Ecological Economics and the Plurality of Values
Environmental Values will celebrate Clive L. Spash’s longstanding contribution to the journal with a special issue devoted to engaging with his work. We invite contributions that seek to address and develop the questions and concerns that have animated Professor Spash’s work on value pluralism, ontology and methodology, and the policies and politics of transformation.
Professor Spash is one of the most important ecological economists of his generation. He has developed a sustained and forceful critique of the unrealistic and mono-dimensional value models of neo-classical economics by insisting that the environment is both constitutive of and limiting to the economy. His research ranges from the critique of monetary value and cost-benefit analysis, where he has developed alternative multi-dimensional and deliberative models of valuation, to the establishment of social ecological economics founded in critical realism, and, more recently, models of political and ecological-economic transformation. Spash’s work is characterised by a willingness to push the boundaries of thinking on these questions together with penetrating criticism of comfortable reformist conceptions of sustainability. Contributors are invited to take inspiration from this spirit of penetrating and fundamental critique of prevalent models of economic valuation.
Contributions might address one or more of the following topics, or any question relevant to Spash’s work:
• Motivation for environmental values: institutions, attitudes, norms, ethics
• Deliberation and plural values in public policy
• Intrinsic, rights-based and utilitarian values
• Incommensurability and the refusal of trade-offs
• The psychological and ethical meaning and content of contingent valuation
• Deliberative monetary valuation and economic values
• Compensation for environmental damages
• Future generations: discounting, equity and harm
• Social ecological economics: interdisciplinarity and the integration of knowledge
• Biodiversity conservation: economics and values
• Climate change: uncertainty, ethics and critiques of cost–benefit analysis
A full listing of Prof. Spash’s work, together with many downloadable papers, can be found
on his website.
All submissions should conform the usual Environmental Values submission guidelines.
The deadline for submissions: 1 June 2022
For further information or any queries please contact Tom Greaves: T.Greaves@uea.ac.uk