We develop a comprehensive multi-level approach to ecological economics (CML-approach) which integrates philosophical considerations on the foundations of ecological economics with an adequate operationalization. We argue that the subject matter and aims of ecological economics require a...

Rain-index insurance is strongly advocated in many parts of the developing world to help farmers to cope with climatic risk that prevail in (semi-)arid rangelands due to low and highly uncertain rainfall. We present a modeling analysis of how the availability of rain-index insurance affects the...

While economists have been contributing to the discussion of various aspects of sustainability for decades, it is just recently that the term "sustainability economics" was used explicitly in the ecological, environmental, and resource economics community. Yet, the contributions that use the...

We study optimal adaptive grazing management under uncertain rainfall in a discrete-time model. As in each year actual rainfall can be observed during the short rainy season, and grazing management can be adapted accordingly for the growing season, the closed-loop solution of the stochastic...

Resilience as a descriptive concept gives insight into the dynamic properties of a system. Sustainability as a normative concept captures basic ideas of inter- and intragenerational justice. In this paper we specify the relationship between resilience and sustainable development. Based on an...

We clarify the definition and interpretation of “sustainability economics” (Baumgärtner and Quaas 2010) in response to recent comments by van den Bergh (2010), Bartelmus (2010) and others. For that sake, we distinguish between general and specific definitions of sustainability and...

We argue that economics – as the scientific method of analyzing trade-offs – can be helpful (and may even be indispensable) for assessing the trade-off between intergenerational and intragenerational justice. Economic analysis can delineate the “opportunity set” of politics with respect...

We study how human preferences affect the resilience of economies that depend on more than one type of natural resources. In particular, we analyze whether the degree of substitutability of natural resources in consumer needs may give rise to multiple steady states and path dependence even when...

We empirically study personal norms of sustainability, conceptualized according to the norm-activation theory and operationalized under the notion of strong ecological-economic sustainability, for commercial cattle farmers in semi-arid rangelands of Namibia, a system that is subject to extensive...

We study risk preferences and their determinants for commercial cattle farmers in Namibia who are subject to high precipitation risk that is heterogeneous across farms. We use data on risk preferences from questionnaire and field experiments, simulated data for on-farm precipitation risk and...