The most important think tank you’ve never heard of: Resources for the Future and the history of economic thought in environmental practice

The proposed project will undertake an historical analysis of the development, role and impact of the Washington DC based think tank Resources For the Future (RFF) - from its founding in 1952 to the late 1990s.

REFUTURE investigates RFFs role in constructing an economic vision of the environment around the concepts of scarcity, value, and externalities; and the subsequent application of that vision through US and international policies focused on managing the environment in relation to economic efficiency.

By focusing on this history of economic thought in environmental practice, REFUTURE raises larger political economic questions regarding the contribution of RFF to i) the global great acceleration of the Anthropocene in terms of material throughput and pollution concomitant with an emphasis on economic growth from the middle of the twentieth century; ii) what I call here the great deceleration of effective environmental and climate policy from the early 1980s on due to the overwhelming political focus on maintaining economic growth by governing nature and managing environmental impacts through the price mechanism.

Drawing from the methodologies of intellectual history, economic sociology and historical political economy, I will undertake research at a number of key libraries and archives in the US and will significantly benefit from outbound placements and training at the Center for the History of Political Economy (HOPE) at Duke University and the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society (IBES) at Brown University.

Overall research direction will greatly benefit from a placement at the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA) at Universitat Autnoma de Barcelona a key European centre for research and critical analysis into the relationship between economic growth and environmental sustainability.

As an affiliated researcher here I will bring key insights from historical analysis of the applied economics of the environment.