Clive Spash´s lecture in Brno
As part of our project focuses on the Investigation of the political and socio-economic context of climate change education, we invited Prof. Clive Spash and his partner Tone Smith to Brno.
Tone Smith is a researcher in the fields of ecological economics, social-ecological transformation, institutional change and degrowth. She has worked for many years at Statistics Norway and with the OECD in the fields of sustainability indicators, environmental performance assessment, environmental-economic accounting, and environmental statistics. Her research addresses questions at the interface of the natural and social sciences and issues related to scientific knowledge and philosophy of science. After finishing her doctoral studies, Smith worked for the Austrian Federal Ministry of Sustainability and Tourism during the Austrian Presidency of the EU Council. She worked on policy issues related to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), preparing position papers and acting as a negotiator on behalf of the European Union Member States during the Austrian Presidency period in 2018. She has also taught economics at various Austrian universities (WU, FH Krems, FH Bfi Wien).
Clive Spash is an economist who writes, researches and teaches public policy with an emphasis on economic and environmental interactions. His main interests are interdisciplinary research on human behaviour, environmental values and the transformation of the world political economy to a more socially and environmentally just system.
On February 18th, Prof. Clive Spash will give a lecture on the introduction to ecological economics. While the economy is generally based on growth, ecological economists emphasized the need to address limits to economic growth and respect for biophysical limits. Rather than simply reforming markets, the ecological crisis became recognized as requiring systemic change. Social and ecological problems are connected by common causal mechanisms that can only be addressed by changing the structure of actual economies. This requires a revolution in economic thought away from the narrow perspective that “the economy” is a singular form in the guise of capitalism. Once rejected, the alternative forms of economies as social provisioning systems become an objective offering the potential for better, more just, equitable and sustainable systems that meet the needs of all, both human and non-human.
The rise of environmental problems led to general public concern in the second half of the 20th century. Economists were slow to react but developed ideas based on employing markets with prices corrected using taxes and/or new forms of markets created via extending private property rights to previously non-commodified entities (e.g. carbon dioxide emissions). This approach employs cost-benefit analysis to correct market failures due to externalities, which has become the defining feature of (neoclassical) environmental economics. Analysis suggests that ecological crises are caused by capital accumulation, market consumerism, technology and human population expansion.
