Ecological Economics (journal)

• 1. Introduction

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  Ecological Economics: The Transdisciplinary Journal of the International Society for Ecological Economics launched in 1989 with a founding editor-in-chief named Robert Costanza. Its founding premise was both simple and radical: that the economy and the natural world could not be studied as though they occupied separate universes. The journal asked what happens at the boundary between what it called "nature's household" and "humanity's household." That boundary is where ecosystems and economies collide, compete, and depend on each other. The questions that framing raised have driven decades of contested, creative research. How does a peer-reviewed journal hold together researchers from natural science, social science, and the humanities under one roof? And what makes a journal described as transdisciplinary in spirit different from an ordinary interdisciplinary publication?

• 2. A Journal Between Two Worlds

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  Robert Costanza founded the journal in 1989, under the umbrella of the International Society for Ecological Economics, and the journal has been published by Elsevier on behalf of that society ever since. Its full title announces its ambitions plainly: The Transdisciplinary Journal of the International Society for Ecological Economics. The word transdisciplinary is not a synonym for interdisciplinary. Where an interdisciplinary publication draws on several disciplines, a transdisciplinary one tries to extend and integrate their understanding altogether. The journal's stated concern is the interplay between ecosystems and the economy, described in its own language as the interfaces between nature's household and humanity's household. That framing treated both ecology and economics as systems with internal logic, each shaped by flows of energy, resources, and value. Publishing through Elsevier gave the journal wide distribution and peer-review infrastructure, while the International Society for Ecological Economics provided the intellectual community that would debate its contents.

• 3. Crossing Disciplines

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  Begum Özkaynak of Bogazici University and Stefan Baumgärtner of the University of Freiburg serve as the current editors-in-chief. Their joint tenure reflects the journal's commitment to drawing contributors from institutions and traditions across the world. The journal emphasizes work that integrates insights from the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities together. That is an unusually broad remit. Most academic journals sharpen their focus; this one deliberately widened its lens. The inclusion of humanities alongside natural and social science signals an interest in values, ethics, and culture as legitimate inputs into questions about ecosystems and economies, not merely background noise. Contributors are peer-reviewed, holding the work to scholarly standards even when the methods span very different fields.

• 4. Neoclassical and Heterodox

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  On the economics side, the journal explicitly welcomes contributions from both neoclassical traditions and a broad variety of heterodox approaches. Neoclassical economics rests on market-based models of rational agents optimizing under constraints. Heterodox approaches challenge those assumptions from many directions: institutional economics, ecological thermodynamics, post-Keynesian analysis, feminist economics, and others. Allowing both camps to publish in the same venue has, by the journal's own account, given rise to lively discussions among the membership over the years. That is a measured way of describing what is often genuine theoretical conflict. The question of how to value a wetland, a coral reef, or a stable climate is not one where neoclassical and heterodox economists typically arrive at the same answer. The willingness to host that argument rather than resolve it in advance is itself a defining feature of the publication.