I did it

Finally, I get a Distinction for my MSc, with a HKD500 cash prize as well. But I will be more excited if I can get the another cash prize of HKD6000 for the best disseration in the class. Seems that it has been awarded to someone else. Anywayz, I already did what I promised to myself at the beginning of the study.

Formation of environmental values

Values. What are values? Can be prices you pay in the market, can be your attitudes towards something. But how can we determine their relationship when there does not exist a market for that product?

Mainstream economists are more than familiar with the estimation of the values of non-marketed environmental goods. We got thousands of articles talking about the determination of values of different environmental goods; we got a long list of valuation techniques for us to make use of, too. Finally we got the numbers. But do we clearly understand how the 'numbers' are formed? Everyone in an introductory economics class can tell me the socioeconomics characteristics of the respondents (for Contingent Valuation Method) would matter.

But I am talking about the 'process'. Dr. CL Spaash, among others, suggested that when a small group of people could have a discussion before they stated the monetary values for certain environmental goods, the values would be different, comparing to individual interviews. This is a process that mimics the real delibrative process in a democratic society.

A large group of elderly and mid-age individuals living in the same public housing estate for more than 30 years may have different values too, because they have developed a strong sense of belongings to the built environment as well as the landscapes inside. An good example is trees, under which they roamed for no reason, they slept for a whole afternoon, they chated with each other. Their 30-year living in that estate is a process, a much longer process.

Contrast to neoclassical economic views, preferences can change along with temporal and spatial variations. Values are not only a reflection of individuals' rational behaviours, but are socially constructed - that means values are not a matter of one single person, but a group of people who are interacting with each other and with the environment as well.

I am preparing to capture the impacts of these variations on environmental values.

What's Ecological Economics?

Forget to do one thing that I should do in the first post - to explain what Ecological Economics means. Quote from Wiki:

Ecological economics is a transdisciplinary field of academic research that addresses the dynamic and spatial interdependence between human economies and natural ecosystems. Ecological economics brings together and connects different disciplines, within the natural and social sciences but especially between these broad areas.
As the name suggests, the field is comprised of researchers with a background in economics and ecology. An important motivation for the emergence of ecological economics has been criticism on the assumptions and approaches of traditional (mainstream) environmental and resource economics. Ecological economics presents a more pluralistic approach to the study of environmental problems and policy solutions, characterized by systems perspectives, adequate physical and biological contexts, and a focus on long-term environmental sustainability. Ecological economics can be regarded as a version of environmental science with much emphasis on social, political, economic and behavioral issues.

Ecological economics' intellectual ancestry may be traced in large part to political economy, a refinement of early economic theory that includes among its earlier researchers Thomas Malthus, David Ricardo and John Stuart Mill. Mill, in particular, by hypothesizing that the "stationary state" of an economy might be something that could be considered desirable, anticipated later insights of modern ecological economists, without having had their experience of the social and ecological costs of the dramatic post-World War II industrial expansion.

The objective of ecological economics (EE) is to ground economic thinking and practice in physical reality, especially in the laws of physics (particularly the laws of thermodynamics) and in knowledge of biological systems. It accepts as a goal the improvement of human wellbeing through economic development, and seeks to ensure achievement of this through planning for the sustainable development of ecosystems and societies. It distinguishes itself from neoclassical economics (NCE) primarily by its assertion that economics is a subfield of ecology, in that ecology deals with the energy and matter transactions of life and the Earth, and the human economy is by definition contained within this system. In contrast, NCE has historically assumed implicitly (and, more recently, explicitly) that the environment is a subset of the human economy. In this approach, if nature is valuable to our economies, that is because people will pay for its services such as clean air, clean water, encounters with wilderness, etc.

So, it is clear that EE is not a branch of economics but a hybrid of various pentinent disciplines. Urban ecological economics, the field I am working on, is a combination of economics, urban planning and human/physical geography as well. As strange as it is in HK, I sometimes feel lonely when I find no one to share except my supervisor. Well...perhaps, as he said, doing research is a lonely journey.