Introduction

Abstract

This book is written to make the core of the political economy of sustainability accessible to students and practitioners, in the belief that recent developments in interactive governance and behavioural economics can be helpful in dealing with the design, valuation and distributional concerns of environmental policy. This first chapter explores the state of the art in environmental policy analysis. In a democracy, politicians want to be advised on outcomes, on cost-effectiveness and distributional consequences, on where the dust settles after a specific intervention. It closes with a brief introduction in global economic development and ecological constraints.