Natural Capital

1994 ◽  
Vol 36 ◽  
pp. 169-182 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Holland

Interest in the concept of natural capital stems from the key role which this concept plays in certain attempts to elucidate the goal of sustainable development—a goal which currently preoccupies environmental policy-makers. My purpose in this paper is to examine the viability of what, adapting an expression of Bryan Norton's, may be termed the ‘social scientific approach’ to natural capital (Norton, 1992, p. 97). This approach largely determines the way in which environmental concern is currently being represented in the environmental policy community.

2010 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 221-265 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philippe Fontaine

ArgumentFor more than thirty years after World War II, the unconventional economist Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) was a fervent advocate of the integration of the social sciences. Building on common general principles from various fields, notably economics, political science, and sociology, Boulding claimed that an integrated social science in which mental images were recognized as the main determinant of human behavior would allow for a better understanding of society. Boulding's approach culminated in the social triangle, a view of society as comprised of three main social organizers – exchange, threat, and love – combined in varying proportions. According to this view, the problems of American society were caused by an unbalanced combination of these three organizers. The goal of integrated social scientific knowledge was therefore to help policy makers achieve the “right” proportions of exchange, threat, and love that would lead to social stabilization. Though he was hopeful that cross-disciplinary exchanges would overcome the shortcomings of too narrow specialization, Boulding found that rather than being the locus of a peaceful and mutually beneficial exchange, disciplinary boundaries were often the occasion of conflict and miscommunication.


2013 ◽  
Vol 694-697 ◽  
pp. 3224-3227
Author(s):  
Pei Li ◽  
Chun Mao Wu

Under the development of the social scientific technology, it endangered the environment by the developed mechanism and mass-product which produced many wastes. People should review the design, especially the way of patchwork design. More and more people appreciate the modern fiber art design works which including the patch work design. So, it applies a more expansive space for design developing course. In the thesis, firstly it researches on the fiber art currency and property. Secondly, study the innovative ideas of the patchwork design thought. Lastly, it applies an inspiration on the patchwork design method which based on the sustainable development theory.


Author(s):  
John P. Wilson ◽  
Sonal Choudhary

Sustainability accounting has become a mainstream practice for a large majority of S&P500 companies, and this reflects global society's increasing interest and concern around sustainability issues. In particular, the United Nations published its “Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development,” and 193 countries signed up to achieving the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and 169 associated targets. The UN also called upon companies to help this process across their supply chains and developed a natural capital protocol for assessing and valuing environmental areas and a social capital protocol (SCP) for assessing and valuing human and societal capital such as skills, knowledge, wellbeing, shared values, and institutions. This chapter systematically investigates each of the 12 steps of the social capital protocol and identifies a range of benefits and substantial challenges which companies will face if they wish to account for their social impact across the supply chain.


Author(s):  
Utkarsh Patel ◽  
Satarupa Rakshit ◽  
S. Ashwin Ram ◽  
Zareena Begum Irfan

Around the world, sustainable development has become a top policy discussion as countries struggle to maintain or enhance economic growth without compromising the future. Nowhere is the issue more pressing than in India, where urban areas and their economies are expected to grow rapidly over the next few decades and where resource use and environmental quality are already raising grave concerns. Sustainable development, economic growth that improves the lives of the people without exhausting the environment or other resources, is especially critical in developing countries, where mass urbanization is taking place at a time when man’s impact on the environment has reached a critical juncture. The study investigates if the present pattern of urban development in India in the creation of mega cities is sustainable. The indicators represent a primary tool to provide guidance for policy makers and to potentially assist in decision-making and monitoring local strategies/plans. The outcome of the study will contribute to the design of policies, tools, and approaches essential for planning to attain the goal of sustainable development and the social cohesion of metropolitan regions.


Author(s):  
S. J. Joubert

A broadened perspective to the past? The social scientific approach to the New Testament This paper focuses on the possibilities that the social scientific approach holds out for the understanding of the New Testament. A review of the contributions of the sociological and the cultural anthropological approaches to the New Testament is undertaken before the social-scientific approach as a whole is evaluated. The use of social-scientific models, in particular, in the construction of the possible social contexts of the New Testament documents, is evaluated in terms of the ability of these contexts to establish ‘new’ systems of meaning.


2019 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 210-231
Author(s):  
María Jiménez-Buedo ◽  
Juan Carlos Squitieri

The idea that mechanisms are crucially important to differentiate between genuine and spurious causal relations is ubiquitous both in the philosophical and in the social scientific literature. Yet philosophers of the social sciences have seldom attempted to spell out systematically the way in which mechanistic reasoning or evidence are concretely used to deal with spurious association and the problem of confounders in the social sciences. In this paper, we analyze two recent such accounts, proposed by Harold Kincaid and Daniel Steel. We show how these two accounts radically differ in their notion of mechanism (a process account, and a complex system account, respectively), and how this ultimately impacts in the way in which they understand the inferential role of mechanisms in the social sciences. We then confront both accounts with the details of a well-known controversy around the purportedly causal association between the legalization of abortion and the subsequent fall in criminality in the United States. We show the limitations of both accounts in representing accurately the role of mechanistic evidence and hypotheses in practice.


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