A Tradição da economia do meio ambiente e o pensamento de Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen: perspectivas no debate atual e Influência sobre políticas de bioeconomia

Abstract

This research investigates the formation of the debate on natural resources and the environment in the history of economic thought from a historiographical and conceptual perspective. In this sense, it analyzes the complex interaction between the economic system and nature, in its broadest sense, seeking to guide the emergence of the concept of bioeconomy for the contemporary debate aimed at tackling the issue of the climate emergency. In order to do so, it emphasizes the historiographical turning point, and the role played by the seminal contribution of Romanian economist Georgescu-Roegen in shaping the concept of the bioeconomy in the 1970s. It also explores how, from that point on, two distinct theoretical approaches emerged to deal with the challenges posed by the environmental issue and which analyzed the economic process in different ways: one which, adhering to the principles proposed by Georgescu-Roegen, promoted the search for a closer integration between the spheres of the economic theory of production and the emerging science of ecology; and another which, maintaining the epistemological inspiration anchored in the physics of the first half of the 19th century, sought to reincorporate the role of natural resources and “forgotten” environmental variables into contemporary economic analysis. Finally, the text highlights the theoretical and practical differences between these approaches, and how they shape the various contemporary conceptions of the bioeconomy, which today influence the formulation of public policies aimed at reconciling economic development with environmental sustainability, in a scenario of global climate change.