Firstly, the field tended to attract different kinds of
socio-economists with a background in institutional,
evolutionary and Marxian economics, political economy,
economic sociology, economics of innovation
etc. Neoclassical economists interested in the environment
already had the chance to organize in AERE
(Association of Environmental and Resource Economists)
and EAERE. These organizations had frequent
conferences and related journals, and as mentioned,
only few neoclassical economists at the time were
really interested in transdisciplinary work. For socioeconomists
the situation was different, particularly in
Europe. In several socio-economic organizations
environmental issues surfaced in the beginning of
the 1990s, but they tended to disappear again or to be
given low priority. For instance, the European
Association for Evolutionary and Political Economy
(EAEPE) held a conference in Barcelona in 1993
highlighting the topic of growth and the environment
(based, partly, on contributions from some of the
persons who were also active in ecological economics,
Joan Martinez-Alier, Jan van der Straaten and
Peter Sfderbaum), but the issue then died out again. A
research group on the environment was re-established
in EAEPE, but the conferences did not, and still do
not, reflect much activity in this field. In the Society
for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (SASE)
environmental issues were relatively visible in the
beginning of the 1990s, not least because of Beat
Burgenmeier’s efforts, but also here the environment
was overtaken by other issues—the present list of
research groups in SASE does not mention the
environment. The Association for Social Economics
(ASE) has been, and still is, a meeting place for
environmentally interested socio-economists, mostly
American, but also a few Europeans. Georgescu-
Roegen was involved in this association and he
published in their journal, Review of Social Economy.
This journal was, and is, an outlet for papers on the
environment, and the meetings had sessions on the
environment, although the main issues were income
distribution, critique of neoclassical economics etc.
(however, the call for papers for the 2004 World
Congress does not mention the environment). Another
mainly American based association, the Association
For Evolutionary Economics (AFEE), which publishes
the Journal of Economic Issues, has also taken
some interest in the environment. The association
organizes the heirs of American institutional economics,
and part of this group are real technological
utopians who think that technology will solve all
problems, whereas the other part share the basic ideas
of ecological economics, for instance represented by
Jim Swaney (Gowdy, personal communication). Some
Europeans (e.g. Peter Sfderbaum) found their way to
the mainly American based associations; here, the
environment could be discussed; however, with the
establishment of ecological economics, this field
became an obvious choice for European socioeconomists
with an environmental interest. This
tended to create a self-fuelling process, as the socioeconomists
did not then spend much time in
strengthening the position of environmental issues in
the socio-economic associations, such as EAEPE,
which, as a result, did not become more attractive for
environmentally interested researchers, and so on.
In the beginning of the 1990s, a peculiar occasion
brought together some of the socio-economists who
became active in ecological economics. Two Romanians,
the Milan gas-tycoon J.C. Dragan and M.C.
Demetrescu, an academic in management, wanted to
see their compatriot, N. Georgescu-Roegen, get the
Nobel Prize in economics (Dragan and Demetrescu,
1991). To support this claim they wanted to initiate
an Association for Bioeconomics and asked some of
the admirers of Georgescu’s theories to help them in
this venture—Joan Martinez-Alier and Eberhard
Seifert. The association held its first conference in
1991, in Dragan’s palace in Rome. Martinez-Alier
and Seifert used such patronage to gather people
interested in Georgescu’s work, and several of these
people, who were or became ecological economists
met there for the first time, for example, John
Gowdy, Kozo Mayumi, Kanchan Chopra, Fritz
Hinterberger, Martin O’Connor (and myself). Herman
Daly was invited, but did not come, as he had
some doubts about the quality of the work that
Dragan and Demetrescu were doing. The small
conference was highly interesting, but the association
was unusual with a self-appointed board. A later
conference followed at Dragan’s summer residence
270 I. Rbpke / Ecological Economics 55 (2005) 262–290
on Mallorca. The death of Georgescu put an end to
the initiative, and the efforts of several of the people
involved were then concentrated in ISEE (papers
from the conferences are published in Martinez-Alier
and Seifert, 1993; Dragan et al., 1997).
The socio-economists who were attracted to
ecological economics had an obvious interest in
strengthening the socio-economic perspectives
inside the society, maintaining the idea that the
economy is embedded in society and culture and
that this should influence the analysis of environmental
issues. With the intention of promoting the
socio-economic agenda, a workshop was organized
at the Wuppertal Institute in 1995 (by a group
composed of Fritz Hinterberger, Jan van der
Straaten, Michael Jacobs, Joan Martinez-Alier, and
myself), resulting in a call for socio-ecological
economics in the ISEE newsletter (Jacobs, 1996).
When the European Society for Ecological Economics
was established shortly afterwards (inaugural
conference in 1996), the socio-economic
influence was relatively strong.