Social Ecological Economics | Radical Transformation towards Social and Ecological Justice
In this episode we speak with Dr. Clive Spash, an ecological economist who is fundamentally challenging conventional economic paradigms through his development of social ecological economics. His work addresses the intersections of human behavior, environmental values, and economic systems - advocating for a radical transformation towards a more socially and ecologically just world. Highlights include:
A critique of mainstream economics for failing to consider not only ecological and biophysical realities, but also pro-social human behavior and relationships, as well as power hierarchies;
How economists who have completed multiple degrees in economics are found to be particularly closed-minded and resistant to alternative perspectives;
How major environmental NGOs, including The Nature Conservancy, Sierra Club, Natural Resources Defense Council, and World Wildlife Fund, have been taken over by corporate and neoliberal ideologies;
How prominent advocates of degrowth and alternative economic models, such as Jason Hickel, Tim Jackson, Kate Raworth, and Timothée Parrique, are unwittingly supporting the growth agendas of mainstream economics while peddling population denialism and human supremacy;
Why Social Ecological Economics provides a scientific and ethical basis for degrowth economics that considers the rights of nature and of people.
MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:
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Clive Spash 0:00
My hope with mainstream economics is that I have no hope with the mainstream of economics. It’s because I've moved. And the reason I developed social ecological economics is because I gave up on trying to communicate with the mainstream. You know, I was trained in this kind of economics, I understand it. And I was involved for several years with resource environmental economists and their society and their associations and trying to get them to do something different than mathematical modeling and to move away from it and to understand, what I increasingly realized was reality, was really impossible. And then at some point, you think, why am I bothering? If you have an economic theory, which doesn't pay any attention to the material and energy flows through the system and to power and power relationships, then it's just failing to address reality. Now, why am I bothering to try and squeeze my ideas into a mathematical model to convince these people who don't want to be convinced anyway. I'm really wasting my time. What I want to do is to create a theory that is powerful enough that they won't have any choice but to listen.
Alan Ware 0:59
In this episode of the Overpopulation Podcast, we'll be speaking with Clive Spash, an economist who is fundamentally challenging conventional economic paradigms through his development of social ecological economics. His work addresses the intersections of human behavior, environmental values, and economic systems - advocating for a radical transformation towards a more socially and ecologically just world.
Nandita Bajaj 1:32
Welcome to the Overpopulation Podcast, where we tirelessly make ecological overshoot and overpopulation common knowledge. That's the first step in right-sizing the scale of our human footprint so that it is in balance with life on Earth, enabling all species to thrive. I'm Nanda Bajaj, co-host of the podcast and executive director of Population Balance.
Alan Ware 1:56
I'm Alan Ware, co-host of the podcast and researcher with Population Balance. We are proud to be the first and only nonprofit organization globally that draws the connections between pronatalism, human supremacy, social inequalities, and ecological overshoot. Our mission at Population Balance is to inspire narrative, behavioral, and system change that shrinks our human impact and elevates the rights and wellbeing of people, animals, and the planet. And now on to today's guest, Professor Clive L. Spash, is an economist, Chair of Public Policy and Governance at WU Vienna, University of Economics and Business, and formerly Editor-in-Chief of Environmental Values, and President of the European Society for Ecological Economics. He has held positions in several countries and run a variety of international projects, including funding from the European Commission and World Bank. His work on environmental issues has involved connecting natural to social sciences and taking an interdisciplinary approach that include the role of value, ethics, ideology, and activism in science. He was one of the earliest economists to address climate change and also biodiversity loss over 30 years ago. As an ecological economist, he's promoted the need for social ecological transformation of growth economies, and price-making market systems as well as a paradigm shift in economic thought. He has published extensively, covering the fields of economics, political economy, conservation, social psychology, project and policy evaluation, environmental policy, philosophy, and ethics. His books include Foundations of Social Ecological Economics in 2024; the Routledge Handbook of Ecological Economics: Nature and Society in 2017; Ecological Economics: Critical Concepts in the Environment, four volumes in 2009; and Greenhouse Economics: Value and Ethics in 2002. More information can be found at clivespash.org. And now on to today's interview.
Nandita Bajaj 4:04
Hello, Clive. You've been a transformative thinker in the field of ecological economics, particularly through your development of social ecological economics. And we've appreciated how your work has deepened the critique of mainstream economics, and how mainstream economics undermines ecological and social justice. We're eager to delve into this critique with you today and discuss the different pathways that you lay out toward radical systemic change that recognizes ecological limits and creates greater social and ecological justice. Welcome, Clive.
Clive Spash 4:44
Thank you very much. Thank you for inviting me.
Nandita Bajaj 4:48
So we'd like to start with an exploration of your primary critiques of mainstream contemporary economic thinking. So your new book, Foundations of Social Ecological Economics: The Fight for Revolutionary Change in Economic Thought, sets out to establish a new emerging paradigm called social ecological economics. And at the heart of this paradigm shift lies an acknowledgement of the embeddedness of economies in both biophysical reality and social structure. So let's start with the basics of what you believe mainstream economics gets wrong in terms of ecological and biophysical realities.
Clive Spash 5:29
Yeah. Okay. Thank you. Well, I think that the basic issue here is how mainstream economics reduces everything to a resource that can be used by the economic system, and it doesn't address the basic structure. So if we take something like an ecosystem, the structure of an ecosystem is about integrity and interrelationships. And the system itself, it cannot be broken down into separate parts. Now, if you take the mainstream of economics, what do they do? They then will convert the ecosystem into a set of services. And they will then break it down to components that would fit into a kind of market commodity model. So you end up with effectively losing the entire integrity of the ecosystem. You just have the bits and pieces that they think are relevant. Worse than this is that you get into how would they value this. Then they will value it by appealing to individual preferences, the consumer-like model. And people then don't have preferences about the integrity of ecosystems, like they don't have preferences about microorganisms, creepy crawly insects, and whatever you know, and they don't know about the structure. So it's very problematic then that you're not actually paying serious attention to the natural science and the structure there. More than this, I would say that we can go back to people like Georgescu-Roegen, who was writing in the 1970s, about the role of entropy and the laws of physics, and how this structure is very important then. What this raises for us is that the economy is heavily dependent on energy and material flows that come through it. This raises the topic of social metabolism, as it's called. So the social metabolism of an economy is core. They're using a metaphor here, which is like a biological metabolism. So we, for example, we require food, and we need to excrete the food. And if we don't do either of those, then we die. And the economy is very similar. So the economy is taking energy and materials in, and it needs to get rid of the waste out. And that's how it maintains itself. Now, if you have an economic theory, which doesn't pay any attention to the material and energy flows through the system, then it's just failing to address reality. And we see this, of course. So the economies are getting into crisis right now, because they're ignoring the supply chains. Where do they get their resources from? And this is a crisis. And they ignore where the outputs of the economy go, which is into the environment. And there we see biodiversity loss, damage to ecosystems, climate change, pollution of all sorts, because they're not paying any attention to it. So the macro-economic model, is a closed system. And it's basically a system which pretends it can operate without any attention to where the inputs come from or where the outputs go to. Now, that is actually not just a closed system. That's an isolated system in physics terms, which means there's no attention to the system's interactions with other systems in terms of materials and energy. So one of the fundamental messages there is that we live in open systems, and that economies are open systems. And if you treat them as closed systems, then you're actually not facing the reality of the system, and you can't manage it. And then we're getting into kind of all sorts of issues about geopolitics, geopolitical crisis, what's going on with resources. Who's going to get to use the capacity of the environment to absorb waste, but also where the resources come from. So it's on both ends. And you'll see that western nation states are basically exporting their waste to less developed countries - e-waste, toxic chemical waste, and so on. That is using their biocapacity. That is using the capacity of the environment to absorb waste. So it's not just resource extraction. And this waste problem is now becoming much bigger than the resource extraction problem was. And that's really what's hitting us now, I would say.
Alan Ware 9:35
So in addition to the ecological and biophysical realities, as you mentioned that the economy is an open system receiving inputs from nature and taking our outputs, you've also critiqued the psychological, social, and political blindspots that economists have about human beings in general. What would be some of your main critiques in the psychological, social, political, arenas?
Clive Spash 9:58
Yes, I think that's the classic model that human behavior in mainstream economics is homo economicus as it's called, which has been in and out of favor over 150 years. So it was heavily derided as an approach to human behavior, even in the 1800s. But then it has reemerged and come back, very much embedded in a kind of neoliberal, obviously, but also a classic political liberal framework. So you're appealing to the individual. And if you go back to Hobbes in the 1600s, you know, the individuals are not nice people. And they're people you need someone to regulate you against so that you don't get attacked. It's right of the selfish individual going out to gain what they can and so on. And of course, the problem with this is that humans are complex and they're actually social beings. So we're not individuals. We cannot survive as individuals and we do not survive as individuals. We're heavily dependent upon relationships of care, of helping each other and interdependency. The classic would be the pandemic, right? If you look at what happened in the pandemic, suddenly everybody realizes how much they're dependent on other people for care. And the care sector suddenly goes heavily up the agenda. And it's just fundamental, you know, to our existence. And then you get people isolated in Western societies, right? So you're put into isolation and people get psychologically disturbed, because they're not individuals living in boxes. But that's the way they're treated in the economic model, right, as if you're an individual in the box. Well, when you put individuals into boxes like that, lock them in their houses, they don't last long without having lots of psychological problems and getting very depressed. So this is one of the issues there. So the social dependency. Now interestingly, I think economic feminists, for example, have picked up on this, which is the concerns about care, but also unpaid labor in terms of feminist labor, because women generally are the ones who reproduce the household. And this is an unrecognized dependency relationship. Now, what happens in mainstream economics is that you only consider labor if it's paid. So it's waged labor. And, of course, the whole destruction of the economy is dependent on unpaid labor, and in particular, female labor. So without that, the household doesn't get reproduced, and there is no economy. So the structure of the mainstream economics is a total failure to understand the role of care dependency on unpaid labor, and the actually non-capitalist economy, we could say, because this is a different form of economy, the care economy. So this is quite important in terms of the social structure. So then you get into human motivation, right, as well. So as I was mentioning, the human motivation in this model is selfish and self-interest. But of course, humans aren't totally selfish. Of course, we all have our own self interests, and so on. But because we're in caring relationships, we're also concerned about others. And therefore, the motivation that we have is also very much about caring for others. And you see this also with nonhumans, right? humans interacting with nature, with nonhumans - typically, of course, in our society, the nonhuman tends to be a pet. Cats and dogs are very popular, because there's a caring for the other, recognition of the other, that we're not just humans on our own, that we have others to care about. So this is also very important, I think, when you start looking at human nature or relationships, that there is this. It's not all about, then, motivating individuals on the basis of paying them off, getting them to work on self interest basis. I mean, it's disappointing, we'll probably come to a little bit later, but in eco-economics, for example, a quote I use with my students, which is from Bob Costanza, who was the first president of the International Society, and he says, We shouldn't appeal to people's hearts. We should rather appeal to their wallets. And that, for me, is of course a classic aspect of framing things in terms of this mainstream selfish interest. And that's what the individual is. I'd much rather us appeal to people's ethics and their hearts and their morality than their wallets, you know. So there's that aspect of it, I think, in terms of the structure. Another thing I would mention here is that, in terms of the social structure, so economics is meant to be concerned about, you know in the capitalist society, firms, businesses, and their macro-economic market model is an interaction between firms and businesses and consumers. So if you look at the firms and business side, which is the other side of this, what's the structure of the economy that they have? The structure of the economy is classically, perfectly competitive, small enterprises. There's some slight variations on this going back to people like Joan Robinson in the 1930s, bringing in some small amounts of monopolistic competition and some other things. But the idea is that that's still the basic model - that competition leads to a fair outcome and the economy's efficient. Now, if you look at the real structure of the economy, the actual economy we have, it's got multinational corporations. They're massive, right? They're the biggest players we have around today. It's a fundamental institution, not addressed. So how can you talk about an economy if you actually miss out the major suppliers and the major producers who are operating in the economy? So it's a real failure to then to take on the structure of the economy. And this also relates to another big failure, which is nothing about power and power relationships. So there's nothing about the social structure and the implications of, and if we take capitalism here, we can go to Marxism, and then they bring in social structure. And this is one of the contributions of Marx was to start discussing the implications of the capitalist economy. If you industrialize, if you get certain people making lots of money, how do they make that money? They exploit labor, and these are the kind of relationships you get in an economy. So if we want to have a just and fairer economy, we have to pay attention to power and power relationships, and what goes on? And how do we run our society, so we have it fairer. And if you'd have no theory at all of power, or social relationships, then you can't address it.
Alan Ware 16:16
Yeah, as far as the psychological, I always found interesting, the research about the more students study mainstream economics, the more selfish they become or the more self-interested. And I found myself, a little bit of macro and micro I had, starting to see the world, in that more of a homo economicus kind of way. So you get steeped and become more of that type of person who is blind to the reality of social relationships. And as you mentioned, power, that kind of ahistorical element, right? That it seems economics is taught, or from what I've heard, they don't look at their own history starting as political economy, which was an offshoot of moral philosophy with Adam Smith. And that economies as they understood them seem to be more for social provisioning, as you've mentioned, is what economies should really be about. So yeah, I greatly appreciate that.
Clive Spash 17:10
Yeah. a sad thing. I mean, the economic curriculum has changed over time to push out history and philosophy of science, history of thought. It's actually been pushed out completely almost. Very interesting, when I was a PhD student, if you managed to get through the courses, it takes about two years to get through the courses in America in a PhD, then they allowed you to make a recommendation for two courses that you feel should be taught in the PhD. And I said this exactly. I said, Well, you need philosophy of science, and you need history of thought. And they were like, Oh, no, we don't need that. Why would we need that? We know what we're doing. We don't want to start questioning what we're doing. So it's very limited. Of course, that means that the more you study it, the more dogmatic you become, and the more closed minded you become. So I've done some survey work on mainstream economists and their interactions with the environment. And if you get somebody who's done three degrees in economics, so they've done bachelor's, master's, and a PhD, they are amazingly closed minded. And they really do not accept any conceptualizations outside of it. But if they've ever done something different, right, they've got one degree that was different. So maybe they did a master's in something else or whatever. They actually, it helps, because they know that there's something wrong with these conceptualizations. And they aren't quite as closed minded and as sure as the real dogmatists.
Nandita Bajaj 18:41
Another interesting thing I picked up when you were talking about how economies really need to be about social provisioning, and how the care economy is not recognized for the most part. You've also discussed how this advocacy to have that work recognized within our current economic paradigm is still asking to have a seat at the table of the current paradigm. It's not really challenging the way our economy is working, not change anything about the way the economy instrumentalizes people, instrumentalizes nature, and really divorces us from, as you said, our ethics, our relationships with each other and nature.
Clive Spash 19:30
Yeah, so there's a whole range of issues around the way in which people feel they should be pragmatic and get a seat at the table. So in the new book, I use the classification. So normally, people will talk about heterodoxy versus orthodoxy, and the classification I use is this category of orthodox dissenters. So what you get is people who realize there's something wrong with the mainstream, move away from it, try to move towards the heterodoxy. But then they go back into the orthodoxy, because they want to have a seat at the table. And this results in the new conceptualization they have, which might move you towards a different paradigm being undermined, and they go back into the mainstream. A classic example that I use is actually all the people who win the Swedish bank prize in honor of Nobel, you know, they call it the Nobel economics prize. But actually, you know, these guys and very few women, I mean there's one I think, Eleanor Ostrom, but they're mostly men, right? They actually then go through this process of critique, and then show you how the orthodoxy doesn't have to change basically, at the end of the day. So they raise some anomaly, some flaw in the theory, and this is what's cited in the prize, but then they basically defend the orthodoxy. They back off. And this is a real problem then. But it's a problem more generally, because people are dealing with hegemonic power structures, and they're struggling with how to deal with them. And they think that they have to conform in order to deal with the hegemonic power structure, but you'll never change the power structure that way. I mean, Gramsci is the great one who did this. He's the one who has the passive revolutionaries in his theory. So you know, he's concerned about how did the Italian fascists get to power when there were so many people opposing them, and that there was the workers' movement, and so on, which was very strong in the early 1900s. And he's writing this always from prison. He's been put into prison, right? So his prison diaries, and he's reflecting on this and explaining it. And what happens is exactly this, that once the movements become so strong that they become a threat, then the power brokers get them at the table. They offer them things, and they get them around the table. And what they do is they pinpoint the leaders and the leadership, and they get the leaders, and they get the leaders to cooperate. And they get them to water down what they're doing, disempower the movement. And then you've got the problem solved. And you see this time and time again. You see it very strongly with what's going on with the environment and the role of the corporations and the way the corporations have very effectively worked with the environmental movement to undercut it.
Nandita Bajaj 22:17
In fact, you've critiqued some of the environmental NGOs and global governance organizations, such as the UN, that are ostensibly supporting progressive alternatives to mainstream economics, but which you've called apologists for growth. Who are some of these apologists for growth? And why do you think they're so unwilling to question the goal of growth that mainstream economists push for?
Clive Spash 22:44
Yeah, growth is really quite an interesting aspect, isn't it? Because it's core to the capitalist economy. I mean it's really what drove the capitalist economy. It’s the ability to accumulate capital. And even a critique, like Marx, is very admiring of the ability of capitalism to do this, right. So he says, you know, this is like the advance of the technology, the material accumulation, and so on. What then happens, so we've realized, you know, ecological economics, people like Herman Daly, very critical of the growth economy and asking for it to be constrained to stop the scale, these kinds of things. But then again you see people actually back down on their critique repeatedly. I mean, the UN is obviously pushing green growth. It's very explicit. So they're not even backing off of growth, but others who actually do critique growth then also back down. I mean, I can give you examples. So you know, so I've written a paper on this, and I cite Tim Jackson and Kate Raworth as two examples, right? So in Tim Jackson, in his book on Prosperity Without Growth, that you'd think that Prosperity Without Growth would be anti-growth. But hidden away in a footnote, I discovered is actually that he says, Well, growth is really important for alleviating poverty. But this is the classic example, right? This is like the World Bank example. So it's essentially no different from the mainstream. So what he's actually saying is, and he's shifted to 'post growth', I've noticed, he actually says, We need growth. We need growth for development. And this is how development is defined is to have material accumulation, capital accumulation. That's the standard model. So prosperity without growth is not without growth at all. It's actually growth first, and after you've become prosperous, then you can go to 'post growth'. And that's his argument, right? And people don't realize that. I mean he has entertained at the degrowth conferences. He has for several years. And I gave a plenary at a degrowth conference and pointed this out. I said, Look, the guy's supporting growth, right? Another one is, even within degrowth you see this. So if I take someone like Jason Hickel, who is renowned for being a degrowther, written very popular texts on it, very much liked by younger people, and so on. His concern is then reflected in he supports 'contract and convergence'. And what's 'contract and convergence' is that we have to get the richer nations to stop consuming so much so that the poor nations can consume more. 'Contract and convergence' is just the same old story of well, they need growth, and therefore growth and development is progress. And if you go to the South American movement they're extremely critical of this. They regard this as really problematic. So Hickel is anti-colonialism and argues this, but he's undercutting his own argument, because the 'contract and convergence' is the old- fashioned colonialism that what we've got to do is impose growth on the other nations so that they can all become part of the same approach. I was at the Beyond Growth Conference. Jason Hickel gave a plenary. He never once mentioned degrowth. He didn't mention it. And I thought that's very interesting for me, because he was using 'post growth'. Tim Jackson was also there. But you know, why was he doing this is because exactly, he's getting a seat at the table. He's in the European Parliament. He's talking to the big boys. He wants to water down what he's saying. This is this kind of thing I talk about as pragmatism, you know, a kind of new environmental pragmatism as well that goes on. Timothée Parrique was also there. You may have come across him, a younger academic who is also very popular. And his presentation consisted of converting degrowth into a downturn in GDP. Well, degrowth is a rejection of GDP. It's a rejection of the whole economic model., So what he did was he then had this diagram where GDP goes down, and it's bounded between two lines. And it can go up and down once it's between the two lines. Well, this is not degrowth. This is a classic apologist for growth, right? He's just converted degrowth into a downturn in GDP. It goes down, and then it can just continue on between two boundaries. It's just amazing to me. And then we get to Kate Raworth, okay. So Kate Raworth's book, Doughnut Economics, very, very popular. Lots of young people like it, you know. I'm not sure many people read it, but lots of people will cite it which is classic with these kind of books. They look at the diagram, and that's about it. So if you actually read it, which I have, there's a lot of inconsistencies in it, of course. I mean, she's citing Herman Daly and some ecological economics and also Marx early on. And then, you get to I think it's like chapter four or five, and what is it called? So basically, she's an apologist for growth, because she says that she's actually agnostic about growth. So the chapter is called 'being agnostic about growth'. How can you be agnostic of growth, if you understood Marx and Marxism and what goes on and exploitation, and you'd read Herman Daly who was very anti-growth, sometimes I think she even claims to be an ecological economist these days, this is just totally inconsistent. You can't be agnostic about it. It doesn't make any sense. This is what I mean, then. So what's happening here is that people are, of course, backing down and playing to the hegemonic power system.
Alan Ware 28:09
Yeah, we've talked with Naomi Oreskes about the neoliberal turn of the late 70s and 80s. And how the market fundamentalism became so entrenched in so many power structures, including leftist, so-called leftist political parties.
Clive Spash 28:25
So the leftist thing is interesting, right? So there's always been an element within, as I said, within Marxism, so Marx did think that capital was very powerful and achieved things. And then you have this split for a long time, though it's not even new, between the potential for the state to become controlled by the workers, and therefore the state continues on being an exploitative, capital-accumulating economy, but you get redistribution. So the big thing is then to redistribute after you've maintained the capital accumulation economy, but it's controlled by a worker state. And this you see like Mazzucato is pushing this very heavily strong state with redistribution. Michael Jacobs also pushing this, and the two of them work together. And Michael Jacobs, coming from a kind of eco-socialist position, but ending up with a total contradiction, because you've got the capitalist state now, not a corporate market one but a capitalist state control, and then redistribution. But he doesn't address the ecological crisis. He doesn't address the social metabolism and the energy and material throughput issues at all. It just maintains it. You end up with a growth economy, which then is creating exploitation of ecology and other people. And then it's meant to be ameliorated by a welfare state. So you get growth, and you create problems and you create harm, and then you try to rectify the harm afterwards. So you create cancers, and people are dying young, and there's air pollution and so on. And so what do you do about that? Well, you have a national health service, and this is the welfare state. People suffer and there's poverty and there's unemployment, because the capital system does this. And then what you do, you have welfare payments. So this is the redistributive element. So going back to the welfare state, it doesn't address the growth economy. It doesn't address the environmental exploitation. And it also, these kinds of leftist, socialist approaches, I think tend to be extremely nationalist. So they totally ignore the supply chain issue. So Alf Hornborg who works on unequal exchange notes this, that when you go to the Marxist literature, what you find is that their concern about exploitation of labor is national. So it's within the nation. So they aren't paying attention to what is the resource that they're using within say, a factory in the UK, dependent upon - the built-in labor, the built-in labor which is coming from other countries, the exploited labor in India, China, Africa, South America. And they don't care about that. They don't pay any attention to it. It's only the workers in the factory in the UK that are being paid any attention.
Nandita Bajaj 31:20
And it's interesting, you said, there's been within a lot of the degrowth alternative economic models, there's a lot of talk about decolonization, and anti-colonialist principles. And yet, as you said, there has already been a global brainwash of growthism, that growth is an important part of, quote, development, that one cannot be prosperous without growth. At least that's the message that's being sold. And the irony of that, because on the one hand, you're saying, let different communities and different countries do what they need to do to figure out their own prosperity. And yet pushing this idea that growth is an important part of development. So it's like, well, let's spread the development message everywhere. And then let them do what they want with that growth, how they want to rearrange their economies. But also, the colonization of nature is absolutely not taken into account. All of the different entities that you mentioned today, the different economic models and the UN are largely human supremacist, because not only are they not including the power hierarchies that are at play among nations and among humans, but they're also completely missing the power hierarchy that's at play between humans and nonhumans, that we are at the top of the food chain, and that we can continue to obliterate nature as we please, except for the couple of nice-looking species that we want to have on our calendar walls.
Clive Spash 33:08
Yeah, I mean, the relationship of humans to nonhumans is really, of course, central and interesting to me, you know. I was editor of a journal called Environmental Values for quite a long time, and engaged with environmental ethics and discussions there. I think one of the things that I find very relevant is a philosopher Professor Vetlesen to University of Oslo in Norway. And he wrote a really good book on this and relating it to capitalism, as well. Within that book is a discussion of the relationships we have to nature. So typically, what happens is nature is represented through human interests. So earlier, we were talking about, you know, ecosystem services. Well, that's because it's a service for us. So nature gets represented that way. Sometimes, there's a little bit of attention to nature of interactions, which are going to be in harmony with nature of this kind of movement. So that kind of discussion, less exploitative kind of forms of interaction. But the thing that he points out is, there's hardly ever any discussion or account taken, and certainly in policy, of independence, autonomy of nature, of nature's ability to look after itself and to be independent of humans. And where is the space for that on the planet? You know, this is really absent. Everything has to be related to the human. I mean, in the 70s, I think it was called, like, speciesism. So our species is the supreme species, and therefore, we just ignore all the other guys. And of course, you know, there is the issue of our survival and the dependency on it. But there's also the moral and ethical issue here. And also that when we were talking earlier about, you know, our relationships of care, and our interdependency with others, and the other here, if there's no autonomous nature, what sort of a world is it, you know? And this would really be a horrible world, if there's nothing that is independent of humans. I mean, I don't really think it can exist, quite honestly. But we're losing a tremendous amount of value in the world when we lose autonomous nature, and that we don't have any space for it.
Nandita Bajaj 35:16
We totally agree. We're with you on that. And in a paper you've also critiqued a lot of NGOs that started out being conservationists and have now completely joined the growhists. They have been captured by the industry. And you've talked about Nature Conservancy, WWF, Sierra Club, and RDC. Can you say a few words about what you've noticed with their joining parties?
Clive Spash 35:46
Yeah, it's interesting, right? Because there's a couple of aspects to this. I'll tell you a little anecdote. Some years ago, I think it's five, six years ago, I was invited to give a talk to the conservation community, two and half thousand people at a big international conference in Montpellier. A nine storey opera building, we were in actually, where we had this. So the guy's from the Nature Conservancy. He's in charge of their scientific research division. And he's known for being a very strong arguer. So I'm pretty strong, arguing myself, I think, you know, so, but I was still going to be in front of two and a half thousand conservationists and I wanted to expose exactly what's been going on in conservation movement with the way that they have actually been moving towards the neoliberal kind of areas. And so I was quite nervous about this. And initially, I think that they were really not in favor of what I was saying. But the interesting thing was, by the time I'd finished, I got a standing ovation. Now, this was really interesting, because the conservation community, people when I was talking to people afterwards, I mean, a lot of people came up to me afterwards, and they all wanted to go and have a discussion. So we went to some small restaurant, and they just packed the place out. And I basically ended up giving seminar question and answer sessions to them. And they were basically shocked that no one had actually voiced this explicitly to them. I felt like the little boy pointing at the emperor and saying he's got no clothes on, because this was what it was like. You know, they suddenly like, Oh, my God, he hasn't got any clothes on, you know, conservation has been taken over by corporations and neoliberals. If you look at the boards of the big environmental conservation NGOs, they've been taken over by corporate executives so that they've actually loaded into these organizations, corporate executives. The World Wildlife Fund, as it used to be called, WWF, that has had people like Pavan Sukhdev, who's, you know Pavan Sukhdev was a futures trader for Deutsche Bank, you know. He was a financier. And he became the head of it after having run the project for the UN on Ecosystems and Biodiversity. I mean, a financial futures market man doing something on biodiversity. You think, well, what's the sense of that? Then taking over WWF. And you see it. So the Nature Conservancy also, at the same time, as I was having that debate, the head of the organization was an ex-financier. And you see what they start doing is they get into biodiversity offsetting. They're actually justifying Rio Tinto's zinc operations in South America by offsetting it with land in North America and these kinds of operations. So it's been a long problem. I think that what you see in the NGO movement is that the smaller organizations are of no interest to them at all. So they don't invade them. They don't take them over. They want the big guys like they want BirdLife International. They want WWF. They want the ones that are really the big players that they see as a threat to them and are power brokers. They don't care about small organizations, or the more radical ones that they can't co-opt.
Nandita Bajaj 39:03
Like ours.
Clive Spash 39:04
Yeah, exactly. Stay small and you won't get co-opted.
Alan Ware 39:05
So as you've written and spoken about the field of ecological economics developed as a response to so many of the criticisms we discuss with mainstream economics, and to many of us concerned with greater ecological sustainability ecological economics has held the great promise as a type of economics that can holistically combine ecological concerns with economics and help us prioritize long-term planetary health. But you've argued that ecological economics has become increasingly similar in a lot of ways to mainstream economics in its approach, and hence your new book Foundations for Social Ecological Economics. So what would be some of your primary critiques of how ecological economics has developed over time?
Clive Spash 39:52
Yeah, so when I looked into the development of ecological economics in more and more detail over the years, I came to realize that the combination of ecologists with economists that was undertaken initially meant that you had a lot of well-meaning ecologists who are concerned about the environment, who have absolutely no knowledge at all of economics. So they didn't understand that there are different types of economists, which means they didn't understand that they were making alliances, many of them, with economists who are totally in the mainstream and which was the antithesis to what the economists wanted to achieve by creating a new society. The result was that many of the ecologists allied with the powerful people. Who are the most powerful people? The powerful economists are, of course, the mainstream economists, by definition, because they're in the hegemony. So what you ended up then was with an alliance between these. At the same time, you saw that some of the elements of the mainstream saw ecological economics as a threat, and decided to take it over. And this is actually Herman Daly's phrase. So the Beijer Institute, Partha Dasgupta, involved with the Beijer Institute, they changed their name to ecological economics. And they brought on board very mainstream economists, and set up a research agenda, which is totally mainstream with Karl-Göran Mäler. And these elements then were there. Herman Daly was invited. He was on there for a short time, and he resigned in disgust at what was going on. And he explicitly said, and I've cited this a few times, that he felt it was a takeover. You know, here's this new movement. It's a bit of a threat. Let's take it over. The thing is that Karl-Göran Mäler is dead. He died and then Partha Dasgupta gave an honorary speech where? At the Indian Society for Ecological Economics. So this is the kind of thing I think is really problematic. So the Indian Society for Ecological Economics is actually very mainstream. It supports these kinds of positions that are actually no different than the neoclassical mainstream model. They have no critique in there at all. So this is one of the issues that we then have this kind of element in there in ecological economics, which is allied with the mainstream. And I tried to analyze why. Well, part of it is because we have these people who are orthodox dissenters, as I was calling them earlier, who basically just go in and out of the orthodoxy and keep reemerging in it, because they think that's the way they can talk to other people. And then you have people who I think, you know I think Bob Costanza is like this, is that he's a well- meaning person who actually then adopts what he thinks is pragmatically powerful. So he doesn't care about the theory. It's of no relevance to him at all. It's whether this is going to work, will he get the seat at the table. And if he wants to do that, then he's got to turn everything into money. And he's got to talk about the selfish individual and so on, and so forth. And then he ends up reinforcing the discourse. And then this becomes the way that we should do things. So ecological economics early on, you know, Herman Daly got appointed to the World Bank. We had the first international conference in Washington, DC. I was there. And Herman was pushing forwards the idea of natural capital, and ecosystem services came along. Now, both of these are totally mainstreaming concepts. At the time, people were thinking that natural capital will give importance to nature, and promote it, and that it will get into things like national accounts and so on, and that this would have a big impact. Of course, it had no impact at all. And the Washington Consensus was arising at exactly the same time. And so Herman's attempts to do anything in the World Bank were soon dead. And, give him credit, he resigned again, right. So he did actually make a stand. So I give him credit for that. But the problem was that by then the concepts of natural capital and ecosystem services had become quite dominant, and had become adopted and have been taken over. And the ecologists bought into it as well. So then we've got the ecologists of the conservation movement buying into this kind of discourse, Millennium Ecosystems Assessment Report using ecosystem services, feeding straight into the developing financialization of nature, which develops over the next 20 years, and the commodification of nature. Then, if we look at the journal, right, the Journal of Ecological Economics, there you have another issue. What you have there is that this idea that we should be tolerant of all voices, which is a kind of political toleration, I would say, but it's not good science, right. So what is science about? And my argument is that science is about actually selecting good theories and validating knowledge. It's not about accepting everything, you know. We threw out the idea that the Earth was flat. You know, we don't say, Oh, let's all be tolerant, so we should still publish papers in Nature and Science about flat Earth because we should be tolerant. But that's effectively what ecological economists are doing, you know. We know that mainstream economists are basically like flat Earthers, and yet we keep entertaining everything they say. And when I raise this with the community or the editors, and they're like, Oh, no, we must keep the debate going. Well, there's no debate. It's not like you're having a debate or anything. They're talking straight past each other. There's a paradigmatic difference, you know. And there's also an ideological commitment that is very different. So people keep then re-engaging with the mainstream terms. The mainstream don't pay any attention to the heterodoxy and the ecological economists. They pay attention only to their own models. It's the others who then pay attention to what they're saying, and just re-empower them all the time. So these are some of the issues that I think have become very problematic, and which is why I've been highlighting them a lot to try and get the society aware of what's going on within its own, you know, the ecological economics society, aware of what's going on within its own boundaries, and then trying to address it.
Nandita Bajaj 46:06
And you started alluding to the social aspect that you brought to ecological economics in response to its shortcomings. So why is the addition of the “social” significant? And what does this approach offer that is missing in both mainstream and ecological economics?
Clive Spash 46:27
Yeah, so I think my feeling there was that when ecological economics was starting out, it was actually trying to bring the ecologists in more seriously than they had been, having attention by economists, but allying with economists, who as we were discussing earlier in the mainstream have no theory of power, or social relationships or anything else. Now, at the same time, in Europe, there were other social scientists coming in who did have that element. So sociologists, Marxists, political ecologists, and so on, who came into the European society. So the European society was interesting, because it actually had that social aspect already in there, which was largely absent elsewhere. So part of the approach of ecological economics then was actually just this linkage approach between mainstream economic models, which have no idea of society. Society for them is just a collection of individuals. So it's methodological individualism. And the ecologists who obviously don't have any kind of social theory, either. So that was the problem. So having recognized this, you know, and then seeing what was happening in the European society, and then how this could actually disappear from the European society if you didn't get attention. I realized that, you know, over time, it was really important to promote the social. So I started out talking about socio-economics initially. And then I realized that actually, over time, that was a little derogatory of the social and the social is way too important to be, you know, hyphenated and reduced down to something that is attached to economics. So then thinking more seriously about structure. And what is the relationship between an economy and society, and then seeing these as actually, co- evolutionary, right, but also emergent, co-emergent as well. This leads me to redefining economics as social provisioning. Because when you start to think about, you know, what is an economy? And I thought, Well, okay, you know, the standard definitions really aren't adequate. And they're actually only about capitalism. So they're embedded in capitalism. So it's all about, you know, meeting consumer needs and wants, and all that kind of stuff, and resources with Robinson, these kinds of approaches. But if you actually start reading into things like Polanyi and others who are doing a bit more history of thought, and you want to have a definition, which extends across time and space, social provisioning does it. But of course, social provisioning is explicitly social, by definition. And then you've got, how do we provide within different social structures and institutions? So the social aspect then brings in a whole range of issues about institutional arrangements and the institutions as things like conventions, so the way that we interact with each other, social norms, so the norms of behavior that we have, and the rules and regulations that we put in place to run our society, laws, and so on. And this is then much richer. And you start thinking, okay, so if I look at capitalism, it has a very particular set of conventions; trust in markets, you know, you don't go into the shop and nick the stuff and not pay for it or wherever. This is a convention really. It might be sanctioned. So if you get caught, you could get sanctioned for it, right? You could go to prison, get fined, or whatever. So that would be a hard rule, sanctioning things. Private property rights are very important to capitalism, so you have to impose it, and so on. So we could define what we understand by what economists call the economy. It's actually the capitalist economy, in particular institutional arrangements, but it also enables us to look at all sorts of others, like indigenous communities, non-monetary economies, pre-capitalist economies. They all have social relationships, right? And they're all about provisioning. They're trying to provide for the community. You can go to the family level and you can consider that. We can go back into prehistory and look at hunter gatherers and their social provisioning systems. So it's a much richer approach to understanding and the social relationships aspect is central then. It's totally core. And of course, we're back to having you know, we've got a much better understanding of humans and their cultural social relations and, of course, variety. So again, what we get into then is all the possibilities that exist. So there's variety already existing in societies. There's not just one economy or one way to run things. There's all sorts of different ones. Cultural variety, the way we satisfy our needs, the way that people have different cultural relationships of social provisioning. What would be just social provisioning? Good and ethical relationships as opposed to exploitative ones, but also the potentiality, right, which is, we can have new ways of social provision. We can have alternative ways of social provisioning. And of course, that's what I argue we really, really need now.
Nandita Bajaj 51:24
That's really great. One thing I really appreciate is how the social within the social ecological economics inherently takes into account the different contexts within which norms are being formed. For example, one of the things we challenge within our work is pronatalism, which is very growth-biased pressures that are put on people to have children because population growth is intertwined with economic growth. And so capitalism and our current kind of hegemonic economic models rely on constant growth in population and consumers. And so I can see how ecological economics would not inherently be able to challenge that social norm of pushing people to have children, you know, for the economy in a way that social ecological economics would consider the power hierarchies and differentials that are inherent within economic models.
Clive Spash 52:36
It's interesting, you know, Herman Daly recognized, for example, the issue of population, but then what was his kind of approach to it. It was totally mainstream, right? He had birth rights that could be traded, which also Boulding advocated as well, Kenneth Boulding advocated. So these are two people who understand that there's limits and capacities to the planet, and that population could be an issue. But their solutions are awful, really, you know. And they don't address the social structure and, like you say, the structure of capitalism that drives the population. So the growth aspect that's in there. And I think this is one of the things with the social ecological economics is to actually analyze these kinds of things in terms of the causal mechanisms. What's causing population expansion and growth, and why is it a problem? And of course also things like for the environment and for ecology, with the expansion of the global north, right? So all the high consumption levels in those populations, and it is the growth economy, right? So it's in the structure. It's in the pension system. It's in the debt system. It's in interest rates. It's like, everybody wants expansion. It's like this is also why I have problems with people who reduce this issue down to education. And you get this like, classic, very narrow position. Yeah, if we just educate women, then it will all change. Well, of course, it won't change because it's not the structure of a capitalist economy, is it?
Nandita Bajaj 54:01
Right. And there's so many embedded social norms that are patriarchal in nature. So if you're not challenging the patriarchy within which those norms are being rehearsed, then how is educating going to change that. And maybe that's the one thing we did appreciate about steady state economy and, you know, some forms of ecological economics that they were considering the role of human population in undermining the biophysical integrity of Earth in a way that some of the other economic models you talked about today, doughnut economics, degrowth, circular economy, they directly or indirectly ignore the population factor. In fact, many of them have just openly said it's a red herring issue. It's not a real issue. We can easily support 10 billion people, which is really disappointing because we like aspects of degrowth. And we, ourselves, embrace so many of those aspects. And I wonder, you know, how does your proposed model of social ecological economics address the role of human population among other factors?
Clive Spash 55:09
Yeah, so I think we've touched on this to the extent here, we look at the structure. So I think I actually put this into my philosophy of science as well, which is critical realism. So any problem like this needs to be analyzed in terms of causal mechanisms and what are the structures that are causing it. So we can look at this, and we can identify causal mechanisms along the way. So, you could say, one of the classic things for population growth typically was that people needed insurance for old age. So what do you do to insure yourself against old age is that you have lots of children, like some of them die, but you get enough children to look after you when you get old; hopefully, if they don't hate you, and move away and the rest of it. But in the old traditional society, this was the insurance system. Well, of course, you could get an insurance system which isn't children, and then you don't have population growth, right? So if the society is prepared to provide for its old people, then you don't need to have lots of children to provide for it. So this is a kind of approach, I would say, we can analyze the causal mechanisms of what's going on. I think it's so unscientific to then just say, Oh, well, it's not an issue. We're going to ignore it. But I think there's again, you can analyze that and ask why do people do that? It's an extremely tense issue, lots of outrage by people that anybody should talk about them not having children, or its associated with authoritarian policies. And of course, there have been some terrible policies in the past which people can cite, but I also think there's a real problem. So you know, Giorgos Kallis has this book on limits, which is also kind of attacking Malthus, and I think that this is really not well thought through. And I think it's very problematic. And I actually think that he misrepresents a lot of what Malthus was about, and also the time period in which Malthus lived, and the kind of issues that people were facing, and quite often a caricature of Malthus, to make him into a bad guy who didn't care about people, and so on and so forth. I think that this is actually not the case. And that people quite often take the very first essay that Malthus wrote, and they don't pay any attention to his later work. And he massively expanded it, and he increased references, and he got into debates with people in society. And he developed his ideas and theories, you know, and you have to look at it in the context of the time period - an agricultural economy, not an industrialized capitalist economy. You have to look at the full range of debates that he had. And I think, like, Kallis just doesn't do this. I tried to ask him about it. He won't talk to me about it, you know. But I think it's a real shame that this caricature comes because it is obviously one of the issues we have to address.
Nandita Bajaj 57:53
And in doing so just kind of blindly or unscientifically, ignoring the issue, a lot of people really intelligent people, will not take into account very foundation of population growth - the patriarchal mechanisms that wanted growth of the empires and states. And population growth, for the most part is being driven by nationalism, ethnocentrism, religiosity, and capitalism. So if you're challenging some of those hierarchical oppressive powers, but not challenging the one that relies on growth, because of patriarchy, then your model is broken.
Clive Spash 58:39
And this is why I have a lot of problem with some of the kind of aspects in social movements and even degrowth and so on, is because they don't maintain their consistency with a theoretical basis. And then actually, they don't even manage to maintain their ideological basis through their theories, right? So especially when we get to those pragmatists, right, then they become extremely contradictory. And they go backwards or forwards. And, and then you say, Yeah, but don't you believe this, you know, where's your values? Oh, yeah, yeah, we believe that. But well, then why are you arguing this? Oh, I don't really know.
Alan Ware 59:11
You're trying to create a more whole view of economics by adding the social, right, understanding the social and power structures within society as a whole and having that be more integrated? How is it being received so far?
Clive Spash 59:28
Well it'll be interesting to see how my book is received to answer that. I feel that you could say it's early days, right? I mean, even 20 years is early days for a theory or a paradigm shift. But my hope is actually more with young people. And I feel that it resonates with their concerns much more. My hope with the mainstream is that I have no hope with the mainstream of economics, because I've moved. And the reason I developed social ecological economics partially as well, is because I gave up on trying to communicate with the mainstream. You know, I was trained in this kind of economics. I understand it. I was involved for several years with resource environmental economists and their society and their associations and trying to get them to do something different than mathematical modeling and to move away from it, and to understand what I increasingly realized was reality, was really impossible. And then at some point, you think, why am I bothering? Why am I bothering to try and squeeze my ideas into a mathematical model to convince these people who don't want to be convinced anyway? I'm really wasting my time. This is why when I wrote my obituary of Herman Daly recently, you know, I was reflecting on Herman and what Herman tried to do, a very well meaning man, but I feel that he was always trying to engage with the mainstream, who didn't want to listen to him. I think he realized this at the end of his life, that a big failure for him was that he couldn't convince these people. My attitude to this is, of course, why would you bother? Why would I bother with these people? What I want to do is to create a theory that is powerful enough that they won't have any choice but to listen. That's my hope, I would say.
Alan Ware 1:01:08
So you're trying to shift a complete paradigm. And as we've heard people talk about, are those change one funeral at a time? Because those beliefs are so strongly defended that otherwise they won't change? Or do they change, as I've also heard you talk about, the nonlinear historical events that just show all the anomalies and flaws in your model, that you think maybe the global financial crisis would have done that more to mainstream economics, but it proved amazingly resilient to remaining the dominant paradigm. But what's your theory of paradigmatic change?
Clive Spash 1:01:43
Yeah, so actually, in the book, I tried to address this as well, in terms of what creates a radical change, you know, what makes science radical. So I go beyond Kuhn, and Kuhn's paradigm theory, which I think is interesting, right. And it provides us with some way to conceptualize. But it's actually also flawed. Kuhn's original idea was that there's like a dramatic shift. And the new paradigm leaves everything of the old paradigm behind. And this was very problematic, right? So Popper didn't like it, because it made science unprogressive effectively, because you just lose all the old science. It's just gone. But other people don't like it, because it's actually doesn't match up to what we observe. So as you said, as a paradigm, they continue on. And even though we have Einstein's theory, we still have Newton's. You know it's still there. So you get the continuation and the continuity and this kind of aspect. But Lakatos, who was basically trying to defend Popper, he came up with this idea that there's a core and then there's a periphery. So this protective belt. And if you think about that, so he's trying to say, oh, yeah, the core is good, right? The core continues on. This is the progressive element. And that's not going to change rather than Kuhn's frying everything out. That protective belt can just change. That's where all the debates are. His idea was to defend a progressive science. But what he actually did for most people, I think, is that make us understand why paradigms don't shift when they're awful. There's nothing progressive. So you get something like economics is a classic example, right. So what's going on? Mainstream economics has a core set of ideas that never change, because it throws up smoke and mirrors. Where's the core? Oh, I don't know, I can't see it. Oh, there's too much smoke in here. Oh, let's have you know, new, newest, let's have complexity economics, let's have behavioral economics,. And then they just throw up all this new stuff, and the core doesn't change. And people are distracted by all these other things that are supposedly meant to be addressing it, which aren't really addressing it at all. So I think there's an issue in there. But of course, we would have to also look at why these ideas don't change when they're totally irrelevant. Economics does not relate to the reality of the economy. And we can see this across the board. So then you would say, How come then these economics departments and these economists stay in place? I mean, what is their role? So you have to then think about it. Okay. So what is the role of these economists if they actually don't have a theory that informs us about the economy? And their role clearly is a social one and a political one. So you call on economists to produce awfully complex models that nobody can understand and have nothing to do with reality because they're very useful, because they justify your policy. So I have a policy I want to implement. Let me get some economists together, who will produce some incomprehensible model that will justify what I've just done, what I wanted. So you take Nordhaus on climate change, producing all these rubbish figures that are actually meaningless. And they give him the Swedish bankers' prize. Bottom line is that all he's doing is justifying inaction on climate change. He doesn't have to have any relationship to a real economy or anything real at all. He just has to get the smoke and mirrors working. Get the smoke and mirrors working and then, Oh that's it, look, everybody thinks I've come up with something brilliant and I haven't done anything. These numbers are totally ad hoc and totally unscientific. It's a political and power game that's going on, I think, with all these economists and their models and so on. But to get back to your question, how do we get the shift? You know, what causes shifts? Well, clearly, with the financial crisis, as you say, you might have expected to be a big change. But what effectively happened, as Mirowski has pointed out, is that they became stronger, right. They use crises. So crises are continuously used by the system to reinforce the system - wars, geopolitics, securitizations, and so forth. So you're gonna have to understand that in terms of the structure and the power relationships. So the banks are too important to let them fail. The financial system cannot go down. The economists will support their survival. Interestingly, I don't like the Austrian economists, but they at least would have let the banks go down. Well actually, the survival of the fittest is their theory. What you can see then is that the economic structure is supporting the paradigm. And there is a very strong relationship and governments are also captured in this process. It's very hard for this to go down. Then we get to the crisis. Okay. So I think crises can create change. I think that when we saw what happened with Keynes's ideas, they became prevalent because of the crisis of the 1930s. If he'd published his series during a period when there was no trouble, no unemployment or whatever, it probably would have gone nowhere. But because there was a big crisis, what did he do, but what his theory was about was actually helping save capitalism. So it wasn't a critique of capitalism. It was actually, Okay, we've got high unemployment, what do we do under capitalism, to save the system. You know we can boost it with demand and get consumption going and get people back employed. It wasn't a radical theory, but it did actually create a theory, right? So if we take the pandemic, and I've argued this, the pandemic was really interesting in terms of revealing the structure of capitalism. It was really evident and in everybody's faces,the exploitation, what goes on. Also, homeless people, people realized suddenly, how many homeless people there are, because actually, they're going to die in the streets. And, you know, in the UK, which is pretty awful when it comes to homeless people I'd have to say, it leaves everything to charities. The state is pretty bad. They started putting them into hotels for a very short period of time. But then after the pandemic, just forget about them, again, you know, when capitalism is going again. So you get this revealed, but you don't get the change in society. So the paradigm shifting is, I think, in economics is very much related to the realization of the structure of the economy. So the environmental crisis is, of course, raising the stakes. And as the stakes get raised, then people are realizing the economists don't explain anything. Their theories keep going on, but the financiers need the economists to keep explaining it the same way so they can keep doing what they want. And the same with the elite, the billionaires, the corporations, and so on. It's very useful for them. If it gets really bad, then I think you're gonna see a shift away from that to more towards, we don't need the economists, what we need is the military and the police.
Alan Ware 1:08:20
So yeah, successive crises can be dealt with, partly, as you've mentioned, in your writings too, by greater debt militarization, increasing authoritarianism. So that could definitely delay any major paradigm shift. And as you've mentioned too, unfortunately, when capitalist systems are under stress, the category of social others expands, as the systems have a diminishing set of resources and the privileged certainly act in ways to maintain that privilege. And we've seen that throughout history. But you've also noted in your work, and you do work with many encouraging movements around the world today that are attempting to shift the dominant paradigm. So what are the sources of the most positive energy and direction, given all of these headwinds, that you find most promising in helping achieve some kind of radical system change?
Clive Spash 1:09:15
I'll tell you a couple of organizations I've been engaged with around Vienna in the last 10 or 15 years. The most hopeful ones and really nice ones is the Climate Action Movement, climate camps. They're really quite inspiring. A lot of different people from different backgrounds coming together, doing protests, peaceful protesting, taking direct action, but always peaceful and quite respectful - more than I can say for the police, who are getting increasingly violent. But the camps are really nice. You know, I mean, communal food, people entertaining, kind of really reminds me of old pop festivals, like. But they're social movements of good people who are concerned, coming together to try and do good things, you know, and opposing oppression. And their concern expanded from the early years of just being on climate to being about social justice, food security, community, broader issues about transportation, deprivation, and so on and so forth, you know. So you can see that as a kind of social movement, really helping and informing people and empowering them. Another one, which is not unrelated, right. And the two actually were together at one point was the anti-flying movement, the stay grounded movement. They've become very professional, very good, actually. And I say, quite scientific as well now, in terms of their reports, and what they're doing, but also activism, you know, again, peaceful activism. And I think that they also have this really strong international element now. So moving from just being people I knew in Austria and Germany, now, translating their documents into Spanish, having online meetings with people who are fighting oppression and airport expansion - massive part of the growth economy - land grabbing, and these kinds of things in India, South America, and all over really. More generally, I think degrowth actually is also very interesting. And some of the degrowth conferences have been very good. you've got people who are academics, but you've also got lots of activists, artists, people engaged in changing their own lives, changing their communities, In Hungary, there are people there who have set up local commune and you know, Hungary has got a really authoritarian Christian right wing leader. It's very awful,And they've managed to set up for food cooperatives. They deliver their food by bicycle, They've reallycreated a supportive community for each other. I don't know if you're familiar with the ZAD in France. It was actually part of the anti-airport movement, originally. They were fighting an airport expansion, took over the land where the airport was supposed to be, which was farmland, created a community that lasted about 20 years. They had built their own houses. They had a really nice community. And I thought, well, this is the kind of thing that governments should support - this diversity, and this interest, and these well-meaning people, you know, trying to lead - and what do they do? They send in the police, and they send in the militarized security forces, and they destroy it. And they also, another thing is, they perniciously gave some of them private property rights to the land that they were on and created division. And this is a classic, right? So they create division within the movement, because some people get rights and others don't. And this is, this is also co-opting them into the system, right? We’re back to the Gramsci kind of thing, you know, you give the leaders private property rights and destroy the commune. But these things happening is really hopeful, I think. But then we've got the more radical NGOs as well, I'm, I'm partially critical of what XR was doing because they were so naive, I felt really, and I think they've had to change now. But it was also quite an interesting movement, for the wrong reasons. I think they didn't really achieve what they set out because they couldn't because it was really not achievable because they had no political analysis, and they didn't understand the structure of society they're dealing with. At the same time, I think it was really interesting that they brought back some kind of a radical element into the environmental movement that has been missing since the 70s. And because of the neoliberalisation of the environmental movement, and what we were talking about earlier, with the co-optation of the big guys, I think XR was a very valuable kind of movement, and what it did, and it also just really woke a lot of people up. That was kind of good. Of course, Fridays For Future was similar, as well. But again, my critique of Fridays for the Future was well, it's very young people, okay, but it was a politically naive movement. Capitalists are so cynical, right? They invite Greta to the Davos meeting, so she can do her little rant internationally and they can make money out of it. I mean, they invest in Futures markets, in the carbon offsetting markets, gether rant and the price of carbon offset goes up. And then they sell them and make money. On the stock exchange, they call it the Greta effect. This is how cynical these people are, you know. So I think there's a lot of hope with these kinds of things. But also, we need to be much more politically aware. This is why I think that degrowth, my position is that social ecological economics provides the theory for degrowth actually. If they want to start understanding how to get degrowth, and how to transform, then they need to have a scientific theory. And that's what could be offered here. And there's always individual action. So we're embedded in society, like we were talking about. We have our psychological issues, all of us, right. But one of the things is that we feel disempowered., We're dealing with these awful kind of problems that we get despair about, and we can't change. But there's so many little things you can do yourself, right. So I've written for 40 years with a pencil, mostly. I always like to use a pencil. I find this a very empowering thing to just have a pencil, right? Not a pen, because pens are made of plastic, and they have metal. So I tried to avoid them. You could say consequentially it's totally meaningless, right. But it's a little empowering act I can do that. And so there's lots of things of course, like give up a car and cycle and, Ulrich Brand, a political scientist here, would say political action, of course, you know, going on to protest. It's an empowering thing, joining together with others. I know a lot of young people like my students, and so on, they get into depression, despair, and stuff. I'm too old to get depressed and despair. I always felt like you should just do things, you could try and find something that's good to do.
Nandita Bajaj 1:15:37
Yes. Well, that seems like a really nice place to to end the conversation. And I especially like that you ended with the value of aligning your actions with your own values. And it is important to feel empowered within our own lives and do things that are little acts of resistance. So we appreciate those suggestions. And also, just generally the incredible depth and insights and the extensive knowledge that you've shared with us today. it's not every day that you get to hear from dissenters that like yourself, who are also working within academia, trying to change, you know, some of the structures from within without getting co-opted by those structures. and it's incredible to to have met you and have had this chance to speak with you today.
Alan Ware 1:16:30
Yeah, we really appreciate social ecological economics, bringing in the social reality of everything that we're facing, and not having such a stunted, mainstream economics view of reality that we need a true as you call it, critical realism sort of theory about what reality is and to base it in something that can be better for all of us. So thank you for that.
Clive Spash 1:16:55
You're welcome. And thank you very much for inviting me. I very much enjoyed talking with you.
Alan Ware 1:16:59
That's all for this edition of the Overpopulation Podcast. Visit populationbalance.org to learn more. To share feedback or guest recommendations write to us using the contact form on our site, or by emailing us at podcast at populationbalance.org. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate us on your favorite podcast platform and share it widely. We couldn't do this work without the support of listeners like you and hope that you will consider a one-time or a recurring donation.
Nandita Bajaj 1:17:30
Until next time, I'm Nandita Bajaj, thanking you for your interest in our work and for your efforts in helping us all shrink toward abundance.
