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Consumption and its Externalities: Where Economy Meets Ecology

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  • Thomas Princen

Abstract

If social scientists are going to make a contribution to environmental policy-making that is commensurate with the severity of biophysical trends, they must develop analytic tools that go beyond marginal improvement and a production focus where key actors escape responsibility via distanced commerce and the black box of consumer sovereignty. One means is to construct an ecologically informed "consumption angle" on economic activity. The first approach is to retain the prevailing supply-demand dichotomy and address the externalities of consumption and the role of power in consuming. The second approach is to construe all economic activity as "consuming," as "using up." This approach construes material provisioning in the context of hunter/gathering, cultivation, and manufacture and then develops three interpretive layers of excess consumption: background consumption, overconsumption, and misconsumption. An example from timbering illustrates how, by going up and down the decision chain, the consumption angle generates questions about what is consumed and what is put at risk. Explicit assignment of responsibility for excess throughput becomes more likely. Copyright (c) 2001 Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Suggested Citation

  • Thomas Princen, 2001. "Consumption and its Externalities: Where Economy Meets Ecology," Global Environmental Politics, MIT Press, vol. 1(3), pages 11-30, August.
  • Handle: RePEc:tpr:glenvp:v:1:y:2001:i:3:p:11-30
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    Cited by:

    1. Romuald S Kinda, 2010. "Does education really matter for environmental quality?," Economics Bulletin, AccessEcon, vol. 30(4), pages 2612-2626.
    2. Cengiz Aytun & Cemil Serhat Akin, 2022. "Can education lower the environmental degradation? Bootstrap panel Granger causality analysis for emerging countries," Environment, Development and Sustainability: A Multidisciplinary Approach to the Theory and Practice of Sustainable Development, Springer, vol. 24(9), pages 10666-10694, September.
    3. Scott Y. Lin, 2021. "Bringing resource management back into the environmental governance agenda: eco-state restructuring in China," Environment, Development and Sustainability: A Multidisciplinary Approach to the Theory and Practice of Sustainable Development, Springer, vol. 23(8), pages 12272-12301, August.
    4. Peter Dauvergne & Jennifer Clapp, 2016. "Researching Global Environmental Politics in the 21st Century," Global Environmental Politics, MIT Press, vol. 16(1), pages 1-12, February.
    5. Folk, György, 2019. "Weal: the universal core of human well-being," MPRA Paper 97082, University Library of Munich, Germany.

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