When economists and ecologists meet on Ecological Economics: two science paths around two interdisciplinary concepts

International audienceEcological economics essentially grew out of economists working in the environmental field and growing dissatisfied with the way that standard economics saw interactions between nature and societies and ecologists anxious to take human activities (including economic) into account in a much more direct way, within the dynamic of the ecosystems on which they depend. This clearly inscribed the new field of ecological economics within an interdisciplinary and even transdisciplinary perspective. In order to try to provide some thoughts on the evolution of this trend and the relationship between economists and ecologists, we have chosen to focus on two items 1 that are undoubtedly among the achievements of ecological economics, although their mobilization is far from uniform among the authors who make use of them: coevolution and ecosystem services. In order to do so, the itinerary of two authors recognized in the field of ecological economics will be examined: Richard B. Norgaard, whose work on the coevolutionary paradigm (Norgaard, 1994) is recognized as one of the foundations of ecological economics (Munda, 1997); Robert Costanza, who initiated work on the monetary valuation of ecosystem services 1 For the moment, we would like to use the generic term for the subject. We shall see later that these subjects may be alternatively (and often also simultaneously) used as metaphors, concepts, and instruments of public policy. 2 (Costanza et al., 1997) that is a marker in the field of ecological economics. What unites these two authors is a manifest interest in the work coming out of systems analysis in the 1970s-as we shall see, that interest ultimately led to fairly contrasting visions of the field of ecological economics

Food Sharing Initiatives and Food Democracy: Practice and Policy in Three European Cities

Calls for greater food democracy in Europe have emerged as the limitations of urban food systems dominated by commercial organisations are documented, but little attention has been paid to how policy arrangements affect attempts to transition to more democratic food futures. This article examines food sharing initiatives - increasingly facilitated by the use of information and communication technologies - as a potential means to enhance urban food democracy, and explores the role of policy in shaping those practices in three European capital cities: Berlin, London, and Dublin. We pose two related questions: To what extent are diverse food sharing initiatives exemplars of food democracy, and to what extent do policy arrangements affect food sharing practices and the nature of any food democracy they might embody? Our empirical evidence demonstrates where the goals and impacts of food sharing initiatives align with key dimensions of food democracy. We also consider how food sharing initiatives - and any food democracy dimensions that they support - are affected by the policy environment in which they operate. The food sharing initiatives examined revealed to be agents of pro-democratic change, at least within the boundaries of their spheres of influence, despite policies rarely having their activities and aspirations in mind

Sustainable development: An overview of economic proposals

L’objectif assigné d’un développement soutenable donne lieu à des multiples interprétations. Nous proposons de dresser un panorama des propositions économiques en la matière. Nous avons réuni pour ce faire trois ensembles de travaux: le premier, qui exprime le point de vue de la théorie économique dominante, met en avant l’idée d’une croissance durable comme condition nécessaire et suffisante pour accéder à un développement soutenable; le deuxième, plus inspiré par une pensée des limites, cherche à élaborer des contraintes socio-environnementales à l’intérieur desquelles le développement économique doit se poursuivre; le troisième, marqué par les expériences du Tiers Monde, met l’accent sur les inégalités sociales et s’interroge sur le sens de la notion de développement.The objective of sustainable development is open to many different interpretations. This article provides a comprehensive overview of the economic proposals related to sustainability through three bodies of work: the first, describing the point of view presented by the leading economic theory, puts forward the idea of sustainable growth as a necessary and sufficient condition to attain sustainable development; the second, inspired by the notion of limits, attempts to establish socio-environmental constraints within which economic development should take place; the third, addressing Third World conditions, focuses on social inequalities and questions the meaning of the development concept

Le développement soutenable: un sujet controverse chez les économistes

The objective of sustainable development is translated in very different ways. We propose a panorama of economic proposals related to sustainability. This one is setting on three groups of theoretical works: the first one, which is the point of view of mainstream economics, brings forward the idea of sustainablegrowth as a necessary and sufficient condition to have a sustainable development; the second, more conscious of physical limits, try to elaborate socio-environmental constraints, inside of which economicdevelopment must go on; the third one, influenced by third world experiences, insists on social inequalities and question the sense of the notion of development.O objetivo atribuído a um desenvolvimento sustentável significa interpretá-lo de diversas maneiras.Propomos o desenho de um conjunto de enunciados econômicos sobre o tema. Para tanto, reunimos três conjuntos de trabalhos: o primeiro expressa o ponto de vista da teoria econômica dominante, evidenciando a idéia de um crescimento sustentado como condição necessária e suficiente para acessar a umdesenvolvimento sustentável; o segundo, mais inspirado pelo pensamento dos limites, busca apontar restrições socioambientais, em cujo interior deve-se perseguir o desenvolvimento econômico; o terceiro, marcado pelas experiências do Terceiro Mundo, acentua as desigualdades sociais e questiona o sentido da noção de desenvolvimento.                RÉSUMÉL’objectif assigné d’un développement soutenable donne lieu à des multiples interprétations. Nous proposons de dresser un panorama des propositions économiques en la matière. Nous avons réuni pour ce faire trois ensembles de travaux: le premier, qui exprime le point de vue de la théorie économique dominante, met en avant l’idée d’une croissance durable comme condition nécessaire et suffisante pour accéder à un développement soutenable; le deuxième, plus inspiré par une pensée des limites, cherche à élaborer des contraintes socio-environnementales à l’intérieur desquelles le développement économique doit se poursuivre; le troisième, marqué par les expériences du Tiers Monde, met l’accent sur les inégalités sociales et s’interroge sur le sens de la notion de développement

Toward an Optimal Online Checkpoint Solution under a Two-Level HPC Checkpoint Model

The traditional single-level checkpointing method suffers from significantoverhead on large-scale platforms. Hence, multilevel checkpointing protocols have been studied extensively in recent years. The multilevel checkpoint approach allows different levels of checkpoints to be set (each with different checkpoint overheads and recovery abilities), in order to further improve the fault tolerance performance of extreme-scale HPC applications. How to optimize the checkpoint intervals for each level, however, is an extremely difficult problem. In this paper, we construct an easy-to-use two-level checkpoint model. Checkpoint level 1 deals with errors with low checkpoint/recovery overheads such as transient memory errors, while checkpoint level 2 deals with hardware crashes such as node failures.Compared with previous optimization work, our new optimal checkpoint solution offers two improvements: (1) it is an online solution without requiring knowledge of the job length in advance, and (2) it shows that periodic patterns are optimal and determines the best pattern. We evaluate the proposed solution and compare it with the most up-to-date related approaches on an extreme-scale simulation testbed constructed based on a real HPC application execution. Simulation results show that our proposed solution outperforms other optimized solutions and can improve the performance significantly in some cases. Specifically, with the new solution the wall-clock time can be reduced by up to 25.3\% over that of other state-of-the-art approaches. Finally, a brute-force comparison with all possible patterns shows that our solution is always within $1\%$ of the best pattern in the experiments

Philippe Descola - L’écologie des autres. L’anthropologie et la question de la nature - Paris, Ed. Quae, coll. Sciences en question, 112 p., 8,60 €

L’anthropologie, quand elle se constitue à la fin du XIXe siècle, se conçoit comme la science de l’interface ou, si l’on préfère, des compromis entre la nature et la culture. Pour les appréhender, les anthropologues vont adopter principalement deux postures épistémologiques, auxquelles Philippe Descola, titulaire de la chaire d’anthropologie de la nature au Collège de France, nous initie en nous exposant la controverse qui opposa Claude Levi-Strauss et Marvin Harris, au milieu des années 1970..

Sustainable development: An overview of economic proposals

L’objectif assigné d’un développement soutenable donne lieu à des multiples interprétations. Nous proposons de dresser un panorama des propositions économiques en la matière. Nous avons réuni pour ce faire trois ensembles de travaux: le premier, qui exprime le point de vue de la théorie économique dominante, met en avant l’idée d’une croissance durable comme condition nécessaire et suffisante pour accéder à un développement soutenable; le deuxième, plus inspiré par une pensée des limites, cherche à élaborer des contraintes socio-environnementales à l’intérieur desquelles le développement économique doit se poursuivre; le troisième, marqué par les expériences du Tiers Monde, met l’accent sur les inégalités sociales et s’interroge sur le sens de la notion de développement.The objective of sustainable development is open to many different interpretations. This article provides a comprehensive overview of the economic proposals related to sustainability through three bodies of work: the first, describing the point of view presented by the leading economic theory, puts forward the idea of sustainable growth as a necessary and sufficient condition to attain sustainable development; the second, inspired by the notion of limits, attempts to establish socio-environmental constraints within which economic development should take place; the third, addressing Third World conditions, focuses on social inequalities and questions the meaning of the development concept

Editorial

La problématique du développement durable est, pour une part, portée par une aspiration à vouloir changer les choses et le monde, et d’abord ceux de l’économie. Pour beaucoup, l’économie apparaît, en effet, comme un domaine et une science « sinistres », synonymes de désenchantement, de domination de la puissance de l’argent, d’exploitation des uns par les autres, de destruction de la nature… Cette volonté de vouloir changer les rapports sociaux, qui amène à repenser et requalifier l’économie,..

La bioraffinerie comme objet transitionnel de la bioéconomie

Les trois papiers de ce dossier cherchent, chacun à leur façon, à cerner les contours de la dynamique d’exploration des usages des ressources agricoles, et de la forêt. Cette dynamique s’inscrit dans des stratégies de substitution des ressources fossiles. Ces stratégies cherchent à inverser une tendance historique issue des révolutions scientifiques et industrielles du XIXe et du XXe siècle. En particulier, la montée en puissance de l’usage du pétrole au cours du XXe siècle a conduit au rempl..

The Hijacking of the Bioeconomy

Unidad de excelencia María de Maeztu MdM-2015-0552Georgescu-Roegen used the term bioeconomy to refer to a radical ecological perspective on economics he developed in the 1970s and 1980s. In recent years, it has also become a buzzword used by public institutions to announce and describe a supposed current economic and ecological transition. We see in this use an attempt of semantic hijacking of the original term. To support this claim we analyze three different interpretations of the term bioeconomy, presenting each of them as narratives combining distinct visions of future economic development, technical trajectories and imaginaries associated with a particular relationship to nature. Finally, we discuss these narratives in relation to the endorsement they receive by different stakeholders