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REPORT 
 

A Report on the Fifteenth Conference of International 
Society for Ecological Economics  
 

Rajeswari S. Raina  
 
The 15th Conference of the International Society for Ecological Economics 
(ISEE) on “Ecological Economics and Socio-ecological Movements: 
Science, Policy and Challenges to Global Processes in a Troubled World” 
turned out to be as intellectually engaging and academically challenging as 
the title promised. Following the revision of ISEE’s mission statement1 in 
July 2017, this was the first ISEE conference that formally invited social 
movements and created a platform for academic and policy actors to 
dialogue with communities and movements. The interactions conclusively 
established the role and voice of communities and movements in 
understanding the interfaces between ‘nature’s household’ (ecosystems) and 
‘humanity’s household’ (the economy). They highlighted the plurality of 
frameworks available to understand nature and society, and the economy as 
a significant sub-component of society.  

The success of the conference, despite some inconvenience caused by the 
multiple venues across the captivating city centre of Puebla, was due to the 
perseverance of the organizers, David Barkin and Clovis Cavalcanti. They 
had to confront and overcome some serious financial and organizational 
hurdles in the build-up to the conference.  

The conference had set out 12 major themes to address the challenges to 
global processes in our troubled world. Most importantly, it made a 
significant effort for cross-fertilization of ideologies, ideas, methods and 

 
 Professor, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Shiv Nadar University, NH91, Tehsil 
Dadri, Gautam Buddha Nagar, Greater Noida, Uttar Pradesh 201314; 
rajeswari.raina@snu.edu.in 

Copyright © Raina 2019. 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.v2i1.67  

1 http://www.isecoeco.org/about/cross-discipline-approach/ 

https://doi.org/10.37773/ees.v2i1.67
http://www.isecoeco.org/about/cross-discipline-approach/


Ecology, Economy and Society–the INSEE Journal [170] 

metrics of ecological economics, political ecology, ethnoecology, 
agroecology and energy systems. Some themes, academically more closely 
linked with ecological economics, like ecosystem services, valuation 
languages, tools of measurement and policy instruments, legal and social 
processes, multi-criteria analysis (theme 9), food security/sovereignty, and 
rural-urban transitions (theme 4), globally diverse inequities, social and 
environmental conflicts, environmental and climate justice, and ecological 
debt (theme 6), trans-disciplinary responses to socio-ecological contexts 
(theme 1), and energy transitions, climate analysis and policies (theme 10) 
were well represented. But the fate of several other themes central to the 
conference call for cross-fertilization of ideas and learning from and with 
communities was not the same. Though, the parallel sessions on some of 
these themes like social metabolism - evolving relationships between society 
and the planet (theme 5), and ecological macroeconomics: prosperity 
without growth (theme 7) did witness cross-fertilization between the usual 
silos of academic expertise and field-based community knowledge systems. 
A key debate in theme 5, was about the real biophysical and economic 
meanings of work and livelihoods that coevolve with ecosystems. Another 
debate in theme 7 was about the meanings and measures of ‘good life’, the 
nature of the state and regulatory authorities as well as legal institutions in 
contexts where economic growth for development is still sacrosanct across 
diverse political ideologies.   

For many of us from INSEE and the global South, the three highlights of 
the conference were: 

1. The first plenary session featuring community voices, indigenous 
concerns and solutions, which powerfully and convincingly articulated 
the need for ecological economics to work with and learn from 
communities;  

2. A session of discussion on books, one featuring celebrated ecological 
economists on “TEEB (The Economics of Ecosystems and 
Biodiversity) for agriculture and food”, and two new books on “Post-
growth thinking in India” and “De la protesta a la propuesta”, where it 
became obvious that ecological economics would be forced to confront 
some tough choices in the coming decade; 

3. The Kenneth Boulding prize award speech by Inge Roepke, recalling 
Boulding’s spaceship earth which appeared in the 1960s, and asking the 
ecological economics community to be more creative, producing more 
transformative thought pieces (and not incremental square knowledge 
pegs for diversely shaped holes).  



[171] Rajeswari S. Raina 

 

Tying neatly and firmly into the theme of the conference, these three 
highlights underscore the demand for ecological economics to work more 
on ‘how we know’. These highlights also bring us this larger concern about 
policies and practices within ecological economics. If the discipline is to 
contribute to sustainability, it needs to create more institutions and 
experiments designed for empirical adequacy and learning capacities in 
communities (in the fields, labs and administrative structures), and not just 
work towards universal generalizations and publications for citations.   

The agenda to discuss ‘science’ and the scientific basis of many methods 
and measures, and actors (experts and policymakers), we consider critical 
for decision-making, was the least manifest in the conference. Perhaps this 
reflects the fate of ecological economics, which unquestioningly accepts 
scientific facts. At the conference, some questions about the legitimacy of 
currently institutionalized frameworks of science-policy relationships, and 
what qualifies in the mainstream as expertise or scientific disciplinary 
authority with social approval, were left unanswered. This lacuna continues 
to gnaw at the very core of ecological economics, despite the conference 
call that had specifically mentioned science as a global process to address 
our troubled world.    

The key takeaway of this conference was that ecological economics, an 
inter-disciplinary knowledge formation integrating ecological sciences with 
values, behaviours, cultural practices, institutions, and social dynamics, has 
not, thus far, made attempts to engage with the multiple actors and  in 
diverse forms of knowledge. Be it the processes of valuation of ecosystems, 
pricing mechanisms, or production policies, the ways in which scientific 
evidence ‘speaks truth to power’, the social construction of technology and 
science, or the coevolution of community-led local knowledge systems, 
ecological economics has the mandate to address the contents of and 
interactions between knowledge forms in ecosystems, societies and 
economies. Today, when the question about ‘how we know what we know,’ 
is being asked by all nine environmental social sciences (ranging from 
environmental history and cultural ecology to political ecology), this 
conference made it obvious that ecological economics has to step up and 
face this question as a global challenge. 

That ecological economics and the other environmental social sciences 
need a different grammar to engage with community-based knowledge was 
evident in the discussions (in themes 2,7 and 12). There are opportunities 
offered by many socio-ecological movements like La Via Campesina or the 
Solidarity Economy. The alternative macroeconomics, political and 
institutional/legal concepts in these movements are forms of knowledge, 
integrated across knowledge-policy-practice continuums. These, therefore, 



Ecology, Economy and Society–the INSEE Journal [172] 

make it important for ecological economics to engage with the critical voice 
of science and its ability to constantly renew itself, enliven disciplines and 
engage meaningfully with several other knowledge systems. But this, and 
the capacity of socio-ecological movements and the environmental social 
sciences to create the opportunity for diverse forms of knowledge to renew 
themselves, and change meanings and practices in daily life, may have to 
wait till the next Conference of the ISEE! 

 


