Ecological Planning and Economic Rationalities: Political and Epistemological Theories in the Age of Polycrisis

ongoing

EcoPlanAge revisits planning as one of the crucial political concepts of the 20th century and offers a new conceptual framework for democratic ecological planning in the 21st century. With climate change, the pandemic and the war in Ukraine, expressions like ‘war economy’, ‘plan’ and ‘new deal’ have ceased to be relics of the past. Degrowth (DG), Green New Deal (GND) and Green Growth (GG) rationalities are either praising or criticizing planning as an effective tool to tackle our polycrisis. Yet, some celebrate its democratic nature, others perceive it as authoritarian. EcoPlanAge identifies an urgent need for conceptual clarification: what precisely does planning mean in the contemporary era? On what grounds is it praised or criticized? By crossing political theory, conceptual history and political ecology it shows how DG, GND, GG rationalities are still influenced by the two strains that have characterized the 1920s socialist calculation debate on planning possibilities: the formal rationality of neoliberalism and the substantive rationality of socialism. EcoPlanAge selects four authors who affect eco-planning debates: Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich August von Hayek (neoliberal strain); Otto Neurath and Karl Polanyi (socialist one). It reconstructs their epistemological and political theories and analyzes the conception of nature, time and gender that underpin their planning frameworks by highlighting the interrelation between their political theories and the concrete historical planning experiments of their time (war economies, Red Vienna, New Deal, Fascism, Nazism, Soviet planning). Finally, it discusses the utility of these planning theories in thinking about a new conceptual framework for democratic eco-planning in our age of polycrisis. The project will be carried out at the University of Bologna (Prof. Michele Filippini, Prof. Emanuele Leonardi), at Boston University (Prof. Quinn Slobodian) and at Brunel University London (Prof. Gareth Dale).