaches in environmental economics attribute the current ecological crisis to the fact that, from its inception, the industrial economic system was founded on premises that made no allowance for the limits and regulatory functions of ecosystems. According to these approaches, we must therefore remedy the historical error of dissociating the fields of economics from the natural sciences, notably by restoring the links between these two disciplines. Distinguishing themselves from the two historic approaches, environmental economics and early ecological economics, the emerging institutionalist schools evoke not only the constructed nature of the environmental crisis (generally viewed as an objective fact by both traditional environmental economists and ecological economists), but also the socially constructed nature of the economy and its institutions. An actionalist regulationist approach allows us to formalize this twofold construction and lays the groundwork for a new economic sociology of the environment in which the technical modalities of ecological modernization are studied in light of social relations, with the understanding that social relations are also affected by the materiality of the environmental crisis. This actionalist regulationist approach also lends itself to anticipating likely trajectories in the future ecological modernization of economic institutions. The concept of sustainable development, brought forward to promote a new perspective of development and progress in response to increasing environmental risks and global development crisis (Zaccai, 2002), has had difficulty explaining the links between the environment , the social sphere and the economy. While its social dimension is often overlooked or poorly conceptualized (Lehtonen, 2004), it is probably the economy–environment debate which has been the most vibrant: although economic growth is often viewed as a necessary step to allow investments in environmental policy measures, social movements and academics from different schools have pointed out that flaws in our economic system itself, enhanced by growth, lead to poor environmental management and ecological disruption Several theorizations have been proposed to explain and address these flaws, theorizations which prove to be rich and diverse, and even contradictory in their understanding of the environmental problem. However, the two main schools of thought, environmental economics and ecological economics, share similar limitations when it comes to recognizing the socially constructed dimension of both the economic system and the environmental …