VALUE STANDARDS IN SUB-SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT - ON LIMITS OF ECOLOGICAL ECONOMICS

Sustainable development is hard to conceptualize as an economic problem, and ''an economic problem'' is also ambiguous. Thus, there is room for several kinds of ecological economics. This paper analyses different ways of relating ecological and economical thinking to each other, and how expertise in these fields relates to politics. Available methods are delimited in scope, where some are suitable for the analysis of sustainable development and others are not. It is concluded that the promotion of sustainable development as a basic value assumes an explicit value strategy. It is argued that neoclassical economics, for example cost benefit analysis, is suitable for analysis of sustainable development only as a special case, and alternatives are at hand for other cases. To illustrate a non-neoclassical analysis, an empirical investigation using the sustainable development records approach is briefly reported upon.