Meanings and Significance of Property with Reference to Today’s Three Major Eco-Institutional Crises

For good reasons, many scientists think that the royal road to wisdom is further specialization and corresponding reduction. Jon Elster (2007, 259), for instance, argued that reduction is at the heart of progress in science. But for good reasons also, some think that integration is as important as differentiation and reduction (Neurath, 1946; Braudel, 1958; Piaget, 1970). In the history of economic thought, K. William Kapp was a powerful voice defending the integration of economics with other scientific disciplines. With Myrdal (1932) and Georgescu-Roegen (1966), he argued that ‘there are no purely economic problems’ and consequently that ‘there can be no legitimate boundary lines which separate economic analysis from the allied and related fields of social [and ecological] investigations’ (Kapp 1961, 201). It is this integrative approach — especially between ecological and critical institutional economics — that we also follow in the present chapter. Few economists are working along these lines today but notable exceptions include Bromley (1991), Fischer-Kowalski (Fischer-Kowalski and Haberl, 2007), Foster (2011), Gowdy (1994), Hodgson (1993), Hornborg (1998), Jacobs (1994), Krall (Krall and Klitgaard, 2011), Martínez-Alier (2002), Max-Neef (2005), Naredo (2003), Norgaard (1994), O’Connor (1998), O’Hara (2006), O’Neill (2007), Paavola (Paavola and Adger, 2005), Sachs (1997), Söderbaum (2008), Spash (2011a), Swaney (1990), Tsuru (2000) and Vatn (2005).