Volume 3: Rethinking Sustainability: Power, Knowledge, and Institutions

By Jonathan Harris

This volume is part of the series
Evolving Values for a Capitalist World

Bringing together the thoughts of economists, political scientists, anthropologists, philosophers, and agricultural policy professionals, this volume focuses on the issues of sustainability in development. Examining such topics as international trade, political power, gender roles, legal institutions, and agricultural research, the contributors focus on the missing links in theory and practice that have been barriers to the achievement of truly sustainable development.

Rethinking Sustainability will be of interest to economists and social scientists, development professionals, and instructors seeking to offer their students a broad perspective on development issues.

Rethinking Sustainability moves the debate from efficiency toward the distribution of power, from free markets toward sharing common assets, from global generalities toward local specifics, and from expert knowledge toward shared learning. This rebalancing is sorely needed. – Richard B. Norgaard, University of California at Berkeley

Rethinking Sustainability is an impressive book, which I recommend very highly. It offers a broad approach to sustainability issues, and challenges many of the presuppositions of mainstream economics. A range of alternative approaches is explored by the contributors, with stimulating analyses of the contribution to sustainability studies of such issues as poverty, political power, the cultural construction of the environment and landscape change, as well as the more usual issues of trade and development. This book will appeal to all who are interested in sustainability, and will be especially welcome to those seeking alternative perspectives. – John Proops, Keele University

About the Author Jonathan M. Harris holds a B.A. from Harvard University and a Ph.D. from Boston University. He is co-editor of the Frontier Issues in Economic Thought series – volumes: A Survey of Sustainable Development, A Survey of Ecological Economics and Human Well-Being and Economic Goals. He is also author of “World Agriculture and the Environment”; and co-author with Dr. Anne-Marie Codur of environmental teaching modules in microeconomics and macroeconomics. He is currently at work on a textbook, The Economic System and the Environment. He is a Senior Research Associate at GDAE, Program Director for GDAE’s Theory and Education Program, and an Adjunct Associate Professor of International Economics at Tufts University Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.