132 results

This article is the first of a series that offers a new paradigm for economics, the “multilevel paradigm,” using generalized Darwinism as its theoretical framework. Generalized Darwinism refers to all processes that combine the ingredients of variation, selection, and replication – not just genetic evolution – making it relevant to the cultural evolution of economic systems that are embedded in political, social, and environmental systems.
2024
Level: avancé
Rethinking the Theoretical Foundation of Economics I: The Multilevel Paradigm
Diane Perrons and Sigrid Stagl combine feminist and critical environmental economics perspectives to develop a critique of the free market growth model and offer new ideas for a more sustainable gender equitable model of development in the interests of all.
2019
Level: avancé
A Feminist Political Economy for an Inclusive and Sustainable Society
Deforestation is estimated to be responsible for about 12-29% of global greenhouse gas emissions. This essay will explore ecological economics as an alternative lens through which to approach forest conservation and the acceleration of climate change.
2018
Level: débutant
Ecological Economics: A Solution to Deforestation?
Neoclassical economics focuses on the allocation of scarce resources. Economic analysis is mainly concerned with determining the efficient allocation of resources in order to increase welfare.
Neoclassical Economics
This article explores if power dynamics in the household can be changed, and if so, how. In this context the focus is laid on government childcare policy and its various channels of possible influence.
Level: débutant
How can childcare policy affect intra-household power dynamics?
Economists like to base their theories on individual decision making. Individuals, the idea goes, have their own interests and preferences, and if we don’t include these in our theory we can’t be sure how people will react to changes in their economic circumstances and policy. While there may be social influences, in an important sense the buck stops with individuals. Understanding how individuals process information to come to decisions about their health, wealth and happiness is crucial. You can count me as someone who thinks that on the whole, this is quite a sensible view.
2020
Level: débutant
Decision by Sampling, or ‘Psychologists Reclaim Their Turf’
In this essay the authors take a look at how welfare could be provided in a degrowth society.
2019
Level: débutant
Bidding farewell to growth: How to provide welfare in a degrowth society
In this essay the author outlines the basis for embracing a post-work agenda, rooted in an emancipatory potential from the domination of waged work, which could help answer both feminist and ecological concerns with work.
2018
Level: débutant
Towards a post-work future: a necessary agenda to reconcile feminist & ecological concerns with work
Exploring Economics, an open-source e-learning platform, giving you the opportunity to discover & study a variety of economic theories, topics, and methods.
2020
Level: débutant
A Time for Precaution
How can we establish new institutions and practices in order to use fare-free public transport as a beacon for sustainable mobility and a low-carbon lifestyle? The author of this essay elaborates on how practice theory and institutional economics can help to answer this question.
2018
Level: avancé
Towards a practice of fare-free sustainability
On July 2020 ZOE-Institute published a unique platform for transformative policymaking: Sustainable Prosperity. Building on insights from new economic thinking the platform provides knowledge about ideas, arguments and procedures that support effective promotion of political change. It aims to strengthen change makers in public policy institutions, who are working on an ambitious green and just transition. As such, it provides convincing arguments and policy ideas to overcome the reliance of economic policy on GDP growth
Level: débutant
Sustainable Prosperity
The general idea of a Job Guarantee (JG) is that the government offers employment to everybody ready, willing and able to work for a living wage in the last instance as an Employer of Last Resort. The concept tackles societal needs that are not satisfied by market forces and the systemic characteristic of unemployment in capitalist societies. Being a central part of the Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), attention for the JG concept rose in recent years.
2020
Level: débutant
The Job Guarantee
In this essay, the principle of capital accumulation, as well as the idea of homo economicus as the basis of the growth model, are located and analyzed from a feminist perspective. The sufficiency approach is presented as an alternative to these two economic logics.
2018
Level: débutant
Enough! The Sufficiency Approach and the Limits of Economic Growth
This chapter discusses the role of gender in economic relations, processes, and outcomes. Gender differences in economic outcomes such as labor force participation and wages have received growing attention from economists in the last several decades – a positive and much needed development in economic thinking.
2016
Level: débutant
Illuminating the role of gender in the economy
This article reviews insights of existing literature on global care chains. A specific focus is laid on the impact that the refugee crisis has on global care chains and in turn how the crisis impacts the de-skilling of the women in the migrant workforce.
2017
Level: débutant
Global care chains, refugee crisis, and deskilling of workers
In this essay the author elaborates on the EU's perspective on the fast growing sector of the platform economy.
2019
Level: débutant
Sharing is Caring? On the EU- Narrative on Platform Economy
“Economics is the science which studies human behaviour as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses1.” This is how Lionel Robbins came to define economics in the early 1930s and there is a good chance that many of you heard a variant of this definition in your first Economics 101 lecture.
2021
Level: débutant
What is “Economics”?
This article, looks at the complex interaction between an urban economy and the vegetation within that urban area. In summary, numerous studies have found a positive link between increased vegetation and social as well as personal health. It makes a case for increasing urban vegetation as a way to benefit local economies.
2018
Level: débutant
Urban Arbonomics | The Complex Nature of Urban Vegetation
Extractivism is a development model based on exploiting and exporting raw materials. It is fundamental to reproducing entire societies, mainly in the Global South, while generating manifold dilemmas. This text situates extractivism within the broader landscape of global economic asymmetries, emphasizing the role of rents—excess revenues generated from resource extraction due to international price differentials—as a central analytical lens.
2025
Level: débutant
The Political Economy of Extractivism
This introductory text explores the political economy of water by defining the subject and examining its key issues.
2025
Level: débutant
The political economy of water
From the theoretical literature, the authors provide seven reasons to be sceptical about the occurrence of sufficient decoupling in the future. In addition to the extensive summary of the recent literature, 'decoupling debunked' provides a great introduction into the decoupling hypothesis.
2019
Level: débutant
Decoupling debunked: Evidence and arguments against green growth as a sole strategy for sustainability
Green Growth has been increasingly discussed as a solution to the socio-ecological crisis. But can economic growth be sustainable at all?
2022
Level: débutant
Is Green Growth a myth?
This workshop offers an introduction to Degrowth and Ecological Economics. It starts by surveying the socio-ecological crisis and its pseudo-solutions, and then moves to Ecological Macroeconomics as a relatively recent field of scholarship within Ecological Economics.
2021
Level: débutant
Ecological Economics and Degrowth
This report by the 'Institute for Global Prosperity' explores the hypothesis that strengthening and extending universal services is an effective way of tackling poverty and improving wellbeing for all.
2019
Level: débutant
Universal Basic Services: Theory and Practice
Institutional economics focuses on the role of social institutions in terms of laws or contracts, but also those of social norms and patterns of human behaviour that are connected to the social organisation of production, distribution and consumption in the economy.
Institutionalist Economics
In this overview paper, Laura Porak reviews the history of industrial policy in the European Union before the background of a Cultural Political Economy approach.
2023
Level: débutant
History of Industrial Policy in the EU
The article addresses the current debate on democratic economic planning and the question of how and by which instruments a post-capitalist planning system, embedded in a broader agenda of macroeconomic transformation, can be developed.
2025
Level: avancé
On Democratic Economic Planning and Macroeconomic Transformation
Ecological economics addresses one of the fundamental flaws in conventional economics--its failure to consider biophysical and social reality in its analyses and equations. Ecological Economics: Principles and Applications is an introductory-level textbook that offers a pedagogically complete examination of this dynamic new field.
2003
Level: débutant
Ecological Economics - A Workbook for Problem-Based Learning
Despite the Doha declaration of November 2001, the failure to start a new round of global trade negotiations at Seattle in December 1999 and the hostility of protesters to the trade liberalization process and growing global economic and social disparities was a wake-up call for the World Trade Organisation (WTO).
2002
Level: avancé
The WTO, Agriculture and Sustainable Development
This essay deals with the concepts of Sustainable Land Management (SLM) and Land Degradation Neutrality (LDN).
2018
Level: débutant
The importance of a Land Degradation Neutrality approach to achieving Sustainable Land Management
What are the implications of the politics of "behavioural change"? Alexander Feldmann took a closer look for you on nudging and framing and if this is a legitimate instrument being used by the state to make us behave better in terms of our carbon footprint.
2019
Level: débutant
Politics as supermarket? Or how current policy design changes the relationship between the state and its citizens
What made the false assumption that saving the economy at all cost during a pandemic so popular? This paper discusses different pathways through the COVID-19 pandemic at national and international level, and their consequences on the health of citizens and their economies.
2021
Level: débutant
How not to save the economy? The interplay of economics and health during the COVID-19 pandemic

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Ce projet est le fruit du travail des membres du réseau international pour le pluralisme en économie, dans la sphère germanophone (Netzwerk Plurale Ökonomik e.V.) et dans la sphère francophone (Rethinking Economics Switzerland / Rethinking Economics Belgium / PEPS-Économie France). Nous sommes fortement attachés à notre indépendance et à notre diversité et vos dons permettent de le rester ! 

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