The Capital Theory Approach to Sustainability: A Critical Appraisal

This paper examines critically some recent developments in the sustainability debate. The large number of definitions of sustainability proposed in the 1980's have been refined into a smaller number of positions on the relevant questions in the 1990's. The most prominent of these are based on the idea of maintaining a capital stock. I call this the capital theory approach (CTA). Though these concepts are beginning to inform policies there are a number of difficulties in applying this approach in a theoretically valid manner and a number of critics of the use of the CTA as a guide to policy. First, I examine the internal difficulties with the CTA and continue to review criticisms from outside the neoclassical normative framework. The accounting approach obscures the underlying assumptions used and gives undue authoritativeness to the results. No account is taken of the uncertainty involved in sustainability analysis of any sort. In addition, by focusing on a representative consumer and using market (or contingent market) valuations of environmental resources, the approach (in common with most normative neoclassical economics) does not take into account distributional issues or accommodate alternative views on environmental values. Finally, I examine alternative approaches to sustainability analysis and policy making. These approaches accept the open-ended and multi-dimensional nature of sustainability and explicitly open up to political debate the questions that are at risk of being hidden inside the black-box of seemingly objective accounting.