Open AccessWhy do Environmental and Ecological Economics Diverge?
Author(s) -
Nikola Petrović
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
science and technology studies
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 2243-4690
DOI - 10.23987/sts.95175
Subject(s) - ecological economics , environmentalism , divergence (linguistics) , human development theory , ideology , institutional economics , sociology , environmental studies , sociology of scientific knowledge , restructuring , environmental movement , environmental sociology , ecology , social science , applied economics , political science , positive economics , economics , mainstream economics , neoclassical economics , sustainability , politics , law , biology , linguistics , philosophy
Environmental economics and ecological economics became established scientific fields as a result of the growth and the success of the environmental movement in the 1960s and 1970s. Using the strong programme in the sociology of scientific knowledge and the general theory of scientific/intellectual movements, this article compares four pairs of scholars (two pairs of scholars appropriated for these fields and fields' founders during the emergence and establishment of the fields). The article depicts how their institutional, ideological and scientific backgrounds contributed to the divergence of these fields. Practitioners of environmental economics and ecological economics were influenced by different strands of the environmental movement. Environmental economics has epistemological and institutional links with environmentalism and ecological economics with ecologism. Different types of interdisciplinarity were used in these fields—a bridge building type of interdisciplinarity in the case of environmental economics and a restructuring and integrative in the case of ecological economics.