Frontiers in Resource and Rural Economics: Human-Nature, Rural-Urban Interdependencies

Agricultural and Resource Economics Review, Apr 2009 by Steele, Scott

Jun-Jie Wu, Paul Barkley, and Bruce A. Weber (eds.). 2008. Frontiers in Resource and Rural Economics: Human-Nature, Rural-Urban Interdependencies. Washington, D.C.: Resources for the Future, 266 pp., $85.00 (cloth), $41.95 (paperback).

Many "frontier" collections are accessible only to a select group of specialist researchers and academics. Rarely are such works accessible to policymakers and ordinary citizens. The edited volume reviewed here-Frontiers in Resource and Rural Economics-is unique in its accessibility to a wide field of economists, social scientists, policymakers, and educated citizens with interests in examining the interdependencies among human and ecological systems, and urban and rural settlements.

The editors of this volume conceive it as an effort "to push back the frontiers of our knowledge about resource and rural economics by exploring the interdependencies between natural resource management and rural development as well as between rural and urban communities" (p. vii). Seen both as a celebration of Emery Castle's outstanding contributions to resource and rural economics and as an opportunity to advance social science research and policy design, the symposium on which this volume is largely based brought together leading scholars in disparate fields to consider the past, present, and future of resource and rural economics.

The final product is an edited volume of fourteen chapters divided into four parts. Used to lay the groundwork for the volume, the initial chapter is, appropriately, co-authored by Emery Castle. In addition to summarizing the content of the volume, Castle and David Ervin highlight five priority subjects that are, and will continue to be, of primary import in the continued development of rural and resource economics. It is useful to highlight these topics, as they arise frequently in alternative forms throughout this collection. First is the need to develop tools, methods, and concepts to account for, and explain, the interactions between economic and ecological systems. Both systems are dynamic and complex. Nevertheless, the tendency to treat these systems as "stand alone" systems is no longer useful, as the interactions between the ecological system and the economic system have been found to be so diverse and substantive that employing a ceteris paribus assumption, on either system, is likely untenable. Second, Castle and his co-author highlight the need to integrate social, economic, and political science into the investigation of the interactions between humans and nature and between rural, urban, and fringe settlements. A singular disciplinary perspective, it is argued, is likely to fail in providing the rich conceptual apparatus needed to investigate the challenging interactions and paradoxes at the heart of rural and resource economics. The volume itself reflects this priority in bringing together leading experts in a variety of fields to tackle the issues at hand. A third priority relates to intermediate decision making and the importance of local and regional agency. The fourth priority concerns the potential conflict between "efficiency" and "sustainability" in the design of land use policy. To incorporate "sustainability," the concept of "efficiency" may need to be modified as core sustainability issues, like intergenerational equity, are not central to efficiency- based policy analysis. Finally, from Castle and Ervin's perspective, a fifth priority must focus on how best to make decisions under uncertainty where irreversibility holds and potential threshold effects may lead to catastrophic ecological outcomes.

Part I of the volume contains two chapters focused on the past 50 years of resource and rural economics. This section's initial chapter by Daniel Bromley offers a condensed history of environmental and natural resource economics. This contribution is valuable for its clarity and in directing scholars to the seminal works shaping the evolution of environmental and natural resource economics. Further, the chapter contains a reflection on "whether our specialized field is well positioned to be relevant in the future" (p. 17). In this case, Bromley expresses concern, first, that disciplinary belief systems may hinder our ability to spot important new problems and develop innovative tools, and, second, that a policy maxim to "maximize social net benefit" is wrongheaded and not supported by a strong conceptual foundation. The chapter concludes by calling for "environmental and resource economists to start the longoverdue quest for a new conceptual ground on which to build our specialty" (p. 25).

Concluding Part I is a short reference on the historic development of rural economics as a field of study. The presentation suggests that the field of rural economics was formed primarily in response to pragmatic problems as they arose historically in the U.S. countryside.

Part II consists of four chapters exploring the interdependencies at the core of this volume. The initial chapter is perhaps the most technical of the volume and aims to illustrate a fundamental insight attributed to Castle. Through general equilibrium modeling and numerical computations, Kerry Smith and Jared Carbone intend to show that "economic interactions outside markets influence what takes place inside markets" (p. 45). The work is nicely motivated with reference to the traditional circular flow model which, Smith and Carbone argue, provides "historical precedent that seems to have allowed modern general equilibrium models to ignore the physical world" (p. 58). But the physical world cannot be ignored, and Smith and Carbone aim to demonstrate this point by developing a model to show how the "physical link between emissions and air quality can alter judgements about the net benefits of policies" (p. 59). The implications of this work point to the fundamental weaknesses surrounding benefit-cost policy prescriptions and suggest a need to develop alternatives.