The scientific status of environmental accounting methodologies: from ecological economics to human ecology

The quest to develop environmental accounting methodologies is a response to the increasingly obvious failure and demonstrated inability of markets to register, let alone generate adequate responses to, the bad environmental effects of economic activity, and, correspondingly, the false picture of welfare produced by current national accounts in terms of GNP or GDP derived from measuring market activity. The goal of environmental accounting is to register environmental effects in a way that can lead to appropriate responses to threats to environments and to provide a better guide for promoting human and ecological welfare. There is a problem, however, of where action is to come from. Ultimately, actions must be responses by economic actors, but different forms of accounting can be oriented towards different kinds of agents to bring about appropriate behaviour. The aim might be it might be directed to individuals to influence their consumption decisions. Or to guide governments in their management of markets to use them to make people respond properly to the environment. Or it might be to reduce the scope of the market and to put decision-making and economic planning more in the hands of governments, either local, national or international. Or it might be to mobilize political movements, local, national or international, to change existing power relations between citizens, economic agents and governments, or between localities, countries and regions. Or it might be some combination of these, for instance first influencing people as individuals, then mobilizing them to change power relations to achieve greater democracy, and then providing democratic communities with the means for decisionmaking. [Introduction]