The socio-economists were not the only group to
be attracted. The second trend was the attraction of
mainstream environmental and resource economists,
particularly in the latter half of the 1990s. The
mainstream economists were there from the beginning,
first of all David Pearce, who had written
papers that were unusual for environmental economists
(Common and Pearce, 1973; Pearce, 1987),
but he more or less withdrew when he became
absorbed in the establishment of the Blueprintprojects
in Britain (Pearce et al., 1989). The
mainstream economists were not central to the
running of the society during most of the 1990s,
arranging the conferences etc. (except for the few
who served as referees for the journal); however,
they became increasingly visible in the journal,
especially when the number of issues was increased
from 1994. This is a consequence of the obvious
fact that the number of mainstream economists is
much larger than the number of economists from
heterodox traditions. Furthermore, the 1990s witnessed
an increasing pressure to publish internationally:
while dpublish or perishT had been well
known at American universities for some time, also
for the social sciences, the publication pressure had
a tremendous effect in Europe, and environmental
economists were, too, looking for publication outlets,
particularly journals where a paper would be
accepted with relative ease. As Ecological Economics
proved to be a successful journal, it was an
obvious choice, as it was difficult to get into the
hard-core economics journals. Paradoxically, the
mainstream economists were also quite numerous
at the ESEE inaugural conference that was arranged
by researchers with a more socio-economic orientation.
This, however, did not prevent David Pearce
from coming under heavy fire from the audience
when he suggested that ecological economics was
just a part of environmental economics.
The establishment of the Beijer Institute also
became an important factor in attracting mainstream
economists to ecological economics, so the story
will be summarized briefly (based on drafts for the
ten-year Anniversary book and AM. and B.-O.
Jansson, personal communication). In 1974 the
Swedish financier Kjell Beijer announced to the
secretary of The Royal Swedish Academy of
Sciences (a self-elective body of academics) that
he was willing to make a substantial donation to the
environmental cause. This resulted in the formation
of the first Beijer Institute, The International
Institute for Energy, Resources and the Human
Environment, which grew successfully and created
branches in different countries. When in 1988, in
the wake of the Brundtland Report, the Swedish
government wanted to strengthen its environmental
efforts, the state-owned Stockholm Environment
Institute was founded, and this institute simply took
over the personnel and tasks from the Beijer
Institute. The Beijer Foundation was willing to
sponsor a second institute, if the Academy could
suggest a new, suitable purpose. One of several
suggestions came from the academy members
Bengt-Owe Jansson and Karl-Gfran M7ler (in
cooperation with AnnMari Jansson and Karl-Erik
Eriksson) and had the provisional title dIntegration
of Ecological and Economic SystemsT. The proposal
emphasized the seriousness of global environmental
problems and the need to analyse the factors
causing them—the economic and social processes
of our society. To meet the challenge of creating the
I. Rbpke / Ecological Economics 55 (2005) 262–290 271
basis for a more sustainable system, including a fair
distribution between generations and countries, a
transdisciplinary systems approach was suggested as
being absolutely necessary. In 1990 it was decided
to support this proposal and to establish the second
Beijer Institute with the name The Beijer International
Institute for Ecological Economics.
Among the members of the first board were Partha
Dasgupta, Herman Daly, Paul Ehrlich, Buzz Holling,
David Pearce, Thomas Zylicz, and the two proposers,
with M7ler as the Director of the Institute. The first
two research programmes were headed by Charles
Perrings (the economy of biodiversity) and Bob
Costanza (the interaction between complex ecological
and economic systems). In 1991 Carl Folke became
deputy director of the institute. Bengt-Owe Jansson
had suggested including Daly on the board, as he was
very impressed by Daly’s approach and wanted him to
influence the development of the institute. However,
among mainstream environmental and resource economists
like Dasgupta and M7ler, Daly was an
outsider, and historically he had sided against
Dasgupta and M7ler in the 1970’s debate on the
limits to growth. Dasgupta chaired the board, and
some of his decisions made Daly so angry that he bgot
disgusted with the whole thingQ and finally decided to
resign (Daly, Personal communication). Looking
back, there was some inconsistency in B-O. Jansson’s
aims: on the one hand, he wanted to promote
cooperation with powerful mainstream economists,
as the environmentalist cause could be strengthened
enormously by support from such influential persons
(cf. the concluding section in Rbpke, 2004), and on
the other hand, he would like to see Daly’s perspective
influence the work, and, in several respects, Daly’s
ideas are basically at odds with mainstream neoclassical
thinking. As the combination did not
succeed, the Beijer Institute concentrated on cooperation
between ecologists and mainstream economists,
and the transdisciplinary work had a strong emphasis
on modelling the interrelationships between ecological
and economic systems. This cooperation was
and is facilitated by the common language of
modelling and common understandings regarding
scientific methods and criteria for what counts as
scientific work.
The transdisciplinary cooperation between ecologists
and mainstream economists was also facilitated
by the changes that occurred in environmental
economics during the 1990s. Whereas the dominant
topics from the mid-1970s and throughout the
1980s had been valuation and economic instruments,
the Brundtland Report sparked an interest in
the sustainability concept and a revival of some
earlier contributions that could be useful in the new
debate (e.g. Ciriacy-Wantrup’s dsafe minimum standardT
approach (1952); see Pearce, 2002 on the
changes in environmental economics). The discussions
that were the background of ecological
economics came to be reflected in the development
of environmental economics; therefore, some considered
ecological economics to be a special branch
of environmental economics—the branch dealing
with the relations between the economy and the
ecosystems and with a focus on the life-support
systems. This way of seeing things became all the
more tempting, as ecological economics turned out
to be a success: the membership rose quickly, the
conferences had many participants, and the journal
had many subscribers (see Section 7). As the field
appealed to a much broader group than environmental
economics, the following was higher. As the concept
of ecological economics became successful, it became
an interesting concept to appropriate and define—just
as the concept of sustainability, on a much larger
scale, became a subject of controversy. It is worthwhile
capturing the ownership of such a concept, as
the definition impacts on real politics and on power in
academia. This was Daly’s worry in relation to the
dominance of mainstream economists at the Beijer
Institute: bI felt it was a kind of take-over—here is
something called ecological economics, it is beginning
to get a little following, it might get in the way
some day, let’s just take it overQ.