Reframing Our Understanding
The Factors of Production and the Source of Long Run Economic Growth View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Oskar Zorrilla
We consider a production economy with three factors of production: capital, labor, and a third, renewable factor. This factor captures all of the goods and services that nature contributes to the production of output. Like capital and labor this factor is essential; it exhibits positive, diminishing marginal returns, and the production function exhibits constant returns to scale with respect to all three factors. We show that in such an economy, many of the main results from the theory of economic growth are overturned. First we show that total factor productivity (TFP) growth is a necessary but not sufficient condition for long run economic growth. Second, for long run economic growth to be positive, TFP growth must be bounded above, and we provide that bound. Taken together, our first two results overturn the notion that productivity gains are the only source of welfare improvements in the long run. Third, we show that a productive steady state is not guaranteed to exist. Fourth, when a productive steady state does exist, it is not globally stable. It is possible for output (GDP) to be too high and the economy converges to a zero production steady state. Finally, our framework offers an explanation for the empirical decline of the Solow Residual over the past few decades. The so-called Secular Stagnation puzzle can be explained by a decline in the third factor of production.
A Human Rights-based Approach to Environmental and Social Sustainability amongst Marginalized Communities: Lessons Learned from Two Continents View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Timothy James Hodges, Mark L. Berlin
The paper juxtaposes two apparently divergent case studies, with the co-authors presenting on-the-ground evidence of the emerging, powerful role human rights can play as a change catalyst in environmental and social policy making to the benefit marginalized communities. This is based on two case studies: The first of the San People of South Africa in their decades-long (successful) effort to acquire, as traditional knowledge holders, a fair share of the commercial benefits derived from the hoodie plant of southern Africa. The second of Canadian queer community’s (successful) advances over recent decades to challenge systemic policies of marginalization and discrimination at the hands of successive governments. What are the lessons learned from such distinct groups residing half a world away from one another and living, respectively, in the so-called developing and developed worlds? What are the implications for others seeking to address the global problems and challenges through local action and community leadership? What are the implications for development practitioners seeking to harness the power of human-rights for social and environmental well-being? And what do such case studies of success mean for the future of global sustainable development policymaking?
From Developing for towards Developing with: Interweaving Anthropology into Energy-related R&D Projects View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Sara Arko
The paper reflects on the experience of embedding anthropological expertise into predominantly technology-oriented EU-funded projects focusing on energy and sustainable built environment. In a number of EU research funding programmes, there is a fairly recent shift in expectations, diverging from expert-led to more participatory models of designing and developing technical or non-technical solutions, reflecting the necessity of integrating social science and humanities into innovation processes, which had hitherto been primarily in the domain of technical sciences. The paper presents the model of a people-centred approach, acting as modus operandi of a project’s inherently collaborative and interdisciplinary development process. Drawing on a Horizon 2020 project NRG2peers, the paper explains the approach and methodology, implementation of the research process, and the research outcomes. NRG2peers is developing tools to support the uptake of next-generation (peer-to-peer) energy communities. Nine pilot communities from four European countries, embedded in different regulatory frameworks and socio-economic contexts, were part of the project’s ethnographic research. The paper therefore offers an insight into community energy initiatives, as well as discusses the transdisciplinary journey, in which non-anthropologists grapple with qualitative research and in which non-academics begin to consider ethnographic data as the key starting point of product and service development processes.
