Welcome

Clive Spash at the European Parliament 2023

This is my personal website. I am an economist who writes, researches and teaches on public policy with an emphasis on economic and environmental interactions. My main interests are interdisciplinary research on human behaviour, environmental values and the transformation of the world political economy to a more socially and environmentally just system.

Over 30 years, I have worked on a range of subject areas and topics from the economic impacts and control of acidic deposition through atmospheric and plant science relating to urban pollution impacts on agriculture to the economics and ethics of human induced climate change and the plural values related to biodiversity. This has also involved moving away from mainstream environmental and resource economics, looking at links with natural sciences, understanding applied ethics, exploring models of democracy and public participation in political science, and linking with social psychology to develop models of human behaviour and motivation. In turn this has led me to question the foundations of accepted knowledge in both the natural and social sciences. As a result I have been been exploring a philosophy of science that combines and accepts realism, sociology of science, critical analysis and deconstructs the fact-value dichotomy.  For some time now, I have pursued this interdisciplinary and integrative work within the context of ecological economics and more recently through the evolving agenda of a politically aware and emancipatory “Social Ecological Economics“.

Author of over 200 published works (for journal articles, book chapters and books see Chronological Listing of Publications).

Research by journal articles published
  • Professor, Chair of Public Policy and Governance, Institute for Multi-Level Governance & Development, Department of Socio-Economics, WU Vienna University of Economics and Business.
  • Ranked in the top 5% of economists in the world (out of over 60,000 registered authors), by Research Papers in Economics [external link], on multiple criteria including number of distinct publications, pages published, downloads, citations and h-index.
  • Ranked (2021, 2019, 2017, 2015, 2013) in the top 250 business researchers in the category lifetime/overall research achievement, by the leading German business and finance daily newspaper Handelsblatt.
  • Review Editor (1996-2001), Associate Editor (2001-2004), Co-Editor (2005-2006), Editor-in-Chief (2007-2021) of Environmental Values [external link] published by White Horse Press.
  • Co-editor (1987-2007) of Environment & Planning C: Government & Policy published by Pion.
  • Former President of the European Society for Ecological Economics (ESEE).
  • Author of the controversial report on emissions trading, first banned and then censored in Australia (see Carbon Emissions Trading) and finally published after I resigned my job: Spash, C. L. (2010) The Brave New World of Carbon Trading (PDF). New Political Economy 15(2).
  • Lead author of an article ranked in the Ecological Economics journal’s top ten most cited papers Spash, C. L. and N. Hanley (1995) Preferences, information and biodiversity preservation. (PDF) Ecological Economics 12(3): 191-208. (Source: Influential publications in ecological economics: A citations analysis, Oct 2004).
  • Author of “The Political Economy of Nature“, recognised as one of the top 25 articles published in the Review of Political Economy over the past quarter century.
  • Author of the book Greenhouse Economics: Value and Ethics. Exploring human induced climate change from the basic science through the impacts, uncertainty and economics to the ethics and public policy.
  • Co-author of Cost Benefit Analysis and the Environment, which became a standard reference and basic text widely used for teaching on the subject.

Established in 2006, this website aims to bring together and preserve in one location materials relating to various aspects of my work. Besides listing publications there are various downloads, many free, of materials which might otherwise be difficult to obtain (e.g. grey literature, discussion papers, research reports and book reviews). Links have been provided to publishers’ websites where downloads may also be obtained.