Context, objectives and organisation

The sci­en­tif­ic com­mu­ni­ty is large­ly in agree­ment that the glob­al trans­for­ma­tion of the Earth sys­tem is caused by human activ­i­ties (IPCC 2022; IPBES 2016). Since the report that was pre­pared for the Club of Rome on the “Lim­its to growth” (Mead­ows et al. 1972), sci­en­tists have been analysing and dis­cussing the plan­e­tary bound­aries with­in which con­di­tions required for safe human activ­i­ties are met (Rock­ström et al. 2009). To date, six out of nine bio-physi­co-chem­i­cal thresh­olds have been crossed. This is putting all life on the Earth or in cer­tain regions – and par­tic­u­lar­ly human life and human soci­eties – at risk. At stake is the “hab­it­abil­i­ty” of the plan­et (Blanc et al. 2022). Sor­bonne University’s Insti­tute for the Envi­ron­men­tal Tran­si­tion, has empha­sised the need for human­i­ty to invent “tra­jec­to­ries that pre­serve or restore the via­bil­i­ty of the Plan­et for humans and non-humans. […] based on a sys­temic approach to trans­form­ing our ways of pro­duc­ing, con­sum­ing, work­ing, mov­ing, liv­ing, and shar­ing eco­nom­ic wealth, with­in the lim­its imposed by the resilience of the Earth Sys­tem, in order to lim­it the extent of cli­mate change, halt the decline in bio­di­ver­si­ty, save resources, reduce pol­lu­tion and pre­serve health. It implies ques­tion­ing our val­ues, is declined at all scales of space and time and mobilis­es all forms of cre­ativ­i­ty, eth­i­cal, social, sci­en­tif­ic, tech­ni­cal, artis­tic, eco­nom­ic, etc.”.

How­ev­er, so far, eco­nom­ics, as an aca­d­e­m­ic dis­ci­pline, has failed in the face of such exis­ten­tial and eth­i­cal chal­lenges. The data are dev­as­tat­ing. In 2019, Andrew J. Oswald and Nicholas Stern, two promi­nent econ­o­mists, high­light­ed the fact that, in their life­times, the top nine main­stream eco­nom­ics jour­nals had pub­lished only 57 (out of approx­i­mate­ly 77,000) arti­cles on cli­mate change. Oswald and Stern (2019) “sug­gest that econ­o­mists are fail­ing the world and their own grand­chil­dren [and ] argue that some form of inter­ven­tion is now urgent­ly required by edi­tors and senior pro­fes­sors […]. Oth­er­wise, his­to­ry will judge our pro­fes­sion harsh­ly”. One of the rea­sons for this major aca­d­e­m­ic fail­ure is the nar­row dis­ci­pli­nary per­spec­tive adopt­ed by most econ­o­mists, which does not include inter­dis­ci­pli­nary and inter­sec­toral approach­es that would allow a sys­temic under­stand­ing of the ongo­ing ruptures.

EPOG-DN aims to devel­op a com­mu­ni­ty of econ­o­mists able to work with oth­er dis­ci­plines and a range of sec­tors and stake­hold­ers, to design the eco­nom­ic poli­cies required to address the eco­log­i­cal chal­lenges. To do this, the project is tak­ing seri­ous­ly the rec­om­men­da­tions con­tained in Das­gup­ta (2021)’s report, that, instead of con­sid­er­ing human­i­ty as exter­nal to the nat­ur­al world, as in main­stream eco­nom­ic mod­els, econ­o­mists should see human­i­ty as “embed­ded in the nat­ur­al world”.

To meet its objec­tives, the EPOG-DN project intro­duces the con­cept of “Glob­al Bifur­ca­tion” (GB), defined as a series of sociotech­ni­cal, socioe­co­nom­ic and socioecological/political/cultural process­es which are sys­temic / mul­ti­di­men­sion­al / co-evo­lu­tion­ary in nature and are aimed at main­tain­ing or return­ing the world and its sub-regions to with­in the plan­e­tary bound­aries (as the con­cept of “hab­it­abil­i­ty” refers to), in a social­ly fair way.What is at stake is the sus­tain­able soci­ety we want and how it can be achieved. The EPOG-DN project aims to inves­ti­gate the set of tra­jec­to­ries lead­ing towards a strong sus­tain­abil­i­ty. The con­cept of strong sus­tain­abil­i­ty is built around the fun­da­men­tal guid­ing prin­ci­ple that, a pri­ori, social, eco­nom­ic and eco­log­i­cal objec­tives are not sub­sti­tutable (Godin et al. 2022). In oth­er words:

• the GB must com­ply with plan­e­tary boundaries;
• exceed­ing plan­e­tary bound­aries can­not be bal­anced by any type of eco­nom­ic growth or mon­e­tary reward, across regions or over time;
• the GB bur­den must be shared in a bal­anced way among pop­u­la­tions and soci­eties to avoid the most frag­ile soci­eties suf­fer­ing neg­a­tive effects. 

At the present time, the con­di­tions for and pol­i­cy per­spec­tives relat­ed to this tran­si­tion are entire­ly unclear, which calls for an inves­ti­ga­tion of and under­stand­ing of the rela­tions between the GB and numer­ous socioe­co­nom­ic dimen­sions (con­sump­tion habits, pro­duc­tion process­es, North/South rela­tions, tech­no­log­i­cal choic­es, com­mer­cial trade, social pro­tec­tion, tax­a­tion, inequal­i­ties, etc.). A strong sus­tain­abil­i­ty sce­nario can be achieved only through a mul­ti­di­men­sion­al approach that takes account of: (i) mon­e­tary and non-mon­e­tary indi­ca­tors; (ii) the required insti­tu­tion­al changes; and (iii) dif­fer­ent geo­graph­ic and time scales.

The com­plex­i­ty and uncer­tain­ty of the GB makes it essen­tial to inves­ti­gate the above ele­ments sequen­tial­ly and to con­sid­er and col­late out­comes in order to con­struct a clear, use­ful, com­pre­hen­si­ble and con­crete pic­ture for soci­ety. The EPOG-DN project pro­pos­es adop­tion of an orig­i­nal and unique approach to this cru­cial issue, based on three directions:

• (i) a sociotech­ni­cal per­spec­tive and crit­i­cal ques­tion­ing of the role of inno­va­tion and tech­nolo­gies (WP3);
• (ii) a socioe­co­nom­ic per­spec­tive involv­ing the devel­op­ment of macro­eco­nom­ic sce­nar­ios (WP4);
• (iii) a socioe­co­log­i­cal per­spec­tive to enable con­sid­er­a­tion of how social organ­i­sa­tions, civ­il soci­ety and cit­i­zens can con­tribute to the tran­si­tion sce­nar­ios (WP5).

The term bifur­ca­tion is thus aimed at high­light­ing the major sys­temic change that human­i­ty must embrace to forge a viable path­way. Thus, GB calls for a new rela­tion between human soci­eties and nature, which does not involve a sin­gle tran­si­tion, but rather is a mul­ti-scalar process (Cut­ter 2021).

• com­mu­ni­ty build­ing, syn­the­sis and per­spec­tives in rela­tions to the results and out­comes of the research to fos­ter trans­dis­ci­pli­nary col­lab­o­ra­tion among the PhD can­di­dates and dia­logue with senior researchers and non-aca­d­e­m­ic stake­hold­ers (WP6). WP6 will exploit the results of WP5 to dis­cuss the assump­tions in the macro­eco­nom­ic sce­nar­ios and mod­els devel­oped in WP4 and iden­ti­fy those con­sid­ered the most rel­e­vant. The indus­try and inno­va­tion pol­i­cy frame­work pro­posed in WP3 will steer dis­cus­sion on how these sce­nar­ios could be imple­ment­ed at the micro/me­so-eco­nom­ic levels.
• dis­sem­i­na­tion activ­i­ties (WP7).

To encour­age cross-dis­ci­pli­nar­i­ty and emer­gence of inno­v­a­tive results, each doc­tor­al can­di­date (DC) project will be a doc­tor­al research, which will be joint­ly super­vised by an econ­o­mist from acad­e­mia and at least a super­vi­sor from anoth­er rel­e­vant field (either from acad­e­mia or not). The DC will gen­er­al­ly spend 2 years at the award­ing degree insti­tu­tion and one year out­side (dura­tion and organ­i­sa­tion of visiting/secondment being adapt­ed to indi­vid­ual DCs’ projects at appli­ca­tion stage).