Coevolutionary Development Potential

Richard B. Norgaard
If economic development is real not simply one group exploiting others or this generation
living better at the expense of the next then economic systems must have an inherent
potential for development. Existing economic thought on the potential for sustain able
development is neither explicit nor consistent with knowledge accumulated in the natural
sciences. Neoclassical economists assume that the potential resides in our ability to devise
technologies which augment the quality of labor and capital and which allow for the
continued exploitation of lower quality stock resources. This assumption has been the focus
of intermittent debate over the nature and limits of technological change and natural
resources development since the beginnings of economics. The debate has influenced the
development of biology and affected resource management policies. While the debate has
raised disturbing issues within economics, it has resulted neither in resolutions nor in new
directions in economic thought. The sustainability debate has not been productive because
it has been set within an in adequate framework. The neoclassical model assumes that
factors of production and the products of economic activity come in discrete units related
only in the process of economic production or through markets. This simplification has
proven very powerful for explaining market phenomena. But neither natural resources and
environmental services as factors of production nor environmental impacts as products of
economic activity come in discrete units. The assumptions of the model are incongruent
with the nature of the real world. It is ironic that environmental problems in economics are
thought of as problems of market failure rather than as evidence of the applicable limits of
the market model. Alternative economic models are no better. Marxist models assume that
capitalists exploit workers. Resource use and environmental problems can only be explored
as aspects of this exploitation. Structuralist models similarly restrict issues regarding
resources and the environment to a presumed underlying structural problem. The key ideas
of institutional economics are general; they do not constrain institutionalists to a particular
model structure. Within the general consensus that institutions are important and evolve on
their own, a few institutional economists have considered the nature of environmental
systems (Kapp 1950; CiriacyWantrup 1963). Overall, however, institutionalists have
emphasized institutions apart from nature. Some have reached pessimistic conclusions
about the long run (Heilbroner 1980) while others have waxed optimistic (Brinkman 1980).
Like the neoclassical model, none of the alternative models focuses on resources and
environmental systems and incorporates assumptions that are appropriate for the
investigation of the sustainability of economic development. The coevolutionary
development paradigm (Norgaard 1981, 1983, and 1984) is designed to address whether
economic development can be maintained over the long run. In turn, the paradigm reframes
what real development can mean. This paper describes the coevolutionary development

process, documents that it stems from a real potential, and raises doubts about the
desirability of growth based on stockresource exploitation.
I. THE COEVOLUTIONARY DEVELOPMENT PROCESS In biology, coevolution refers
to an evolutionary process based on reciprocal responses between two closely interacting
species (Ehrlich and Raven 1964; Baker and Hurd 1968). Coevolutionary explanations have
been given for the shape of both the beaks of hummingbirds and the flowers they feed on,
the behavior of bees and the distribution of flowering plants, the biochemical defenses of
plants and the immunity of their insect prey. The concept can be broadened to encompass
any ongoing feedback process between two evolving systems, including social and
ecological systems. Dunn (1971) and Boulding (1978) describe economic development in
evolutionary terms by identifying isomorphisms in social and ecological systems along the
lines suggested by Bertalanffy (1968). Both Dunn and Boulding draw analogies between
ecological and social systems, between genetic mutation and technological and social
innovation, between survival of the fittest and economical and institutional competition,
and between efficiently tapping the sun's energy and maximizing profits. Coevolution,
however, is an interactive rather than a parallel or analogous process. For this reason, the
coevolutionary model was developed from the work of cultural ecologists where social and
ecological interaction is the distinguishing concept (Stew ard 1955; Rappaport 1968; and
Harris 1979). The cultural ecology perspective, however, has largely evolved from studies
of primitive societies in homeostatic equilibrium with their environment. Except for Harris,
few cultural ecologists have addressed the global issues of economic development of
interest to economists. One way to look at the interaction of ecological and social systems
is through energy flows.
Coevolutionary development can be envisioned as a sequential process involving a surplus
of energy beyond that necessary to maintain the social and ecological systems in their
present states. A surplus of energy would be defined as more than the ecological system
needs to maintain its present mix of biomass and more than the social system needs to
maintain the size and welfare of its population. The surplus energy may be either directed
to, or fortuitously result in, a new interaction between the social and ecological systems. If
this new interaction is favorable to society, results in a continuing energy surplus, and if this
surplus is invested in further beneficial change, coevolutionary development is taking
place. Sociosystems and ecosystems are maintained through numerous feedback
mechanisms. Coevolution occurs when at least one feedback is changed, which then
initiates a reciprocal process of change. An important feature of this process is that
feedbacks that previously maintained an equilibrium in the ecosystem may be assumed by
or shifted to the social system. Eugene Odum (1969) characterizes agricultural development
as a transformation of the ecosystem to reduced numbers of species and usually lower
combined efficiency of nutrient recycling, higher but less stable rates of production, and
low biomass stocks relative to natural conditions. As people push ecosystems in this

direction to suit their own needs, they intervene in nutrient cycles and disturb some
equilibrating mechanisms that evolved within the ecosystem. Coevolutionary development
occurs faster, or is perhaps only possible, if the sociosystem compensates for these natural
system losses. New sociosystem functions may entail, for ex ample, managing legumes to
replace portions of lost nutrient cycles, weeding to offset natural succession, and combating
herbivorous insects to compensate for lost natural pest control mechanisms. These new
sociosystem functions are costs because they involve managerial effort, the acquisition of
knowledge, the use of natural resources, and the establishment and maintenance of
institutions. Ecosystem modification need not entail more sociosystem involvement. But
when it does, the costs of these new activities must be deducted from the gross benefits of
the new interaction. Coevolutionary development has been taking place for thousands of
years. The rise of paddy rice culture in Southeast Asia is an instructive example. The land
extensive practice of slash and burn agriculture was gradually abandoned over many
centuries as investments were made in dikes, terraces, and water delivery systems for
increasingly intensive paddy agriculture. The benefits from this ecological transformation
came in the form of superior weed control and greater nutrient retention. The environmental
system modification process, however, was not unilateral. In order to maintain the
ecological system in its modified form and to acquire the benefits of modification,
individuals changed their behavior and the social system adapted to assist and reinforce
appropriate individual behavior. In the case of paddy rice, the benefits from ecological
transformation could only, be acquired through complex social changes that facilitated
property ownership, water management, and labor exchanges. Economic views of Western
history typically emphasize the dramatic increase in the productivity of the few individuals
still working in agriculture. This increase is generally attributed to a continual decrease in
environmental constraints on farmers. The coevolutionary perspective emphasizes the
increase in individual task specialization and the increase in the cultural or institutional
complexity of maintaining feedback mechanisms between specialized actors within the
social system and between the social system and the ecosystem. The coevolutionary view
emphasizes an increasingly important, and frequently more complex, interaction between
man and his environment. Western agriculture was once a small scale, labor intensive,
polycultural, and near subsistence interaction between the social and ecological systems.
The systems coevolved to a large scale, mechanized and energy intensive, monocultural,
commercial farming interaction. This new agricultural interaction is maintained by a highly
complex system of farm implement and agrochemical industries, a highly developed
marketing system, and government institutions to generate and disseminate knowledge,
develop new inputs, regulate markets, absorb risk, subsidize capital, limit the distributional
effects of adjustments, and control environmental and health impacts. The various
sociosystem elements in part evolved in reaction to the ecosystem's responses to human
activities. While monocultural systems brought increasing returns to scale with
mechanization, their instability and the increased risk borne by a farmer with a single crop
encouraged the use of agro chemicals and risk spreading institutions. Similarly, ecosystem

responses to agrochemicals led to new institutions to regulate pesticides and water pollution
as well as to new research programs in agricultural experiment stations. Equally important,
the institutional responses typically encouraged further changes in similar directions. Crop
insurance and regulated markets, for example, reduce the risks of monocultural production
and make it more attractive. Today's agricultural systems have soil features, weed
dynamics, and insect-crop interactions that reflect coevolution with the sociosystem, while
today's agricultural institutions reflect the vulnerability of disturbed soil to wind and water
erosion, the adaptations of insect populations to chemical control, and the susceptibility of
monocultural systems to variations in weather. Western agriculture was transformed by
factor augmentation, by increasing the rate of use of separate factors of production. The
most significant change was in the use of purchased inputs produced from stock resources.
The ecological system responded to this change, initiating a coevolutionary response with
the social system that continues today. Coevolutionary development, however, was not
being realized. Coevolutionary processes have unveiled the negative aspects of stock
exploitive technologies or, at best, offset the negative effects. To improve upon the past, we
need a better understanding of the nature of coevolutionary potential. II. THE NATURE
OF COEVOLUTIONARY POTENTIAL
Life is a member of the class of phenomena which are open or continuous systems able to
decrease their internal entropy at the expense of substances or free energy taken in from the
environment and subsequently rejected in a degraded form.
Since the beginnings of agriculture until the significant use of stock resources a little more
than a century ago, the human population has doubled more than eight times. This growth
can most easily be explained as the result of a process of capturing coevolutionary
potential. During the past century, increases in population and economic well being
primarily came from the augmentation of factors of production physical capital
accumulated, the quality of the labor force improved, and stock resources were exploited at
much higher rates. While social and ecological systems coevolved, growth came through an
increased flow of imputs. In this increased flow, stock resources played a new and
proportionately larger role. Though the rate of population doubling increased dramatically
with the significant exploitation of stock resources, it has doubled less than twice. Seven
millenia of coevolutionary agricultural development and a longer, earlier history of
progress in hunting and gathering, provides empirical testimony that outweighs the record
of factor augmented growth by at least seventy centuries to only somewhat more than one.
Coevolutionary potential stems from two phenomena which form the major premises of the
coevolutionary development argument. First, evolution has been a negentropic process.
Planet Earth, at least with respect to human needs, has acquired a better order through
evolution. Second, knowledge and the ability to learn have been incorporated in the
perceptual systems of individuals and the cultural systems of societies through evolutionary
processes including natural selection. Since these phenomena are described in parts of the

natural science literature rarely cited in the economics literature, they will be developed in
some detail. A third premise, that additional coevolutionary potential still exists, is also key
to the argument. From a perspective limited to people and Planet Earth, evolution has been
a negentropic process. Four and a half billion years ago, Earth did not have the order that
allows us to exist today. Whether by chance or by design, life somehow started. Gradually
life transformed its own environment. The nitrogen molecules in the atmosphere are a
product of the early anaerobic life forms while oxygen molecules are largely a product of
later net plant growth. By evolutionary and coevolutionary processes, various species
evolved to form the highly diverse and complex ecosystems of today. The oxygen we
breathe, the plants and animals we eat, and the hydrocarbons we tap to fuel our industries
are products of biological processes. Even the ordering of minerals improved for us over
eons by various physical processes stemming from solar energy and the gradual cooling of
the earth. From a human perspective, entropy on Planet Earth has decreased. Evolution has
not defied the second law of thermodynamics. The increase in order and in the availability
of energy is only a local phenomenon. Plants have captured some of the sun's energy and,
with the assistance of other organisms, used it to create certain forms of order that happen
to be beneficial to people. But energy in the solar system overall is dissipating, proceeding
from potential to kinetic, still becoming less and less available. The sun will die in perhaps
another and a half billion years, but for now and the forseeable future, life is capturing
more of the sun's energy in a form that is more beneficial for us than it was in the
beginning. Though it is obvious that Earth has a superior order now, misinterpretations of
the second law of thermodynamics have masked this reality. Life maintains order, not in
spite of the laws of entropy, but because of DNA and the energy that plant life captures
from the sun. From simple amoebae to complex vertabrates, life is a process of maintaining
order, of maintaining the processes of life and the characteristics of particular species. This
order is encoded as information in the arrangement of the bases of DNA molecules.8
Singlecelled organisms and tissue cells in higher organisms replicate by a process whereby
paired chains in the DNA molecule split, reform they paired parts, and provide the
information necessary for reconstructing the characteristics of new cells. Individual cells
form and die, but the cell's order lives on and the orderly life processes provided by each
cell type continue. Similarly, individuals die but species can live on through sexual
reproduction. Order, however, is not simply maintained. The diverse gene pools of each
species are constantly subjected to the selective pressures of changing physical and
biological factors. In addition, mutations occur through imperfect DNA replication and
DNA damage. A small proportion of mutations facilitate the functioning of the organism in
its environment and, in turn, change the biotic selective pressures on other species.
Evolution necessarily went from the simple to the more complex, but how ecosystems
developed such a multitude of different and diversely interdependent species remains a
mystery. Animals, even amoebae, learn. The sensory systems of even the most simple
animals enable them to recognize different stimuli. Similarly, the brains of even the less
developed species deduce cause and effect and extrapolate experience to new situations.

Western thought has emphasized formal learning and neglected the innate. This has led to
the view of past evolution as a chance process. Quite the contrary, learning, knowledge, and
evolution have been intertwined from some where near the beginning. This means that the
fitness of animal species, especially the vertebrates, is partly related to the correctness of
their perceptions as to the nature of reality and to their ability to learn. To some ex tent,
reality has coevolved with perceptions of reality. Animals not only learn but learn together.
Ants, wolves, and humans have learned in very different ways to live in social groups. The
survival of individuals and of the species now depends on their social behavior. In some
cases social roles have become genetically encoded, while in others culture is the sole
repository. Cultures evolve through random change, deliberate trial, error, and learning, and
through natural selection. Cultural adaptations survive if they make the culture more fit.
Information with considerable survival value becomes incorporated in culture in ways
which individuals do not under stand or even perceive. The new sociobiology literature
uses a coevolutionary framework to describe how cultural adaptations have influenced
genetic selection while genetic factors have, in turn, influenced cultural selection. Looking
at the world this way, it is futile to distinguish between natural and cultural factors for over
time they have become hope lessly intertwined. Agriculture has long relied on cultural
knowledge for ecosystem management through shifting the mix of species. Deliberate
planting and watering, hand weeding, plowing, flooding, and burning are direct means of
favoring productive species, reducing the competition for nutrients by "weeds," and
nurturing species that complement each other. Plants complement one another by providing
shade, by having associated soil microorganisms that fix nitrogen or help other plants
absorb mineral nutrients, and by hosting predators of other plant's pests. The optimal
management of interacting species in an ecosystem can be compared with the optimal
control of nonmarket effects in an economic system (Tullock 1971). People have been
affecting, and been affected by, their environment for some time, up to three and a half
million years. Agroecosystem management has indirectly influenced the course of
evolution for organisms with rapid regeneration times, from microorganisms to insects.
Simultaneously, people have directly selected individuals within populations of species
from corn to cows for reproduction based on preferred characteristics. Both agroecosystem
management and deliberate selective pressure have been culturally learned and reinforced.
Individuals learn selection and management techniques from others. Society maintains and
allocates shared resources including fields and water. Appropriate behavior is enforced.
Cultural ecologists have shown for traditional societies how values, kinship, customs,
rituals, and taboos are related to the maintenance of an interaction with an ecosystem."To a
large ex tent culture also guides modern agricultural societies, but modernization has
entailed a continual substitution of formal institutions and objective knowledge for culture
and cultural knowledge as we commonly think of them. Modernization of agriculture in
Third World countries has emphasized factor augmentation through new inputs and training
for farmers. The cultural knowledge and traditional agroecosystems that evolved over
centuries have not only been ignored but destroyed. Lacking a philosophy and science of

development that incorporates coevolutionary processes, we have given insufficient respect

to the importance of building on or learning from how ecological and social systems have
interacted and affected each other in the past. Agroecology has emerged recently as a new
field through the work of plant and insect ecologists interested in agricultural development.
Agroecologists think of agriculture as a process of ecosystem management. They learn
about ecological systems by studying how traditional farming systems have coevolved.
Traditional farming systems represent a resource of coevolutionary knowledge which can
be augmented with scientific knowledge a d which, to some extent, can be used to improve
the sustainability, productivity, and stability of modern agricultural systems.
Coevolutionary development potential is far from exhausted. The existing favorable
ecological order is sustained through the photosynthesis of only 0.25%of the sun's energy
that strikes the land surface. Even modern cornfields only capture 2% while up to 13%
could be captured through photosynthesis. The long run potential for DNA to provide more
order is enormous. Neither ecological nor social systems are static, and cultural learning is
still taking place. The existence of coevolutionary potential is certain. There is the historical
record itself seven millenia of coevolutionary agricultural development and a longer, earlier
history of progress in hunting and gathering. How this potential might be captured and what
kind of future coevolutionary development might hold is unclear. Coevolutionary
development may be limited to food, clothing, shelter, and health. Skyscrapers, high speed,
long distance travel, and similar products might only be possible through the use of stock
resources. On the other hand, inner city ghettos, the destruction of indigenous cultures, and
nuclear holocaust might also be avoided along a coevolutionary development path.
Needless to say, the future along either path is uncertain. Due to the fragmentation of
knowledge in science today, scientists and laypeople alike can neither significantly question
our current development path nor conceive of a significantly different path. Our society's
emphasis on atomistic and mechanistic thinking makes it difficult to comprehend, let alone
capture, coevolutionary development potential. Even if systems and evolutionary thinking
were much better developed, coevolutionary potential can only be captured slowly. Society
will make the transition to this slower rate of growth only through a better understanding of
the costs and limits of stock exploitive growth.
III. STOCKRESOURCE EXPLOITATION IN A COEVOLUTIONARY WORLD
During the last century, increases in population and in economic well being have primarily
come from stock resource exploitation. The potential for this growth was inherent in our
ability to discover and adopt new technologies. But Georgescu Roegen has shown that most
technological change simply allows us to exploit low entropy resources faster and thereby
transform the favorable order of the natural world into a homogeneous garbage dump
sooner. He correctly critiques increases in well being that come strictly through augmenting
factors of production. Current stock exploitive growth necessarily comes at the expense of
future generations. Increasing entropy seems first and most noticeably to be taking an

institutional toll. Resources do not simply run out or even necessarily become "physically,"
in an onsite production sense, more difficult to extract. Ever more sophisticated technology
to exploit increasingly intractable stock resources, however, requires continuous
improvements in human skills and organization. In 1870 about 0.25%of the population of
the United States between 18 and 65 years of age was enrolled in higher education. Some
were there learning to develop and utilize new technologies. In 1920 almost 1% of the
working age population was investing in higher education rather than working. This
proportion rose to 6.2%by 1970 and 9.7%by 1980. In addition, a larger proportion of the
students were acquiring knowledge for the development and maintenance of technologies
and institutions. This dramatic increase is representative of other changes in our society.
Research and development have become substantial sectors in the economy. Private and
public bureaucracies have arisen to capture the economic gains and minimize the social and
environmental side effects of new technologies. The social transformations necessary for
the advance and use of stock exploitive technologies have limits. The costs of education,
the productivity of our research and development efforts, and the size and effectiveness of
our bureaucracies are frequently identified as the major factors limiting economic advance
today. A simple extrapolation of higher education attendance documents these limits. At
current rates of increase, 100% of the working age population will be attending school all
the time by the year 2063 (Norgaard 1983). These transformations have one thing in
common. The rapid increases in the demand for education, research and development, and
bureaucratic organization and operation are all based on Western science. In this sense, we
are experiencing the limits of objective knowledge. These limits can be expressed in
coevolutionary terms. In the neoclassical view, the costs of exploiting a stock resource are
the discounted net gains of exploiting the resource later. From the coevolutionary vantage,
this is an underestimate of the costs for at least two reasons. First, stock resources can be
used to initiate or assist coevolutionary development. This option may prove especially
valuable within a social and ecological interaction that is not generating a surplus at the
time but none the less has further coevolutionary potential. From the neoclassical
perspective, this can be thought of as an opportunity cost of using a stock resource for
exploitive development now rather than waiting to use it to initiate or guide coevolutionary
development later. This cost might be expressed as a probability weighted sum of the
discounted higher costs using other resources for reaching alternative social and ecological
system interactions and the discounted value of any interactions foregone. From the
coevolutionary vantage, it is not clear what interest rates are or how to predict the nature,
let alone the probabilities, of future interactions. The second user cost is probably more
significant but is no easier to quantify. Both the social and the ecological systems evolve
during stock exploitation. But this evolution is not coevolutionary. Each system evolves not
strictly in response to the other system but in response to the exploitation of stock
resources. The two systems become"wedged" apart relative to a coevolutionary interaction.
After stocks are exhausted, it is unlikely that the ecological and social systems would be in
a position for subsequent coevolutionary interaction. Ecologists warn us of the potential

consequences of species extinction and irreversible ecosystem transformations. Social

systems suffer from similar transformations. Nearly a decade after the OPEC embargo,
institutions in both the developed and developing countries are still changing, at great cost,
to complement the new relative prices for energy related goods and services. In the United
States the tendency to switch to other stock resources such as coal and oil shale rather than
to flow resources used in the past such as solar and wind power is probably better explained
by the extinction of appropriate institutions and the compatibility of current institutions
than by relative costs in a narrower technological sense. In Alaska, the Middle East, and
other areas with oil, social institutions, fed by oil revenues, are evolving largely
independently of whether they assist in the development of a sustainable social and
ecological interaction. Both coevolutionary and stock exploitive development paths take
social and ecological systems to states from which other development paths may be
difficult or impossible to reach and follow. Some paths presumably retain more options and
flexibility; they eliminate fewer options and allow changes at lower cost. Coevolutionary
development paths may retain more options in addition to the fact that they retain stock
resource exploitation options. Certainly, given the limits imposed by the second law of
thermodynamics on factor augmenting growth, staying on a coevolutionary path avoids the
transition costs of finding and converting to such a path after stock resources have been
depleted. Economic thought typically stems from and reinforces real world institutions.
There is good reason to believe that stock resources are overexploited because current
economic thought and social institutions ignore coevolutionary potential and
coevolutionary user costs. These additional user costs include (1) the losses associated with
not being able to use stock resources for later investment in coevolution, and (2) the losses
associated with returning to and/or accepting a less advantageous coevolutionary path after
the stock resource is depleted. Ignoring coevolutionary user costs results in an overuse of
stock resources. Looking at resource allocation in a broader economic context, ignoring
coevolutionary user costs distorts the relative costs of factors and prices of products. Skills
associated with stock resource exploitation are overvalued relative to skills associated with
environmental management. Stock resource intensive products are underpriced relative to
labor and other flow resource intensive products. Research effort is over allocated to
exploitation technologies relative to environmental management technologies. If a
coevolutionary view of development had been adopted along with other views, our
economy would probably be significantly different and less precarious.
V. TEN CONCLUDING COMMENTS
A broad arrays of ideas new to economics have been related in this paper. Though a major
objective of the paper has been to stress interactive relationships, I will conclude with an
itemized list of important points. First, the neoclassical view of economic development as a
process of augmenting factors of production stems from the basic assumption that factors
are separable. Atomism has a long history in philosophy and the physical sciences. The

benefits of modern technology stem from the scientific advances based on the atomistic
assumption, but the social and environmental costs of modern technology can also be
attributed to this view of the world. A different and historically antecedent view contends
that human welfare and tenure on earth depends on the maintenance of a harmonious
relationship with the natural world. This perspective is grounded morally in many religions
and has been developed further by philosopher naturalists. Formal knowledge about
ecology and evolution during the past century has provided an increasingly strong scientific
foundation for this perspective. Far more than the atomistic mechanistic world view, the
harmony with nature world view has provided much of the philosophical and scientific
bases for the conservation and environmental movements and for the resulting resource and
environmental policies. Second, the coevolutionary, or harmony with nature, development
process has an underlying scientific basis. Plants that capture more of the energy from the
sun have an advantage. Plants and animals that establish viable relationships with each
other also have an advantage. The DNA encoding of these roles is not replicated perfectly.
Nature keeps rolling the dice and some new adaptations survive while, in turn, new
adaptations put new biotic pressures on other species. New adaptations for animals include
the ability to perceive, interpret, and learn. Fitting well has become a conscious process.
And for many species but especially for humans perceiving, interpreting, and learning is a
social as well as an individual process that influences and is influenced by the nature of the
collective consciousness. And this is the third important conclusion. As one of the social
species, our survival depends on the appropriateness of our social consciousness of our
relationship to the environment. Value systems, institutions, and specific technologies
evolve in the context of the overall consciousness, in the context of how we predict
ecosystem responses and interpret our ecological options. Fourth, we are not experiencing
coevolutionary development through the realization of coevolutionary potential.
Knowledge, institutions, and even tastes have evolved during the past century around
atomistic and mechanistic paradigms rather than evolutionary paradigms. The
transformation and management of ecosystems based on prescriptions from atomistic and
mechanistic paradigms leads to immediate quantifiable gains to identifiable factors of
production. These initial gains, however, have repeatedly been followed by costly
consequences for social and ecological systems. These consequences have necessitated
additional corrective social changes and bureaucratic developments that would not have
been necessary if the initial changes had been designed with a coevolutionary paradigm in
mind. Fifth, the coevolutionary perspective gives a better picture of the nature of the social
and ecological problems that accompany the factor augmentation approach to development.
From this vantage, stock resource exploitive development appears to be driving a wedge
between the social and ecological systems such that they no longer respond directly to each
other. Each system responds first to phenomena of stock resource exploitation. The social
system responds to the ecological system only because of the detrimental ecological
response to stock exploitation. Similarly, the ecological system responds to changes in the
social system from stock resource exploitation. The coevolutionary feedback system has

been blocked and rerouted; the prospects for coevolutionary development in the future have
diminished. Sixth, the coevolutionary vantage high lights the uncertainty of the future.
Possible courses of coevolution are unknown. Not only do new components and
interactions evolve over time, but the rules of evolution themselves evolve. The ability to
predict con sequences, supposedly the true test of a science, is not a strength of
evolutionary paradigms. The real uncertainty of the future does not increase as we shift
from an atomistic mechanistic world view to a coevolutionary view. Indeed, to the extent
that the coevolutionary perspective leads to more realistic reactions to new conditions,
uncertainty should decrease. Seventh, it is difficult to imagine how we will continue to
work with ecological and economic thought from here and return to a coevolutionary path,
optimally combine the two perspectives on development, or use the coevolutionary
perspective to foresee and plan for the coevolutionary ramifications of the neoclassical
approach to development. Specifically, it is difficult to imagine institutional changes that
would ensure that coevolutionary user costs be reflected in economic decisions. It seems
unlikely that these costs can be neatly accounted for in property rights, liability rules,
procedural rules, or new bureaucratic structures. Current institutions presume a certain
amount of certainty and separability. Property rights, as well as other institutions, are
established and maintained on the premise that actions have limited effect on definable
components and that these effects do not change over time. The gains from taking a
coevolutionary world view probably will be more easily captured through the development
of ecological and evolutionary philosophies, land ethics, and social pressure than through
legislation; through a clear move away from formal analysis and prediction toward the use
of cultural knowledge; and through a move away from large, formal, centralized, inertia
bound bureaucracies toward smaller, regional institutions. These thoughts, however, are the
beginnings of yet another paper. Eighth, the paper provides a link between economic and
ecological paradigms. A grand synthesis is not the intention but rather an appeal for
theoretical pluralism. Receptivity to alternative vantages on reality facilitates new insights
and exposes old myths, enriching both economics and ecology. Ninth, the coevolutionary
development paradigm provides a new perspective on environmental and cultural
transformation. New arguments for change and preservation cut across the existing
divisions and promise to redefine environmentalists and developers, stock resource
optimists and pessimists, and cultural libertarians, protectionists, and reformers. Over the
past decade, these factions have entered into a costly stalemate and have established
permanent fronts. A redrawing of the lines and redefinition of the interests could prove very
productive in the future. Tenth, all models evolve in response to particular questions. In
turn, the questions one chooses to pursue, especially in the social sciences, are linked to
premises about the nature and state of the world. The classical economic model evolved
more than one and a half centuries ago to explore markets and the relation of individual
economic actors and the state at a time when feudalism was giving way to capitalism. With
the virtual acceptance of capitalism, the neoclassical model began to focus nearly a century
ago on justifying the efficiency per se of market transactions. The assumptions of the

neoclassical model are adequate for such a narrow focus. Few people today doubt the
efficiency of the market except with respect to environmental management and
intertemporal natural resource allocation. One of the major issues of the latter half of this
century is whether and how development might be sustained. The assumptions of the
neoclassical model are inappropriate for these questions. The coevolutionary model
incorporates relationships between people and their environments based on recent advances
in natural science and experience with modern social systems. The model is thereby more
appropriate for exploring relationships between resources, environmental systems, and
social systems over the long run.