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The COVID-19 pandemic simultaneously triggered a sudden, substantial increase in demand for items such as personal protection equipment and hospital ventilators whilst also disrupting the means of mass-production and international transport in established supply chains. Furthermore, under stay-at-home orders and with bricks-and-mortar retailers closed, consumers were also forced to adapt. Thus the pandemic offers a unique opportunity to study shifts in behaviour during disruption to industrialised manufacturing and economic contraction, in order to understand the role peer-to-peer production may play in a transition to long-term sustainability of production and consumption, or degrowth. Here, we analyse publicly-available datasets on internet search traffic and corporation financial returns to track the shifts in public interest and consumer behaviour over 2019 – 2020. We find a jump in interest in home-making and small-scale production at the beginning of the pandemic, as well as a substantial and sustained shift in consumer preference for peer-to-peer e-commerce platforms relative to more-established online vendors. In particular we present two case studies – the home-made facemasks supplied through Etsy, and the decentralised efforts of the 3D printer community – to assess the effectiveness of their responses to the pandemic. These patterns of behaviour are related to new modes of production in line with ecological economics and as such add capacity to a broader prefiguration of degrowth. We suggest an adoption of a new “fourth wave” of DIY culture defined by enhanced resilience and degrowth to continue to add capacity to a prefigurative politic of degrowth.

Environmentalists have long warned of a coming shock to the system. COVID-19 exposed fragility in the system and has the potential to result in radical social change. With socioeconomic interruptions cascading through tightly intertwined economic, social, environmental, and political systems, many are not working to find the opportunities for change. Prefigurative politics in communities have demonstrated rapid and successful responses to the pandemic. These successes, and others throughout history, demonstrate that prefigurative politics are important for response to crisis. Given the failure of mainstream environmentalism, we use systemic transformation literature to suggest novel strategies to strengthen cooperative prefigurative politics. In this paper, we look at ways in which COVID-19 shock is leveraged in local and global economic contexts. We also explore how the pandemic has exposed paradoxes of global connectivity and interdependence. While responses shed light on potential lessons for ecological sustainability governance, COVID-19 has also demonstrated the importance of local resilience strategies. We use local manufacturing as an example of a possible localized, yet globally connected, resilience strategy and explore some preliminary data that highlight possible tradeoffs of economic contraction.

This chapter affirms the importance of civic acculturation associated with the nation-state. In a world of low/no growth, the three-legged political economy of State, Market, and Livelihood will militate the re-nationalization and regionalization of the global economy, greater viscosity in the flow of people, information and things, and the partial re-emergence and reassertion of local, community, and city-level institutions against the rationalizing and universalizing logic of the national state. New goals relating to education focus on this need for education: to serve the informal and reciprocal economy of livelihood; in addition to the high culture of exo-education, to consolidate lower-level cultural communities; to service traditional local and craft production that does not seek necessarily to compete in directly in the Market; to consolidate rather than undermine individual connections with extended family and place-attached communities.

As a discipline, ecological economics is at a turning point and there is a need to develop a new research agenda for ecological economics that will contribute to the creation and adoption of new economic institutions. There are still considerable environmental issues and a new generation of scholars ready to tackle them. In this paper and Special Issue, we highlight the voices of emerging scholars in ecological economics who put social justice squarely at the center of ecological economic research. The papers in this issue remain true to the central focus of economic downscaling while calling for greater emphasis on culture and society. We acknowledge that methodological and intellectual pluralism inherently entail tensions but strive to find shared normative foundations to collectively work toward socio-ecological transformations. In this editorial, we emphasize the need for further attention to social aspects of ecological economics and evolutionary approaches to further strengthen cooperation.

This editorial introduces a special section of the journal on ecological economics: The next 30 years consisting of 20 different articles from a broad range of contributors. It explores common themes from the articles including uncertainty, the normative goals of sustainable scale and just distribution, collective action, co-evolution, transdisciplinarity and the need for radical systemic change. Drawing on our own vision for the next 30 years of EE, we use multi-level selection theory (MLS) to help understand how these themes are connected, to offer insights into how we might promote collective action at the scale required to achieve a socially just sustainability transition, and to reassess the distinction between normative and positive science. We conclude that ecological economists are united primarily by the recognition that economics must be built from biophysical foundations and by our shared normative values that prioritize the common good over self-interested individual preferences

Ecological economics and systems theory have a long-standing history. As a foregrounding metatheoretical framework, systems thinking deepens socio-ecological acuity through comprehensive models of complex relationships between social and biophysical systems. However, critical and soft systems are often overlooked, necessitating a framework for “critical pluralism,” similar to that used by systems theorists themselves. To do this, we argue that ecological economics needs to include paradigm analysis as an integral part of the ecological economic discourse to situate work within sociological paradigms – not just biophysical limits to growth. To help establish a critical pluralism approach, we trained a group of emerging ecological economics scholars to integrate systems thinking more firmly in research approaches. We integrate soft systems methodology and critical systems heuristics to establish foundations for critical soft systems methodology. We then trained emerging scholars on this new methodology. Emergent from the results of this training is a new paradigm of thought, centred on regenerative features, for the future of ecological economics – which is best navigated with critical pluralistic approaches. The results of this training also present lessons for the discipline of ecological economics that help chart out the discipline's tensions.

The policy vehicles required to achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in domains such as education, health, and welfare rely on fiscal transfers from a growing economy. SDGs also routinely replace less-complex systems in the informal/livelihood sector with more complex systems in the domain of the formal economy, the state, and the market. Such systems are more expensive both financially and in terms of ecological footprint. From any ecological-economic perspective, this dependence of development on growth is problematic. Recent research indicates that there is currently no country that achieves a good life for its citizens at a level of resource use that could be extended to all people on the planet. This tension between growth and ecological integrity suggests a prima facie case for the establishment of new Ecological Economic Goals (EEGs). We argue that a sustainable modernity will necessitate the re-emergence of the domain of reciprocity and informal economy or livelihood; the re-emergence of some early-modern patterns of solidarity and mutualism in the Global North; and the retention and repurposing of pre-modern, agrarian principles of solidarity in the Global South. In place of SDGs, EEGs are advanced as policy vehicles for a sustainable mode of development within biophysical limits.

Big data and online media conglomerates have significant power over the behavior of individuals. Online platforms have become the largest canvas for advertising, and the most profitable commodity is users’ attention. Large tech companies, such as Facebook and Alphabet, use historically effective psychological advertisement tactics in tandem with enormous amounts of user data to effectively and efficiently meet the needs of their customers, who are not the end-users, but the corporations competing for advertising space on users’ screens. This commodification of attention is a serious threat to socio-ecological sustainability. In this paper, I argue that big data and social advertising platforms, such as Facebook, use commodified attention to take advantage of psycho-social neuroticisms and commodity fetishism in modern individuals to perpetuate conspicuous consumption. They also contribute to highly fragmented information ecologies that intentionally obscure scientific facts regarding ecological emergencies. The commitment to stakeholders and growth economics makes social advertising conglomerates a significant barrier to a socio-ecological future. I provide a series of solutions to this problem at the institutional, research, policy, and individual levels and areas for future sustainability research.