Environment and sustainability

This chapter reviews socio-economic research on the environment and sustainability. The chapter first explores core aspects of socio-economics, examines how socio-economics has related to the agenda of research on the environment, and assesses how socio-economic research on the environment became institutionalized. We consider that the environment has not been high on the agenda of the socio-economic research community but that there is a substantial amount of socio-economic research on the environment in the ecological economics and other research communities. The chapter then examines the research on institutional sources of environmental problems on monetary valuation and environmental decision-making as two areas where socio-economics has had a particularly strong influence. The chapter concludes that the acknowledgement in these areas of research of ecological and social embeddedness has given rise to a research agenda for ‘socio-ecological economics’. Sustainable consumption and global environmental change are already important areas of research for it. But ecological macroeconomics is also needed to formulate coordinated responses to multiple crises such as economic downturn, climate change and loss of biodiversity. There are signs that it is emerging in debates on steady-state economy, de-growth, and institutional changes in the labor market and the financial sector