Democratic Economic Planning, Social Metabolism and the Environment

Abstract

This article studies the ecological institution of three models of democratic economic planning: Devine and Adaman’s negotiated coordination, Albert and Hahnel’s participatory economics, and Cockshott and Cottrell’s new socialism. We review these institutions from an ecological economics perspective to see how they tackle environmental issues. Our analysis reveals a number of problematic areas, on which we propose a potential way of resolution: our proposal includes a new framework to understand democratic economic planning, and a merger of the different models and insights for building new institutions that would be better adapted to confront current environmental issues.