Political Ecology and Ecological Marxism as critical approaches to the relationship between economic development and the environment

Abstract

In this article, we propose a contribution to the discussion about the controversies between the dominant and heterodox economic approaches regarding the relationship between economic development and environmental problems. We will approach this question through a general characterization of the relationship amid the economic development programs, implicit in the orthodox tradition of Environmental Economics, and in heterodox traditions such as Political Ecology and Ecological Marxism. We critically characterize the general features of the Environmental Economy approach that supports the market’s capacity to operate as an efficient allocator of resources and as a self-regulator of the economic cycle, postulating a program of sustainable economic development with a productive nature. In contrast to Environmental Economics, Political Ecology and Ecological Marxism promote the questioning of the mode of production and consumption, of the relations of production and power, and of political decisions as a way to understand the link between society and economy, and the environmental deterioration that leads to economic and ecological crises. Political Ecology offers tools to question the sustainability of the productivity-based development paradigm and helps in understanding that the consequences of environmental deterioration are unevenly distributed among the different sectors of society. Ecological Marxism, for its part, offers a look that allows us to understand the way the abstract conditioning factors, characteristic of the capitalist mode of production as the logic of profit maximization, private ownership of the means of production, and wage labor, are linked to specific conditions as the economic crisis and the environment predation. Ecosocialism has a philosophy that lies in Marxism but divests itself of its productivist past to question the idea of development. Instead, it proposes the philosophy of sumak kausay (good living), which builds a new ethic of coexistence between production, consumption, and nature.