Sustainability: The Paradigmatic Challenge To Agricultural Economics

The agricultural economics profession needs a broader and more robust philosophical basis to meet the challenge of sustainable development. First, sustainability can easily be understood as an issue of intergenerational equity, as a redistribution of rights or a transfer of assets to future generations which redefines the efficient allocation of resources. Economists have distorted the sustainability discourse with efficiency arguments which implicitly assume current generations hold all rights to resources. Second, economists have assumed that the patterns of thinking of ecology and the values they complement and economic thinking and the values it complements will merge into a coherent, logical argument. Different patterns of thinking really are different and inherently shed light on different aspects of the complex world in which we live. Conceptual monism within economics impedes the participatory resolutions between economic thinking and ecological and other ways of understanding that are sorely needed. Third, how development unfolded, including its presumed unsustainability, reflects how people understood the possibilities for economic development and acted upon their understandings. Economists need a supplementary model for the past and the future in which patterns of thinking thems~lves _are endogenous. }hus the paradigmatic expansion I propose for the profession broadens neoclassical thinking to its own full conceptual base once again, is more receptive to other patterns of thinking, and furthermore strategically incorporates at least one additional pattern.