Eco-eco and int. assessment seminar series. "The second generation of Ecological Economics : how far has the apple fallen from the tree?"

Wednesday October 16th from 13h to 14h30 with Dr. Gael Plumecocq. This paper questions the discourse and rhetoric produced by ecological economics through the scientific production published in the eponym journal since its creation in 1989. I used methods of discourse analysis (Alceste and Iramuteq), on 15 241 abstracts of papers published in interdisciplinary, economic, and ecological journals printed between 1990 and April 2013. Results suggest the ecological economics discourse and the environmental economics discourse are getting closer across time. The semantic classification of cooccurrent terms used in Ecological Economics indicates a growing significance of the notion of ¿ecosystem services¿, and of monetary valuation rhetoric in the recent period. I present the case against such a merger and conclude by emphasizing the need to put this issue up for discussion within the community. Keywords: Discourse analysis, Rhetoric, Ecological economics, Environmental economics, Editorial choices Gaël Plumecocq is a Socio-economist trained in Economics of Institutions. He holds a PhD in Economics from the University Paris West ¿ Nanterre ¿ La Défense (2010), with a dissertation on the roles of social norms and conventions in the multilevel coordination of infra-regional policies for sustainable development. He is Fellow researcher at the French National Institute for Agricultural Researches (INRA), based in the ¿Agroecosystems & Agriculture, Resource Management, Innovations and Ruralities » (AGIR) Unit. He is associated to the IASTE group since 2013. Currently, he works on several research projects funded by the French National Research Agency (ANR) and the European Commission (FP7) on the implementation of technical, organizational, and institutional innovations for a more sustainable agriculture. In particular, he focuses on the collective processes through which sustainable solutions are legitimized, and adopted or rejected by means of deliberative evaluation. He is developing a method of discourse analysis that crosses textual statistics and multi-criteria evaluation.