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European Association
of Environmental and Resource Economists
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EAERE President Correspondence
N. 3 - October 2004 - Testing Theory
Colleagues,
There's an Irish expression: 'You start out with a lot of theories and no children, and end up with a lot of children and no theories.' Everyone smiles knowingly in recognition of the gap between ex ante expectation, and ex post reality. But in truth, the evidence of experience does not leave us theoryless. Rather, our theories become more nuanced, more shaded, less unambiguous, less arrogant. But we need the interface between theory and evidence so that the latter can inform and improve the former. Theory, Scott Barrett has observed, is 'structured imagination.' It is crucial that we have this structure, even if only to reject it. Facts uninformed by theory are like an amoeba - formless, directionless and ultimately uninteresting. But theory perpetually disassociated from the reality check of evidence can likewise lose its way.
John Von Neumann observes that:
Mathematical ideas originate in empirics….But once they are so conceived, the subject begins to live a peculiar life of its own and is better compared to a creative one, governed almost entirely by aesthetical motivations…As a mathematical discipline travels, or after much 'abstract' inbreeding, it is in danger of degeneration….whenever this stage is reached, the only remedy seems to me to be the rejuvenating return to the source: the re-injection of more or less directly empirical ideas'. (From A Beautiful Mind, by Sylvia Nasar, Touchstone, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1998.)
The strand of our profession that addresses environmental and natural resource phenomena would appear to lend itself to a very active and productive interaction between theory and practise, imagination and experience. And yet we observe that evidence based analysis comprises a minor share of our scholarship, and, according to some metrics, a declining one.
And for academics in particular, it can be difficult to traverse the route from concept to where things are done. A former academic colleague at University College Dublin, Seamus Deane, expressed the dilemma:
I remember at times
How irresponsible I have
Become. no ruling passion
Obsesses me, although passions
Are what I play among.
I'll know the library in a city
Before I'll know there is a slum.
I could wish the weight of
Learning would bring me down
To where things are done.The annual Global conference on Environmental Taxation, the Applied Environmental Economics Conference and the meetings associated with the European Society for Ecological Economics are growing, and all attract empirically rooted work.
I order to help correct this asymmetry in our endeavours, we are initiating a pilot scheme at our annual meeting in Bremen in June 23-26, 2005. For this meeting, we have identified four themes - emissions trading, renewable energy, transport and the environment, and biodiversity. For each of these, we are inviting submissions of evidence based papers, i.e. contributions where there is a substantive effort to test propositions emanating from theory with evidence. This is not a zero sum game. We continue to cherish and encourage submissions exclusively rooted in theory. We will start each evidence-based session in the morning with an invited 'stage setting' paper, followed by clusters of papers in sessions selected by peer review. For each theme, we may also have a panel incorporating some practitioners from the field in question. This initiative is taking place under the strategic direction of the Programme Committee led by Nick Hanley.
The extent of these sessions depends on the number of quality papers we receive.
We hope that these sessions may also be of interest to policy practitioners, who will come along to see what evidence-based analysis has to offer them as they try to improve the quality of their decisions.
So please 'spread the word' that these sessions are happening, and invite your colleagues who might have regarded the EAERE conference as inhospitable territory for evidence based work to change their minds and contribute papers.
More generally, if you have ideas on this concept, and how it might be developed, send a note to our Secretary General (monica.eberle@feem.it) so we can address your concerns at Council.
Favourite Quote: The encyclopedists wanted to know everything…..but that direct relationship between the self and - as the Italians say - lo scibile the knowable - was already broken. Leonardo da Vinci still had everything in his head, still knew everything, but now….it's not longer possible to know everything. The tie between the Self and Things no longer exists. One must make a world of one's own in order to satisfy one's need to know, one's need for order. Samuel Beckett
Frank J. Convery
EAERE President
Past Correspondence
