Abstract

In this wide-ranging interview, Clive Spash discusses his career, influences, key publications and how he eventually became a critical realist. In Part 1, he discusses his education, the founding of the International Society for Ecological Economics (ISEE) in 1990 and the European Society for Ecological Economics (ESEE) in 1996, and the period up to and including the publication of his monograph Greenhouse Economics. He ranges over critique of cost–benefit analysis and of integrated assessment models, the central role of ethics, the problems ingrained at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) based on its organizational division of labour and the continual tensions between mainstream economics and ecological economics. In Part 2, he turns to his later work and its explicit critical realist influences.