Après l’encastrement - Savoirs économiques et transformations écologiques

Since the 1970s, ecological economics has promoted the materialisation of economic analysis through the lens of matter and energy flows, hybridising economic concepts with biophysical knowledge. This perspective has progressively diffused into mainstream environmental economics — a development that, at first glance, appears to constitute an ontological and epistemological victory for the embedded economy tradition. Yet re-embedding and the mobilisation of material knowledge are insufficient to strengthen economics' capacity to orient the ecological transformations that are now required. By concentrating on the economy–biosphere interface and deploying a utilitarian rationality aimed at demonstrating the economic case for preservation, materialised economics tends to render invisible the socio-economic conflicts, institutional conditions of action, and structural obstacles to reducing anthropogenic pressures. Biophysical analyses contribute primarily three types of inputs — information, prices, or optimal quantities — whose transformative reach remains limited. These limitations delineate an impossibility triangle for the discipline: simultaneously representing biophysical dynamics, socio-economic systems, and operational levers for transformation. Re-embedding renders things visible, but does not supply the conditions for implementing transformative policies. The article proposes a distinction between ecological objectives (EOs) — defined by compliance with biophysical constraints — and normative ecological objectives (NEOs), which explicitly formulate policies, regulations, or economic actors' courses of action. Material knowledge must be translated into NEOs, while economic analysis focuses on examining their socio-economic, distributional, institutional, and financial consequences. The proposed framework organises a six-step research programme oriented towards analysing the conditions of possibility for ecological transformations, rather than demonstrating their economic rationality. This reorientation refocuses economics on its proper objects — production, distribution, institutions, and conflict — while preserving the biophysical constraint, and enables the articulation of material knowledge, political decision-making, and economic analysis within a consequentialist perspective.