[VW] Evolutionary and Global Political Economy
Coordinators:
Katarzyna Gruszka
Independent researcher
[email protected]
Georgios Liagouras
University of the Aegean, Greece
[email protected]
Manuel Scholz-Wäckerle
Vienna University of Economics and Business, Austria
[email protected]
In this research area we pursue a critical political economy approach in the spirit of Marx, Schumpeter, Veblen and Georgescu-Roegen, with an emphasis on evolutionary and global questions of capitalist development and beyond. Thereby we want to highlight topics about the evolutionary dialectics involved in processes of spatio-temporal change, in particular concerning the interdependence of variation and transformation. Clearly such an approach emphasizes multi-level interactions between micro-meso-macro or goes beyond this artificial separation. It is furthermore concerned with the environmental implications of technological and institutional change as well as with the geopolitical tendencies of longue durée magnitude, therefore also addressing the evolving hegemonic dependencies as well as the unequal exchange occurring in world-systems and world-ecologies.
The world economy is characterized by a rapid intensification of interdependencies. Nation states develop into continental blocks, economic and political motives of actors and coalitions of actors in the global interplay can rarely be distinguished. In this global political economy of the 21st century the role of economic policy – traditionally bound to measures of fiscal and monetary policy at the national level – has to be redefined and re-designed. The task of this new research area [VW] thus is to provide a research arena for the discussion of evolutionary and global economic policy; it aims for evolutionary economic policy in the sense of debating the framework within which rule systems can experience evolution.
As world-systems evolve under the siege of global capitalism, the task of an evolutionary political economy approach is to get behind the appearances of this globalization and analyze the evolution of those material realities in a critical way. The adoption of evolutionary theory in evolutionary economics used foremost the Modern Darwinian Synthesis for this purpose. In this research area we aim for an evolutionary approach of the social sciences going beyond the adaptationist paradigm of variational evolution and emphasize the dialectics of transformational evolution. The latter assigns agency to economic subjects, allowing them to modify environmental conditions such as institutions, technology, politics as well as the biosphere. Thereby the economic agents are not sketched as mere objects of the internal forces of capitalist development, i.e. market selection. The question of transformational evolution also searches for agencies involved in the sublation processes of capitalist production and exchange, agencies who are constructing niches for (de)centralized democratic economic planning for instance.
We invite contributions from following approaches:
- critical political economy, evolutionary economics, institutional economics, international political economy, ecological economics, systemic cycles of accumulation, world-systems
- evolutionary theory, complex adaptive systems, historical and relational materialism, biophysical foundations
- environmental philosophy, political ecology, science and technology studies
- variation and transformation of global capitalist development, longue-durée
- the analysis of late capitalism, intellectual monopoly capitalism, platform capitalism, the Stack, automation, decarbonization, unequal exchange
- democratic economic planning, social-ecological transformation, degrowth
- computational social simulation approaches to the questions raised
