Creating a Sustainable Economy (An Institutional and Evolutionary Approach to Environmental Policy)

This book is designed for those scholars, students, policy-makers – or just curious readers – who are looking for heterodox thinking on the issue of environmental economics and policy. Contributions to this book draw on multiple streams of institutional and evolutionary economics and help build an approach to environmental policy that radically diverges from mainstream prescriptions. Institutions and technologies – and not only markets – are at the heart of a systemic and dynamic analysis of those structural changes which are needed to create a sustainable economy. Actors for change – and their ability to influence politics and policy – are explicitly taken into consideration. These issues are analyzed from different viewpoints by contributors to the book: some focus on behavior and institutions, others analyze the interaction of economic and technological dynamics; some provide sectoral case studies and others have the ambition to provide the reader with an overall picture. But all authors view environmental policy as a combination of actions that can trigger – and make viable – those structural changes which are needed to reach sustainability.