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EDITORIAL 

 

Ecology, Economy and Society–the INSEE Journal 
 

Kanchan Chopra  
 
As the Indian Society for Ecological Economics (INSEE) launches the 
journal Ecology, Economy and Society, my mind goes back to a workshop on 
‘interdisciplinarity’ it organized in 2001. Speakers concentrated on ‘the 
divide between the natural and the social sciences’ and ‘the bigger divide 
within the social sciences’. In the years since then, one wonders whether the 
two divides have been widened or reduced. Undoubtedly, a great deal has 
been added to the understanding and literature on environmental issues. 
However, this has happened in many diverse ways—so diverse, indeed, that 
one can identify several ‘academic worlds’, each laying a claim to being the 
‘most appropriate’ way of bridging the two divides referred to above. Each 
of these academic worlds speaks to different aspects of the same issues and 
in different ways. Some even attempt to craft a ‘common language’ which 
could bridge the divide, both within and across the two sets of disciplines. 

Studies focusing on the ‘environmentalism of the poor’ adopt a political 
and social ecology perspective and are connected by a focus on equity. The 
study of environmental justice movements in Latin America and other parts 
of the developing world proves amply that the distribution of benefits from 
resource extraction and use is skewed. Justice and equity as the keystones of 
development are indeed a powerful metaphor to depend on. One cannot, 
however, help wonder: ‘How important is the environmental inequity in the 
landscape of multiple and overlapping disparities in South Asia or, indeed, 
in the developing world?’ And can that be the only overwhelming reason to 
look at ecology and society? 

                                                        
 Coordinating Editor (2017–18). Former Director and Professor, Institute of Economic 
Growth, University Enclave, North Campus, Delhi 110007; choprakanchan14@gmail.com 

Copyright © Chopra 2018. Released under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 
4.0 International licence (CC BY-NC 4.0) by the author. 

Published by Indian Society for Ecological Economics (INSEE), c/o Institute of Economic 
Growth, University Enclave, North Campus, Delhi 110007. 

ISSN: 2581-6152 (print); 2581-6101 (web). 

DOI: https://doi.org/10.37773/ees.v1i1.3  

https://doi.org/10.37773/ees.v1i1.3


Ecology, Economy and Society–the INSEE Journal [2] 

The understanding of natural scientists begins from another vantage point. 
They maintain that an overshoot in the use of the earth’s resources has 
occurred in several areas where our planet has crossed the ‘safe operating 
space for humanity’. They focus on physical boundaries crossed at the 
global level. Ecologists, geographers, and natural scientists have developed 
methodologies to examine these. Ecological footprint studies, geographic 
information systems (GIS) using satellite-generated data, and vegetative 
index studies help us to see how our forests, wetlands, and cities are 
changing. These constitute another strand of work, and another 
methodology for looking at linkages between ecology, the environment, and 
society. But individual nations and governments need to understand what 
this means for them. Which are the ecosystems that a nation needs to 
protect? As developing South Asian countries, where have we crossed the 
limits of irreversibility?  

And then there is ‘environmental economics’—which, in a sense, looms 
large in its attempt to explain environmental issues and influence policy. 
Using the powerful quantitative techniques and metaphors of its mother 
science ‘economics’, it has evolved at a phenomenal rate in the past few 
decades. It uses the tools of mathematical modelling and econometrics in 
intellectually seductive ways. With modelling as a common tool, it has 
found ways to develop interdisciplinarity with inputs from the natural 
sciences. Other social sciences, meanwhile, question the basic paradigm of 
‘homo economicus’, on which a number of its results are contingent.  

Parallelly, ‘ecological economics’ in its pristine form sees biophysical 
processes as of the essence, and takes on mainstream economics, but not in 
a decidedly successful manner yet. It views economic systems as parts of a 
larger ecosystem, which it conceives of as the sum total of the physical 
world and as governed by the laws of thermodynamics. But missing from 
this approach is human behaviour and its levers, as also the inequity in 
distribution of power and wealth. 

With evolutionary biology and the learning from non-human species 
stepping in, lessons on the drivers of human behaviour emerge. A very 
compelling related development looks at economic and ecological systems 
as ‘complex adaptive systems’. In economics as well as in nature, individual 
agents interact with each other through competition, exploitation, and 
cooperation. Mathematics is sometimes used as a tool to analyse outcomes, 
with concepts such as thresholds, tipping points, and resilience providing 
depth to the analysis. These built bridges of a kind more academic than 
policy-enlightening. From the perspective of political science and sociology, 
scholars attempting to study communities, and how they manage their 
resources, initiated the literature on the links with diverse institutions 



[3] Kanchan Chopra 

governing behaviour. These constitute another reaching out within the 
social sciences, leading to the understanding that institutional economics is 
indeed the economics relevant for the environment. 

This new journal, in its invited and contributed sections, aims to highlight 
and provide examples of each of these diverse approaches to the study of 
the links between ecology, economy, and society. We choose to do so by 
attempting to publish, in each issue, representative papers and contributions 
belonging to as many of the genres mentioned above as possible. It is 
hoped that the community of scholars working on the environment will 
read and ponder over alternative ways of looking at the issues they study. 
This will constitute one small step towards bringing about a more pluralistic 
understanding of the challenges that our planet earth faces in the twenty-
first century and, perhaps the ways we can confront these challenges. 


