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Lawrence Summers’ Principle

Lawrence Summers is a US economist, former President of Harvard University, and former Chief Economist of the World Bank. The ‘Lawrence Summers’ Principle’ – a term coined by Martinez-Alier (1994) …

DPSIR

DPSIR is a framework for describing the interactions between society and the environment developed by the European Environmental Agency (EEA). It is based on the PSR (Pressures/State/Response) model proposed by …

Post-normal science

Post-normal science (PNS) is a problem-solving framework developed by Silvio Funtowicz and Jerome Ravetz (1993) according to which a new conception of the management of complex science-related issues is proposed. …

Activist knowledge

Activist knowledge refers to all kinds of experience-based knowledge originating from activists in a broad sense, including community groups, NGOs, women’s groups, trade unions, grassroots associations and so on. It …

Ecological footprint

Definition and methodology Widely used by scientists, businesses, governments, agencies, civil society organisations and individuals working to monitor ecological resource use and advance sustainability, the ecological footprint (EF) represents the amount …

Co-management

Many traditional societies formed – and still form – relatively closed systems in which natural resources are managed through complex interplays of reciprocities and solidarities. Forms of collective possession and …

Natural capital depletion tax

Sustainability requires maintaining so-called natural capital intact, or at least, slowing down its loss while waiting for positive technological changes and peak human population. In order to achieve this, an …

Ecological rucksacks (hidden flows)

An ecological rucksack is defined as the total quantity (in kg) of materials removed from nature to create a product or service, minus the actual weight of the product. It …

Access and use rights

Among the institutional arrangements regulating human–nature relationships, rights and obligations to natural resources, and access and use rights play a crucial role (Bromley, 1991; Ostrom and Schlager, 1996; Van Griethuysen, …

Common-pool resources

According to Ostrom (2008), scholars are still in the process of developing a shared language for the broad set of things called ‘the commons’. There is frequently confusion about similarities …