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- Nachhaltigkeit (4)
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Sustainability and Justice: Conceptual Foundations and Cases in Biodiversity and Fishery Policy
(2014)
Sustainability aims at justice in a threefold sense: intragenerational justice, intergenerational justice, and justice towards nature. However, the justification, specific content and practical implications of justice claims and obligations in the sustainability context often remain underspecified. This dissertation therefore asks: How can the concept of justice be structured systematically? How can justice be specified in the context of sustainability? Which specific problems of justice arise in sustainability policy? And what are the respective contributions of (sustainability) economics and (sustainability) ethics? The five papers of this cumulative dissertation approach these issues from different angles, working at the conceptual level and at the level of cases from biodiversity and fishery policy. In Paper 1, a formal conceptual structure of justice is developed, which lists the conceptual elements of justice conceptions: the community of justice including claim holders and claim addressees, their claims (and corresponding obligations), the judicandum (that which is to be judged as just or unjust), the informational base for the assessment, the principles of justice, and on a more practical level, the instruments of justice. By specifying these conceptual elements of justice, it is possible to analyse and compare different conceptions of justice. In Paper 2, the normative dimension of sustainability is discussed in terms of justice. Based on the identification of certain core characteristics of the concept of sustainability, we determine the specific challenges of justice in the context of sustainability along the conceptual structure of justice (from Paper 1). Inter alia, we show that sustainability calls for the integration of justice claims in the relationships with contemporaries, future humans and nature in a non-ideal context characterized by uncertainty, systemic mediation and limits. Paper 3 addresses the contribution of economics to the assessment of trade-offs between intergenerational and intragenerational justice. Economic analysis can delineate the opportunity set of politics with respect to the two justice objectives and identify the opportunity cost of attaining one justice to a higher degree. While the two justices are primary normative objectives, the criterion of efficiency - when directed at the attainment of these justice objectives - has the status of a secondary normative objective. Paper 4 constitutes a case study, reconstructing the ´biopiracy´ debate from a justice perspective. The paper links to the so called Access and Benefit-Sharing framework of the Convention on Biological Diversity, and addresses the question, which problems of justice arise regarding the utilization of genetic resources and traditional knowledge, especially if associated with patenting. It is shown that the predominant perspective of justice-in-exchange is insufficient and therefore complementary conceptions, namely of distributive justice, corrective justice and structural justice have to be taken into account. Paper 5 empirically assesses the justice notions of stakeholders in the Newfoundland fishery, building on qualitative semi-structured interviews and a combination of inductive and deductive coding. A central result is that inshore fishers are seen as the main claim holders, with a claim to participate and being listened to, and the opportunity to make a living from the fishery. Recognition, participation and distribution are all important domains of justice in the context of the Newfoundland fishery. The paper also discusses the relationship between normative theorizing and empirical justice research. Overall, this thesis integrates ideal and non-ideal normative theorizing, economic analysis, empirical justice research and hints at institutional implementation in the debate on sustainability and justice.
In my dissertation I explore conceptual and economic aspects of resilience, i.e. a system’s ability to maintain its basic functions and controls under disturbances. I provide methodological considerations on the conceptual level and general insights derived from stylized ecological-economic models. In doing so, I demonstrate how to frame resilience so as to economically evaluate and investigate it as an important property of ecological-economic systems. Is conceptual vagueness an asset or a liability? In chapter 1 I address this question by weighing arguments from philosophy of science and applying them to the concept of resilience. I first sketch the wide spectrum of resilience concepts that ranges from concise concepts to the vague perspective of “resilience thinking”. Subsequently, I set out the methodological arguments in favor and against conceptual vagueness. While traditional philosophy of science emphasizes precision and conceptual clarity as precondition for empirical science, alternative views highlight vagueness as fuel for creative and pragmatic problem-solving. Reviewing this discussion, I argue that a trade-off between vagueness and precision exists, which is to be solved differently depending on the research context. In some contexts research benefits from conceptual vagueness while in others it depends on precision. Assessing the specific example of “resilience thinking” in detail, I propose a restructuring of the conceptual framework which explicitly distinguishes descriptive and normative knowledge. Chapter 2 investigates the common assumption that the optimization problem within a simple selfprotection problem (spp) is convex. It is shown that the condition given in the literature to legitimate this assumption may have implausible consequences. Via a simple functional specification we analyze the (non-)convexity of the spp more thoroughly and find that for reasonable parameter values strict convexity may not be justified. In particular, we demonstrate numerically that full self-protection is often optimal. Neglecting these boundary solutions and analyzing only the comparative statics of interior maxima may entail misleading policy implications such as underinvestment in self-protection. Thus, we highlight the relevance of full self-protection as a policy option even for non-extreme losses. Chapter 3 starts from the observation that ecosystem resilience is often interpreted as insurance: by decreasing the probability of future drops in the provision of ecosystem services, resilience insures risk-averse ecosystem users against potential welfare losses. Using a general and stringent definition of “insurance” and a simple ecological-economic model, we derive the economic insurance value of ecosystem resilience and study how it depends on ecosystem properties, economic context, and the ecosystem user’s risk preferences. We show that (i) the insurance value of resilience is negative (positive) for low (high) levels of resilience, (ii) it increases with the level of resilience, and (iii) it is one additive component of the total economic value of resilience. Chapter 4 performs a model analysis to study the origins of limited resilience in coupled ecologicaleconomic systems. We demonstrate that under open access to ecosystems for profit-maximizing harvesting forms, the resilience properties of the system are essentially determined by consumer preferences for ecosystem services. In particular, we show that complementarity and relative importance of ecosystem services in consumption may significantly decrease the resilience of (almost) any given state of the system. We conclude that the role of consumer preferences and management institutions is not just to facilitate adaptation to, or transformation of, some natural dynamics of ecosystems. Rather, consumer preferences and management institutions are themselves important determinants of the fundamental dynamic characteristics of coupled ecological-economic systems, such as limited resilience. Chapter 5 describes how real option techniques and resilience thinking can be integrated to better understand and inform decision making around environmental risks within complex systems. Resilience thinking offers a promising framework for framing environmental risks posed through the non-linear responses of complex systems to natural and human-induced disturbance pressures. Real options techniques offer the potential to directly model such systems including consideration of the prospect that the passage of time opens new options while closing others. Examples are provided which illustrate the potential for integrated resilience and real options approaches to contribute to understanding and managing environmental risk.
This dissertation concerns the question of how economics can contribute to the analysis of trade-offs between values (or normative objectives). The analysis is illustrated for the case of policies that pursue the goal of sustainability. Methodologically, this is done by reflecting economic concepts in light of philosophical theories and using generic models to analyze trade-offs between particular values. In sum, the work shows how economics can help in analyzing the factual relationships between values by clarifying the set of feasible acts and outcomes. The first paper of this cumulative dissertation concerns the question what a general definition of efficiency with respect to normative objective implies about relationships between two values. In order to conceptualize relationships between values carefully, the analysis distinguishes instrumental from intrinsic values and discusses the question whether there is one intrinsic value (value monism) or many intrinsic values (value pluralism). Next, a small economic model is used to show that there can be different relationships between values such as win-win relationships and trade-offs in value-efficient states if there are three or more values. Further, the distinction between Pareto-efficiency (based on individual preferences) and value-efficiency (which can also include non-preference values) is used to study relationships between values. The second paper uses the definition of sustainability as inter- and intragenerational justice to discuss the relationship between these two objectives. The general aim of this paper is to discuss what economic concepts can contribute to the discussion of tradeoffs between justices. For this, a syntax of the concept of justice is employed, different relationships between justices are defined and economic concepts such as scarcity, efficiency and opportunity costs are transferred to the justice context. One result from this analysis is that there must be a trade-off between these two justices in such respective efficient outcomes. The third paper concerns an intertemporal mechanism leading to the well-known equity-efficiency trade-off in an intergenerational setting. For this, two central characteristics of intergenerational policy making are taken into account: irreversibility and ignorance (or unawareness). A pertinent example is the irreversible use of fossil fuels before and after the discovery of the effect of CO2 emissions on climate change. The trade-off between Pareto-efficiency and intergenerational equity that results from these two characteristics is shown in a model with two non-overlapping generations which use a non-renewable resource. In the model there is initial unawareness about an intergenerational externality from resource use that is only discovered after the irreversible use of the resource. A central result of the paper is the trade-off between intergenerational equity and efficiency that emerges if initially unknown sustainability problems arise after irreversible policies have been enacted. The fourth paper concerns the question what the concept of merit goods can contribute to discussions of sustainability. For this, the history of the concept is discussed, then merit goods are defined and connected to the philosophical literature on different conceptions of well-being. In the next step different challenges and opportunities of merit good arguments are discussed for the sustainability context. For example, it becomes clear that merit good arguments concern conceptions of well-being and do not directly concern the aspect of intergenerational distribution in sustainability problems.
Conflicts between intragenerational and intergenerational justice in the use of ecosystem services
(2012)
The principle of sustainability contains two objectives of justice regarding the conservation and use of ecosystems and their services: (1) global justice between different people of the present generation ("intragenerational justice"); (2) justice between people of different generations ("intergenerational justice"). International sustainability policy attaches equal normative importance to both objectives of justice. Accordingly, environmental philosophers ethically justify that people living today and people living in the future have equal rights to certain basic goods, including ecosystems and their services (e.g. Feinberg 1981, Visser’t Hooft 2007). Whereas ideal theories of sustainability and justice do not recognize interdependencies between intragenerational and intergenerational justice, conflicts in attaining the justices possibly arise in policy implementation. Identifying and preventing such conflicts is fundamental to devise an ethically legitimate, politically consistent and actually effective sustainability policy. This dissertation systematically investigates conflicts between intragenerational and intergenerational justice in the use of ecosystem services. Human wellbeing depends on the services provided by ecosystems. Yet, humans substantially degrade world’s ecosystems, and therewith cause the loss of important ecosystem services (MEA 2005: 26ff.). The idea of sustainability demands to use ecosystem services in accordance with the two objectives of intragenerational justice and intergenerational justice. Reality, however, is far from attaining these objectives: Both today’s global poor and future persons are, resp. will be, disproportionately affected by the loss of vital ecosystem services (MEA 2005: 62, 85). Especially severe affected are the rural poor who directly depend on local ecosystem services for food, income and health. The political discourse on the relationship between the objectives of intra- and intergenerational justice in the use of ecosystem services (‘justice-relationship’) is blurred. Further, the political discourse lacks a common understanding of justice in ecosystem-use and a systematic reflection on the actual ‘justice-relationship’, such as on the factors that cause conflicts between the two justices. In this dissertation, I investigate the ‘justice-relationship’ along three central questions: • What conception(s) of justice can adequately address the distribution of access rights to ecosystem services? • How must sustainability policy be designed to enhance both intragenerational and intergenerational justice in the use of ecosystem services? • (How) Can economics be helpful for characterizing and assessing trade-offs between the two justices? I approach these questions both generally and by the example of a case study, the MASIPAG farmer network in the Philippines. Methodologically, I combine a normative and a positive analysis of the relationship between intra- and intergenerational justice in the use of ecosystem services: The normative analysis serves the explication, justification and reflection of the norms underlying the ‘justice-relationship’; the positive analysis serves the description of the ‘justice-relationship’ in the sustainability discourse and in practical contexts, as well as the provision of explanations on the determinants of the ‘justice-relationship’. As methodological approach, I apply the “comprehensive multi-level approach” as developed by Baumgärtner et al. (2008) – investigating the ‘justice-relationship’ simultaneously on the three levels of (i) concept, (ii) model and (iii) case study.
Responsibility for sustainability is an action guiding concept which relates the abstract norm of sustainability with concrete action contexts. It thereby specifies what bearers of responsibility ought to do. In this thesis, I introduce the concept of responsibility to economic theory, focusing specifically on individual and governmental responsibility for sustainability. Some of the questions I examine are: how should responsibility be distributed among agents? How can agents, who are responsible for several normative aims, solve trade-offs? Do governmental policies affect individuals’ ability to assume responsibility? How can individuals efficiently induce governments to act responsibly? In Paper 1, A utilitarian notion of responsibility for sustainability, I conceptualize and formalize a utilitarian notion of responsibility for sustainability which I then relate to established normative criteria for assessing intertemporal societal choice. I show that responsibility for sustainability can be unambiguously conceptualized in economic models. Furthermore, I affirm that responsibility may provide action guidance even if the aim of sustainability is not feasible. In Paper 2, Verantwortung von Konsumenten für Nachhaltigkeit, I study consumers’ responsibility for sustainability. Particularly, I specify crucial components of this responsibility in order to analyze the relation of consumers’ private and political responsibility. I show that the responsibility for sustainability of consumers comprises three indispensable obligations of which only one concerns consumers’ consumption choices. In Paper 3, Regulation of morally responsible agents with motivation crowding, I focus on the impact of governmental policies on the motivation of an individual to assume moral responsibility. In particular, I study the regulation of a morally responsible individual with motivation crowding in the context of a negative externality. I show that combining consumption taxes with the provision of perfect information is, in many cases, superior to consumption taxes alone. In Paper 4, Endogenous Environmental Policy when Pollution is Transboundary, I examine how individuals which form lobby groups affect the determination of environmental policy when governments seek not only to maximize welfare, but simultaneous maximize support by lobby groups. More specifically, I consider the case in which two countries are linked through transboundary pollution. Environmental policies adopted by self-interested governments may be more stringent than by social welfare maximizing governments. Furthermore, due to the interaction of distortions the space of optimal policies increases: politically optimal tax rates may be too high or too low to optimally internalize the environmental externality.
This paper-based dissertation deals with the concepts of economic heterogeneity and environmental uncertainty from different perspectives, and at multiple levels of abstraction. At its core sits the observation that heterogeneity and uncertainty are deeply entangled, for there would be no uncertainty without heterogeneity of options to act regarding multiple future states of the world. At the same time, heterogeneity - in the form of diversification - has been suggested as a way to reduce uncertainty in portfolio theory (Markowitz 1952). The dissertation evolves around two research foci: (1) methodological implications of heterogeneity of scientific theories in the face of empirical data (Paper 1), and (2) two different forms of uncertainty are considered, environmental risk (Paper 2) and Knightian uncertainty (Paper 3). Paper 1 develops a new framework for model selection for the special case of fitting size distribution models to empirical data. It combines Bayesian and frequentist statistical approaches with the criterion of model microfoundation, which is to select, all other things considered being equal, the model that comes with a suitable micromodel, that explains, from the perspective of the individual constituent, the genesis of the overall size distribution. The approach is subsequently illustrated with size distribution data on commercial cattle farms in Namibia. We find that the double-Pareto lognormal distribution fits the data best. Our approach might have the potential to reconcile one of the oldest debates in current economics, i.e. the one about the best model to describe and explain the distribution of economic key variables such as income, wealth and city sizes in a country. The second paper revisits the Namibian commercial cattle farm data and uses it to put some theories from the agricultural economics literature regarding farm management under environmental risk to an empirical test. We focus on the relations between inter-annual variability in rainfall (environmental risk), risk preferences, farm size and stocking rate. We demonstrate that the Pareto distribution - which separates the distribution into two parts - is a statistically plausible description of the empirical farm size distribution when ´farm size´ is operationalized by herd size, but not by rangeland area. A statistical group comparison based on the two parts of the Pareto distribution shows that large farms are on average exposed to significantly lower environmental risk. Regarding risk preferences, we do not find any significant differences in mean risk attitude between the two branches. Our analysis confirms the central role of the stocking rate as farm management parameter, and shows that environmental risk and the farmer´s gender are key variables in explaining stocking rates in our data. Paper 3 develops a non-expected-utility approach to decision making under Knightian uncertainty which circumvents some of the conceptual problems of existing approaches. We understand Knightian uncertainty as income lotteries with known payoffs but unknown probabilities in each outcome. Based on seven axioms, we show that there uniquely (up to linear-affine transformations) exists an additive and extensive function from the set of Knightian lotteries to the real numbers that represents uncertainty preferences on the subset of lotteries with fixed positive sum of payoffs over all possible states of the world. We define the concept of uncertainty aversion such that it allows for interpersonal comparison of uncertainty attitudes. Furthermore, we propose Renyi´s (1961) generalized entropy as a one-parameter preference function, where the parameter measures the degree of uncertainty aversion. We illustrate it with a simple decision problem and compare it to other decision rules under uncertainty (maximin, maximax, Laplacian expected utility, minimum regret, Hurwicz).