prices and quantities unsustainable consumption and the global economy abstract the ecological unsustainability of current consumption patterns is now well documented one aspect of this problem which has not been sufficiently addressed is the growth of excess consumption driven by falling goods prices the index of department store prices have fallen substantially since the early 1990s in large part because global capital mobility and excess global labor supply has allowed firms to depress wages and avoid paying environmental costs consumers have responded by purchasing increasing numbers of these artificially cheap goods the example of apparel is discussed in some detail and data from other goods categories are presented these trends suggest that achieving sustainable consumption in the us is not only a technical issue but will also involve fundamental changes in the global political economy to eliminate the artificially low prices of imported goods

the european court of justice national governments and legal integration in the european union we develop a game theoretic model of the conditions under which the european court of justice can be expected to take adverse judgments against european union member governments and when the governments are likely to abide by these decisions the model generates three hypotheses first the greater the clarity of eu case law precedent the lesser the likelihood that the court will tailor its decisions to the anticipated reactions of member governments second the greater the domestic costs of an ecj ruling to a litigant government the lesser the likelihood that the litigant government will abide by it and hence the lesser the likelihood that the court will make such a ruling third the greater the activism of the ecj and the larger the number of member governments adversely affected by it the greater the likelihood that responses by litigant governments will move from individual noncompliance to coordinated retaliation through new legislation or treaty revisions these hypotheses are tested against three broad lines of case law central to ecj jurisprudence bans on agricultural imports application of principles of equal treatment of the sexes to occupational pensions and state liability for violation of eu law the empirical analysis supports our view that though influenced by legal precedent the ecj also takes into account the anticipated reactions of member governments

an institutional critique of intergovernmentalism most intergovernmentalist analyses of european integration focus on treaty bargaining among european union member governments recent articles also have examined everyday decision making through power index analysis an approach that asserts that a government s ability to influence policy is a function of all possible coalitions in the council of ministers to which it is pivotal this approach suffers from two major weaknesses first it fails to take into account the policy preferences of governments it overestimates the influence of governments holding extreme preferences and underestimates that of more centrist governments second power index analysis fails to consider the important roles of the commission of the european communities and the european parliament in legislative processes today s procedures affect the mix of agenda setting and veto power and this has systematic effects on policy outcomes if intergovernmentalism is to explain choices made during treaty rounds it must take into account these legislative dynamics

k william kapp s theory of social costs and environmental policy towards political ecological economics abstract the paper analyzes the contribution of k william kapp widely considered one of the founders of ecological economics this paper will demonstrate how k william kapp developed his theory of social costs into a framework for environmental policy development i e the basis for political ecological economics the latter provides the most comprehensive and non utilitarian alternative to the main neoclassical approaches provided by arthur pigou and ronald coase kapp determined basic human needs to be necessary values operational for policymaking via politically derived and scientifically determined social minima criteria and socio ecological indicators this rational humanism was inspired by weber s concept of substantive rationality and informed by john dewey s pragmatic instrumentalism the paper concludes that kapp s contribution is important enough to cement its place in the broader school of ecological economics

footprints in the cotton fields the industrial revolution as time space appropriation and environmental load displacement this paper offers a method for quantifying the global exchange of natural space and labor time underlying the economic success of the british textile industry in the late 18th and early 19th century using historical statistics on inputs of land and labor embodied in cotton and wool production respectively estimates are made of the amount of british land and labor that were saved by displacing fibre production to north america by comparing inputs of land and labor in the textile exports of england with those in some commodities imported from its colonial periphery and juxtaposing these data with exchange rates estimates are also made of unequal exchange using such methods it is possible to bring together the marxist concern with unequal exchanges of labor time on one hand with the more recent concern with ecological footprints on the other

marx s reproduction schemes and the environment abstract ecological economists have argued that marx s reproduction schemes are self contained circular flows that downgrade the importance of natural conditions the present paper evaluates this criticism in light of both marx s methodology and his response to quesnay s tableau economique it is shown that marx follows quesnay in clearly distinguishing monetary circular flows from material throughput and that his schemes encapsulate the dependence of capitalist production on natural conditions as developed elsewhere in capital at the same time the purpose of marx s schemes is not to theorize environmental crises but to set out the basic exchanges necessary for capitalist reproduction as a material and social class process marx s analyses of capitalist environmental crises are developed at other points in capital

elephant poaching ivory trafficking problems in sub saharan africa an application of o hara s principles of political economy this paper examines the complex social problem of african elephant decimation using a political economy approach this paper applies five principles of o hara s political economy pope historical specificity circular and cumulative causation uneven development heterogeneous agents and contradiction pope provides a practical tool for scrutinising the interdependent aspects of a problem the culture of conspicuous consumption for ivory is a key historical driver of demand yet a core integrated factor that helps explain the current crisis relates to the principle of uneven development the role of uneven development can be indirect through lack of human development causing high crime and corruption rates weak policy frameworks and conflicts in land ownership further heterogeneity of agents adds to the complexity of the networks engaged in the decimation of elephants linked to the poaching trafficking circuit of heterogeneous agents this paper identifies two specific elephant contradictions between the market forces of durable fixed capital and environment elephant capital this study contributes to the literature by analysing the interlinking cumulative processes of elephant poaching and ivory trafficking networks which previous studies in the economics literature tend to ignore

enlargement processes and distributional conflicts the politics of discriminatory membership in the european union this paper examines discriminatory membership in the european union from a game theoretical perspective i argue that discriminatory membership enables the enlargement of international organizations with heterogenous member states eu members impose discriminatory measures on new members to redistribute enlargement gains from new members to particularly negatively affected eu members as to render expansion pareto efficient the empirical findings of a probit analysis on the eu accession negotiations and outcomes of all five eu enlargement rounds support the theoretical claim the eu grants acceding states restricted membership rights if distributional conflicts emerge moreover the candidate s bargaining power and the possibility of alternative compensation schemes influence the enlargement outcomes

overcoming accumulation is a capitalist steady state economy possible abstract this article critically reviews the case for a steady state zero growth economy posing the question whether such an economy can be stable and socially just given that in the current global economy lack of growth is synonymous with crisis the sse thesis is analysed within a framework of marxian political economy concluding that a stable and just sse is possible but not feasible within the social relations of capitalism using the marxian analysis of capital accumulation the article then considers whether the reforms proposed by ecological economists can form an effective countervailing force to the drive for accumulation the conclusion is that such reforms can be successful but only in so far as they are complemented and brought to their logical conclusion by a wider attempt to transcend the capitalist relations of production

does ecological economics have a future contradiction and reinvention in the age of climate change abstract this paper addresses the role of neoclassical methodologies in ecological economics and the contradictions these methodologies pose to the field s critical founding principles we first consider robert costanza s treatment of nicholas stern s global deal and then survey climate change related articles published in this journal over the past five years this survey reveals how mainstream neoclassical methodologies dominate discourse and do so by marginalizing more critical political economy analyses this situation imperils the field s founding vision of a no growth steady state it also fails to address the related growth dynamics of capitalism without such a critical treatment the field s formal embrace of methodological pluralism actually entails an ideological empiricism that renders ecological economics theoretically incoherent this situation undermines the field s historical promise as an alternative economic paradigm ecological economics now faces a problematic future its survival in a form faithful to its founding vision will require an explicit choice to address its internal contradictions and reinvent itself in ways relevant to our contemporary context without such a choice ecological economics will likely succumb to an implicit acceptance of the hegemony of mainstream economic methodologies and their pro growth imperatives

the community trap liberal norms rhetorical action and the eastern enlargement of the european union discipline 3 i begin my search for an explanation with liberal intergovernmentalism the most prominent and promising rationalist account of the major turning points in the history of european integration this perspective accounts plausibly for most of the enlargement preferences of the member states and explains why the association of central and eastern european countries to the european community ec was the initial outcome of the bargaining process among them it fails however to account for the community s decision to go beyond association and offer these countries full membership this puzzle is solved through a sociological perspective in which enlargement is understood as the expansion of international community if the eu is conceived of

international actors on the domestic scene membership conditionality and socialization by international institutions international relations scholars increasingly debate when and how international institutions influence domestic policy this examination of ethnic politics in four baltic and east european countries during the 1990s shows how european institutions shaped domestic policy and why these institutions sometimes failed comparing traditional rational choice mechanisms such as membership conditionality with more socialization based efforts i argue that conditionality motivated most behavior changes but that socialization based efforts often guided them furthermore using new case studies statistics and counterfactual analysis i find that domestic opposition posed far greater obstacles to socialization based methods than it did to conditionality when used alone socialization based methods rarely changed behavior when they did the domestic opposition was usually low and the effect was only moderate in contrast incentive based methods such as membership conditionality were crucial in changing policy as domestic opposition grew membership conditionality was not only increasingly necessary to change behavior but it was also surprisingly effective many panel and seminar participants have offered useful comments on this work but my thanks goes in particular to michael zurn alexandra gheciu frank schimmelfennig jeff checkel robert keohane steven wilkinson robert putnam milada vachudova and the editors and anonymous reviewers of international organization i also thank princeton university press for allowing me to use material from my book ethnic politics in europe the power of norms and incentives the usual caveats apply this research was funded by a grant from the danish research academy former forskerakademiet and by travel support from the weatherhead center for international affairs at harvard

export credit subsidies export credit subsidies jacques melitz and patrick messerlin in recent years governments have increasingly resorted to export credit subsidies the major motivation for the proliferation of such schemes seems to be macroeconomic rather than microeconomic in nature the conventional argument namely that they simultaneously increase demand and improve the current account is fundamentally flawed in ignoring the second round effects on prices and the exchange rate the authors investigate whether there is a valid macroeconomic case for export credit subsidies and find that temporary measures can be useful in reducing the recessionary costs of a disinflationary program by permitting a larger appreciation of the exchange rate during the initial stages of the program they also present detailed evidence on the impact across different industries of export credits in france these are heavily concentrated on a small number of industries specifically machine tools construction metalworking aircraft ships and electrical equipment the distortionary effect on industrial structure is consequently large and any beneficial macroeconomic benefits are likely to be outweighed by the microeconomic costs the case for export credit subsidies is not persuasive

political economy of climate change ecological destruction and uneven development abstract the purpose of this paper is to analyze climate change and ecological destruction through the prism of the core general principles of political economy the paper starts with the principle of historical specificity and the various waves of climate change through successive cooler and warmer periods on planet earth including the most recent climate change escalation through the open circuit associated with the treadmill of production then we scrutinize the principle of contradiction associated with the disembedded economy social costs entropy and destructive creation the principle of uneven development is then explored through core periphery dynamics ecologically unequal exchange metabolic rift and asymmetric global in justice the principles of circular and cumulative causation ccc and uncertainty are then related to climate change dynamics through non linear transformations complex interaction of dominant variables and threshold effects climate change and ecological destruction are impacting on most areas especially the periphery earlier and more intensely than previously thought likely a political economy approach to climate change is able to enrich the analysis of ecological economics and put many critical themes in a broad context

absolute and relative gains in international relations theory the problem of absolute and relative gains divides neoliberal institutionalism and structural realism the former assumes states focus primarily on their absolute gains and emphasizes the prospects for cooperation the latter supposes states are largely concerned with relative gains and emphasizes the prospects for conflict existing work in international relations theory generally traces the differences between these two theories to different assumptions about states preferences using a simple game theoretic model this essay offers a reformulation of the problem of absolute and relative gains that links changes in the states behavior the feasibility of cooperation and especially the states concern for relative versus absolute gains explicitly to changes in the constraints facing the states many of the differences between neoliberal institutionalism and structural realism appear as special cases of the model

when do institutions bite historical institutionalism and the politics of institutional change historical institutionalist theories of endogenous change have enhanced our understanding of institutional development by providing a theoretical vocabulary for analyzing how institutions may be renegotiated over the long run by social and political actors in these theories however the causal impact of institutions themselves on political outcomes including their own change and reform is less developed a significant problem for an institutional research program this paper addresses this problem by proposing strategies that integrate historical institutionalism s insights into endogenous institutional change with a systematic analysis of the institutional conditions under which bottom up processes of gradual change are likely to be counteracted in particular the institutionalization of cultural categories and the allocation of power over the timing of reform within institutional and policy configurations are important variables for understanding how pre existing institutions may enable institutional incumbents to channel delay or prevent institutional change

the politics of common knowledge ideas and institutional change in wage bargaining domestic economic institutions change through processes of conflict and bargaining why do the strongest groups in such conflicts ever change their minds about the acceptability of institutional arrangements they once opposed drawing on the cases of ireland in 1986 87 and italy in 1989 93 this article demonstrates how the process of common knowledge creation between employers and unions changed the course of negotiations over national wage bargaining institutions common knowledge creation happens when existing institutions are in crisis the institutional experimentation that follows such crises characterized by deep uncertainty places a premium on persuasive argument the ideas most likely to serve as the basis for newly common knowledge will have analytical and distributive appeal to both unions and employers and they must be ratified in public agreements which i call common knowledge events common knowledge events establish new social facts which can change the payoffs associated with different institutional outcomes this can lead even powerful actors to accept institutions they had previously opposed the author thanks marius busemeyer mary louise culpepper keith darden orfeo fioretos archon fung peter hall andrew martin cathie jo martin victoria murillo kathleen thelen and gunnar trumbull along with three anonymous reviewers and the editors of io for comments and conversations that improved this article ben ansell and vikram siddarth provided valuable research assistance financial support from the john f kennedy school of government and the weatherhead center for international affairs at harvard university is gratefully acknowledged any remaining errors are my own

constructing the international foundations of e commerce the eu u s safe harbor arrangement much recent international relations scholarship has argued that states are unable to control e commerce so that private actors are coming to play a dominant role however this body of literature fails to account for emerging hybrid institutions in which states create general frameworks of rules which are then implemented by private actors this article examines a prominent example of such an institution the eu u s safe harbor arrangement in the field of privacy and sets out an alternative explanation of state private actor relations in the sphere of e commerce it shows how safe harbor had its origins in efforts by the european union eu and united states to mitigate problems of interdependence that threatened to undermine the principles of order on which their regulatory systems were based safe harbor reflects neither the eu nor u s approach but rather a novel blend of state and private regulation the article demonstrates the vital role of argument and persuasion in identifying safe harbor as a solution and in negotiating its particulars it finds that conventional game theoretic accounts of bargaining are unable to explain the negotiation of safe harbor and argues that constructivist approaches should pay more attention to how argument can disclose new possibilities of action

protecting democracy in europe and the americas especially since the end of the cold war the council of europe ce and the organization of american states oas have acted to protect democracy in their member states from erosion or reversals with ce policies more robust than those in the americas what explains this variation i develop an argument focus ing on institutional permeability or the extent to which those organizations are acces sible to nonstate actors permeability consists of three dimensions range of third parties allowed access level of decision making at which access is granted and transparency of io information to those third parties higher levels of permeability are likely to produce higher levels of constraint on state behavior through increas ing levels of precision and obligation in international rules and practices alterna tive explanations summarized as regional democracy norms domestic democratic lock in interests and the power of stable democracies cannot explain the variation in multilateral democracy protection more broadly this article suggests that democratizing ios by allowing ever greater access to nonstate actors is likely to result in stronger more constraining international rules even in areas where states most jealously guard their sovereignty such as the nature of their domestic political institutions

the politics of dispute settlement design explaining legalism in regional trade pacts dispute settlement mechanisms in international trade vary dramatically from one agreement to another some mechanisms are highly legalistic with standing tribunals that resemble national courts in their powers and procedures others are diplomatic requiring only that the disputing countries make a good faith effort to resolve their differences through consultations in this article i seek to account for the tremendous variation in institutional design across a set of more than sixty post 1957 regional trade pacts in contrast to accounts that emphasize the transaction costs of collective action or the functional requirements of deep integration i find that the level of legalism in each agreement is strongly related to the level of economic asymmetry in interaction with the proposed depth of liberalization among member countries

a dispositional theory of reputation costs politicians frequently turn to reputational arguments to bolster support for their proposed foreign policies yet despite the prevailing belief that domestic audiences care about reputation there is very little direct evidence that publics care about reputation costs and very little understanding of how we propose a dispositional theory of reputation costs in which citizens facing ill defined strategic situations turn to their core predispositions about foreign affairs in order to weigh competing reputational dimensions employing a diverse array of methodological tools from vignette based survey experiments to automated text analysis we show that the mass public has a taste for reputation but understands it in fundamentally different ways with hawks concerned about the negative reputational consequences of inconsistency and doves equally concerned with the negative reputational consequences of belligerence and interventionism in illustrating how reputation costs are in our heads our findings offer both good and bad news for theories of reputation in ir

prospects for a heterodox economics of the environment and sustainability this paper introduces a special issue on heterodox economics of the environment and sustainability at present humanity faces several challenges such as resource scarcity biodiversity loss and climate change and yet we would argue contributions from traditional heterodox schools of thought such as post keynesianism marxism and to a lesser extent institutionalism have had relatively little to say about them instead the economic analysis of environmental issues has been dominated by approaches inspired by neoclassical economics and latterly by ecological economics the special issue is part of an effort to stimulate more heterodox work on the environment and to explore connections between existing groups of scholars particularly between ecological and heterodox economists

disciplining trade finance the oecd export credit arrangement the salience of tariffs quotas and other import restrictions in current discussions of trade policy obscures what may well become a more significant form of government intervention subsidized export promotion over the past two decades subsidized trade finance has been one of the most widely used instruments of export promotion this article offers an historical description and a theoretical explanation for the success of the organization for economic cooperation and development oecd export credit arrangement an international regime restricting the provision of subsidized trade finance the explanation emphasizes three factors the structure of government institutions the relative power of states and the functional value of information more generally the analysis demonstrates the inherent weaknesses of monocausal explanations of international cooperation and the advantages of explanations based on a conception of international cooperation as a multistage process each stage of which may be explained by a separate theory

understanding the variations of unions litigation strategies to promote equal pay reflection on the british case despite their traditional mistrust of the use of the law and their uneasy relationship with the concept of equality british trade unions have used the law in various ways in order to advance both gender and pay equality since 1970 some trade unionists have been making use of european legislation to improve legal norms and build a strong body of case law they have developed legal expertise and detailed knowledge of the practicalities of the law and have supported numerous claims however this use of litigation has not developed consistently over time and across unions litigation has been quite controversial within the trade union movement this article seeks to investigate what are the conditions under which some trade unionists have decided to rely upon litigation to further their female members interests depending on the time period the article emphasises the crucial role these local trade unionists have played in the development of equal pay litigation the paper builds on a developmental approach that differentiates several stages or phases in which union s litigation strategies for equal pay figure differently

three s a crowd third parties and wto dispute settlement in spite of the recent failure of two referendums the drafting of a constitution for the second biggest economic power in the world the european union eu remains a major event in the history of european integration whether the constitution or a revised version of it will come into force or not several important questions emerge how did an increased number of twenty five member states reach a conclusion whereas a lower number of fifteen had failed at previous intergovernmental attempts in particular how did the constitutional convention differ from previous intergovernmental conferences igcs at which the eu exclusively bargained its treaty documents in the past how can one explain the outcomes of the convention which proposes redistribution of power and resources among twenty five or more member states this article uses the positions of the delegates of the eu s constitutional convention to examine bargaining in a setting with few formal rules the authors use theoretical insights from a spatial model and new survey data to determine the implicit voting rule used at the convention they find that the convention differed from previous igcs because the convention was governed by consensus whereas previous eu bargains on treaties had always required unanimous support the level of consensus was higher than simple majority rule but lower than unanimity since this threshold impacted who won and who lost at the convention the authors also examine the sources of bargaining power such as delegates distance to the status quo distance to the median population size and domestic constraints the results confirm several findings in the eu bargaining and two level game literature for example that actors closer to the status quo hold a stronger bargaining position and that actors from larger member states are neither more likely nor less likely to win at the negotiating table than are actors from smaller states the findings on the irrelevance of domestic constraints also indicate why the popular votes in france and the netherlands failed

the structure and dynamics of eu federalism this article analyzes european union eu politics through the lens of comparative federalism the article assesses the contributions that rationalist and constructivist approaches can make to the analysis of eu federalism focusing on two broad questions first what explains shifts in authority from the state i e member states to the federal i e eu level second what explains the degree to which the federal government constrains state discretion this article develops testable hypotheses based on the rationalist and constructivist perspectives and presents a set of initial plausibility probes the article shows that there is considerable room for dialogue between rationalist and constructivist perspectives and together they can provide a more comprehensive explanation for the dynamics of eu federalism

historical roots for ecological economics biophysical versus allocative approaches abstract a number of economists today are aware that the results of their science are more or less at variance with concrete fact and are alive to the necessity of perfecting it they go wrong rather in their choice of means to that end they try obstinately to get from their science alone the materials they know are needed for a closer approximation to fact whereas they should resort to other sciences and go into them thoroughly not just incidentally for their bearing on the given economic problem until economic science is much farther advanced economic principles are less important to the economists than the reciprocal bearings of the results of economics and the results of the other social sciences many economists are paying no attention to such interrelations for mastery of them is a long and fatiguing task requiring an extensive knowledge of facts whereas anyone with a little imagination a pen and a few reams of paper can relieve himself of a chat on principles pareto 1935 para 2022

relative gains and the pattern of international cooperation many political situations involve competitions where winning is more important than doing well in international politics this relative gains problem is widely argued to be a major impediment to cooperation under anarchy after discussing why states might seek relative gains i demonstrate that the hypothesis holds very different implications from those usually presumed relative gains do impede cooperation in the two actor case and provide an important justification for treating international anarchy as a prisoner s dilemma problem but if the initial absolute gains situation is not a prisoner s dilemma relative gains seeking is much less consequential its significance is even more attenuated with more than two competitors relative gains cannot prop up the realist critique of international cooperation theory but may affect the pattern of cooperation when a small number of states are the most central international actors

structured pluralism in ecological economics a reply to peter soderbaum s commentary abstract peter soderbaum argues in his commentary concerning my article on sustainability economics remig 2015 for more open and radical ecological economics i agree with that statement however i reject soderbaum s interpretation that my arguments foster mainstreamed ecological economics or dictatorship in my critique of sustainability economics i raised several issues that have remained unspecified and that potentially lead to unsustainable development patterns once put into practice soderbaum does not reply to these conceptual challenges of sustainability economics in this commentary i argue that structured pluralism dow 2004 is a constituent element of ecological economics i welcome peter soderbaum s proposal for a discussion about the definition of economics and suggest to rely on ronald coase s proposal to define economics as a science that studies the working of the economic system i conclude that sustainability economics in its current form is closer to neoclassical than ecological economics

explaining variation in the use of european litigation strategies european community law and british gender equality policy through the examination of one of the most successful cases of a european community ec law litigation strategy this article develops a general framework for understanding when and how the ec legal system will be successfully used by domestic groups to challenge national policy the authors show how the european legal system actually shifted the domestic balance of power in favor of equality actors allowing a previously weak domestic group to influence the united kingdom s gender equality policy at the height of conservative party rule expanding beyond the british case the article develops a series of hypotheses about when the ec legal tool is likely to be used by groups to influence national policy hypotheses that could account for cross national variation in the impact of european court of justice jurisprudence on domestic policy in areas outside of equality policy

unraveling the veil of fuzziness a thick description of sustainability economics this article provides a thick description geertz 1973 of sustainability economics baumgartner and quaas 2010a b have proposed as an alternative to ecological economics the new field of sustainability economics which has triggered various replies the purpose here is to order and to review these contributions building upon a literature review of sustainability economics the paper argues that the concept currently has more of a fuzzy and declamatory character the rhetoric mccloskey 1998 of sustainability economics contains general issues of sustainability economics externalities and the capability approach the article argues that it is currently not clear how the solutions for science and policy proposed by sustainability economics differ from those of ecological economics efforts should be directed towards further development of the theory and the operationalization of sustainability principles the systemic view of co evolutionary development social learning and sustainability economics normative underpinning merits more consideration in the debate about sustainability economics