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08 July 2014: New paper published by Sociology academic

Essex academic Professor Mark Harvey has just published a paper titled 'On the horns of the food-energy-climate change trilemma: towards socio-economics analysis' in the Theory, Culture and Society journal.

Abstract
The food-energy-climate change trilemma refers to the stark alternatives presented by the need to feed a world population growing to nine billion, the attendant risks of land conversion and use for global climate change, and the way these are interconnected with the energy crisis arising from the depletion of oil, with its threat to existing, let alone growing levels of economic activity.

The paper first examines the challenges to social science presented by interactions between political economies and their related natural environments, both in terms of finitudes of resources and generation of greenhouse gases. It does so by reviewing some approaches from classical political economy, transition theory, economic geography, and political ecology, before elaborating the neo-Polanyian approach adopted here. It then presents the natural science perspective of the trilemma, necessary to inform a social science analysis of interactions between socio-economic and bio-physical systems.

The paper goes on to present the case of Brazil using a neo-Polanyian ‘instituted economic process’ framework, to demonstrate how the trilemma is a spatial and historical socio-economic phenomenon, developing unevenly and varying significantly in its dynamics in different environmental and resource contexts.

The paper concludes by pointing to some further challenges to developing a social scientific theory in this field.