ISEE 2016: Kenneth Boulding Award Winners Announced

The International Society for Ecological Economics (ISEE) announced the 2016 recipients of the Kenneth Boulding Award that will be presented at the 2016 ISEE Conference, June 26 - 29, on the campus of the University of the District of Columbia. The Kenneth E. Boulding award of the International Society for Ecological Economics (ISEE) is given in honor of people who exemplify aspects of the special character of Kenneth E. Boulding with the hope of perpetuating his many individual strengths, that combined into his wisdom and lasting influence. The 2016 Kenneth Boulding Award to Professor Kanchan Chopra and to Professor Arild Vatn.

Kenneth E. Boulding (1910-1993) was a leading systems thinker who integrated social theory with the natural sciences and moral philosophy. He was an eccentric provocative critic of the fragmentation that characterized modern scholarship. Yet his creativity, seminal ideas, and constructive engagement with the scientific community were widely recognized, resulting in his being elected President of the American Economics Association and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Kenneth and his wife, Elise Boulding, herself a renowned sociologist, were Quakers who actively contributed to the international peace movement. Kenneth lived humbly, with grace, wit and laughter, and maintained unbounded faith that goodness and sensibility would ultimately prevail in a world, then as now, seriously threatened by human folly. 

Kanchan Chopra was until retirement the Director and Professor at the Institute of Economic Growth in Delhi, a prestigious institution. She provided the main impetus for the emergence of the Indian Society for Ecological Economics in 1998 which under her stimulus has regularly held very successful biennial conferences. She has written or edited an impressive series of books, including Growth, Equity, Environment and Population: Economic and Sociological Perspectives (2007) with C H Hanumantha Rao, and Ecological Economics for Sustainable Development (2004) with Charles Perrings.  She trained a generation of researchers in India in environmental and ecological economics. In 2006 she gave her name to the “Kanchan Chopra” committee mandated by the Supreme Court of India to calculate the NPV (net present economic values) lost by diverting forestland for non-forest use, so that compensation would be paid into a fund. This was ecological economics in practice at top judicial and administrative level in a very large and important country - calculation of NPV involved fundamental debates on discount rates, and on the values of marketable and no marketed forests products and environmental services. The Kanchan Chopra committee refused economic valuation of biodiversity as such.

Arild Vatn is professor at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences (NMBU). His main contributions have been in institutional and ecological economics. He has published two major books, Environmental Governance. Institutions, Policies and Actions (2015) and Institutions and the Environment (2005). He had a major role in introducing and rigorously defining the concept of “institutions” for ecological economics.  One recent article is “Markets in environmental governance. From theory to practice”, Ecological Economics, 117:225-233. He gave a memorable plenary talk in at the ISEE conference in Delhi in 2006, explaining the origin and strongly criticizing the principle of “limited liability” in corporation law (remembering that the East India Company was one of the first companies to offer limited liability to its shareholders).  Arild Vatn has published on environmental governance and policy evaluations regarding environmental resources and pollution. He has been a protagonist in debates on environmental valuation. He was president of the European Society of Ecological Economics and he organized a pioneering and very influential series of PhD summer schools in ecological economics in Europe between 2006 and 2014.

For more information for the International Society for Ecological Economics (ISEE) and to register for the 2016 Conference please visit www.isee2016.com.