A Policy Compass for Ecological Economics

Abstract

A policy compass indicates the direction in which an institution is going in terms of three general qualities. The three qualities are: suppression, harmony and passion. Any formal institution can develop a policy compass to examine the discrepancy between what the institution would like to do (suggested in its mandate) and the actual performance and situation it finds itself in. The latter is determined through an aggregation of statistical data and facts. These are made robust and stable using meta-requirements of convergence. Here, I present a version of the compass adapted to embed the central ideas of ecological economics: that society is dependent on the environment, and that economic activity is dependent on society; that we live in a world subject to at least the first two laws of thermodynamics; that the planet we live on is limited in space and resources; that some of our practices have harmful and irreversible consequences on the natural environment; that there are values other than value in exchange, such as intrinsic value and use value. In this paper, I explain how to construct a policy compass in general. This is followed by the adaptation for ecological economics. The policy compass is original, and so is the adaptation. The compass is inspired by the work of Anthony Friend, Rob Hoffman, Satish Kumar, Georgescu-Roegen, Stanislav Schmelev, Peter Soderbaum and Arild Vatn. In the conclusion, I discuss the accompanying conception of sustainability.