Rethinking Economics in a Finite World: practical Applications of Social Metabolism
Classical approaches to economic theory are built on a fatal omission: that of the material cost of the extraction and disposal of resources and the environmental impacts that come with them. When focusing on the relationship between production and consumption, classical economists are forgetting sources, sinks, and the whole infrastructure needed to condition fluxes. Social and socio-ecological metabolic approaches allow us to understand economic processes more comprehensively than an analysis in monetary terms. Understanding the economy as embedded in a web of material and social relationships that are constrained by the boundaries of the environment, such approaches can account for the material footprint of all of these exchanges, from extraction to transformation and disposal.
What can these approaches contribute to social transformations? What are the limitations we have due to ecological limits? What underlying patterns can be identified at different levels of analysis? What scale is appropriate for such methods?
After exploring the foundational concepts of social metabolism and how it can be applied to sustainability issues in our 12th Pathways Forum, we will focus here on its applications at various scales and for various uses. We will be looking into what it means to weigh cities, how we can use material footprints to assess transition scenarios, and how social metabolic approaches uncover unequal ecological exchanges on a global level.
Speakers
Sabines Barles, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne
Cristina Madrid Lopez, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
Register here
The Pathways Forum is a bi-monthly online event where researchers from diverse disciplines who engage, or want to engage, with societal actors in processes of adaptive learning to design, implement, and evaluate pathways to sustainability get a chance to reflect on concepts and theories of change, and discuss the practical implications of sustainability science and transdisciplinarity for research practices. Through this webinar series, the Pathways Initiative aims to develop and support agenda-setting, synthesis and capacity building around pathways for sustainability.
