Clive Spash

Spash has developed extensive critiques of mainstream economic approaches to the environment. These cover its limited ethical foundations,[19][20] its failure to address manifest problems with its own methods,[21] problems with preference theory,[22][23][24][25][26] the social problems of advocating economic growth in macroeconomics,[27][28][29] the failings of consumer choice theory,[30][31] and mainstream economists' general lack of realism [32] .[33]

Spash has worked extensively on ecosystem valuation and was Editor-in-Chief of the journal "Environmental Values" (2006-2021). His early research explored the application of cost-benefit analysis to environmental change and especially air pollution damages.[34] This research moved from work on acidic deposition to tropospheric zone to greenhouse gases and climate change, as evident in his dissertations and thesis. He co-authored an influential textbook on environmental cost-benefit analysis,[35] but his work was increasingly critical of the approach. The approach to intergenerational ethics that is reduced down to a discussion over discount rates is exposed as obscuring the presence of implicit value judgements while claiming objectivity.[36] This approach's fallacious reduction of strong uncertainty (social indeterminacy and ignorance) to weak uncertainty (probabilistic risk) is exposed in his book "Greenhouse Economics".[37]

Spash’s work in the area of environmental cost-benefit analysis (e.g. Hanley and Spash[38]) developed into the exploration of social psychology and motivations for environmental values.[39] He employed contingent valuation to conduct empirical research in innovative ways that included ethical motives as well as attitudes and norms.[40][41][42][43][44] At the same time his work revealed fundamental failures of contingent valuation research [45] and its employment for public policy by environmental economists.[46] He moved into exploring the possibilities for alternative deliberative approaches,[47][48] their combination with monetary valuation,[49][50] and the implications of deliberation for economic value theory.[51] Spash cited the term deliberative monetary valuation (DMV) to summarise a set of approaches being employed to combine individualistic willingness to pay (WTP) assessments of the valuation of environmental damage and preservation with group approaches and various related methods. He importantly noted that social values are qualitatively distinct from the aggregate of individual values, highlighting an overlooked weakness in results gathered from DMV studies;[52] that findings of DMV research elucidate the complexity of human value systems and preferences, which goes uncaptured by common economic conceptualisations and by the method itself;[53] and that “exclusion and predefinition of values” inherent in commonly practiced DMV methods constrain or prevent the expression of value pluralism.[54] An alternative “discourse based approach” [55] is proposed that address these methodological concerns (see also O'Hara 1996,[56] 2001[57]), and this involves reconceptualising DMV 'as a mutual agreement resulting from an interactive process involving the contestation of discourses'.[58]

His climate economics involves realist and ethical critiques of mainstream economics and has targeted the work of David Pearce (economist), William Nordhaus, Richard Tol and others.[59][60] He has deconstructed the work of Lord David Stern in both his Stern Review[61] [62] and under the New Climate Economy collective.[63] His critiques of the economics of climate change include its intergenerational ethics,[64][65] its approach to uncertain futures involving ignorance and indeterminacy,[66] and social cost-benefit approaches to decision-making [67] .[68][69] He has also criticized the mainstream economic approach to policy encapsulated under carbon emission trading, also known as cap-and-trade.[70] His work in this area was censored by the government in Australia but finally released after a Senate vote defeated the government.[71] Carbon trading is seen by Spash as failing both in theory and practice and in compulsory as well as voluntary forms.[72][73][74] He has argued the Paris Agreement is a failure to address reality and not a great success on which to build.[75][76] Spash has concluded in favour of rights-based approaches and regulation rather than utilitarianism and carbon trading.[77][78]

Spash also linked issues in valuation to ethical positions and refusals to trade-off species and ecosystem loss, and contrasted rights-based ethics with utilitarianism in conservation.[79][80] He was one of the first economists to work on biodiversity valuation in economics.[81] His work here developed approaches to empirically investigate ethically motivated refusals to trade-off species and ecosystems for money as expressed by the occurrence of lexicographic preferences[82][83][84] .[85] This work on biodiversity economics also led to criticism of preference utilitarianism [86] and the spread of mainstream economics into ecology and conservation biology.[87][88] In the early 1990s Spash designed a survey conducted in Scotland on forestry to explore the valuation of biodiversity and the occurrence of protesting and refusals to make the trade-offs that economists had previously assumed were rational.[89] He developed this further in studies of wetland re-creation in East Anglia[90] and coral reef improvement in Curaçao.[91] Willingness-to-pay responses from contingent valuation were found to be charitable contributions for many respondents, and not trade prices as economists assumed.[92] The work expanded into attitudinal and social norm research using measures from social psychology and questioning various claims made about the results from contingent valuation.[93] Related work questioned prominent environmental attitudinal scales used by social psychologists [94] and aspects of work by Daniel Kahneman on valuation.[95] When "Biodiversity Economics: The Dasgupta Review" appeared in 2021, advocating natural capital, Spash produced critical deconstructions of the report.[96][97]

Spash’s research in the 2000s became directed towards the development of a paradigm shift to a social ecological economics.[98][99][100] He highlighted the need for ecological economics to have firm foundations in philosophy of science and to link ontology to epistemology rather than follow an eclectic pluralism in economics.[101] His key conclusions here support the need for integration of social, ecological and economic knowledge,[102] and combining heterodox schools of thought in a structured methodological pluralism.[103][104] This is seen as a way forward that emphasises “the structural aspects of economies as emergent from and dependent upon the structure and functioning of both society and ecology“.[105] This conceptualisation rejects reductionist approaches and builds on interdisciplinarity (over mono- or multi-disciplinarity), while incorporating value incommensurability and value pluralism.[106] His research recommends the philosophy of science of critical realism.[107] Spash’s research has highlighted problems arising from the conceptualisation of ecological economics as a simple combination of two disciplines (i.e. ecology and economics) that otherwise remain divorced from each other and unreformed by their interaction.[108] He has developed this critique into an exploration of the divisions within ecological economics, and more generally the environmental movement, by defining three categories: social ecological economists, new environmental pragmatists and new resource economists.[109][110][111][112] His work includes some empirical evidence on these categories.[113] Moving beyond a simple division within the field, the social ecological economics category has become advocated as a new paradigm.[114] Spash sees social ecological economics as the way forward for the field of economics in general.[115][116]