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Māori, the Indigenous people of Aotearoa New Zealand, have an intrinsically environmental approach to economics. This approach—informed by the Māori worldview—was refined over the first millennium of inhabitation, before colonization brought the intrusion of Western institutions and the consequent involution of Māori institutions. Māori view humans as embedded within a wider nonhuman community of nature that is simultaneously spiritual and material. Māori understand “nature” as a unified spiritual-socioecology. Economics is just one facet of this whole, a facet fundamentally entwined with the whole such that all economic relationships have inherently social, spiritual, and ecological elements. At the core of Māori relationships with nature is the ethic of kaitiakitanga, or the act of guardianship over the spiritual-socioecology. Māori have a responsibility to actively care for their human and nonhuman community, to act with mana (authority and dignity), to respect nature’s tapu (sacredness), and to maintain nature’s mauri (life force). The Māori economy is underpinned by an integrated, nuanced, and adaptive framework of beliefs and institutions that constrains decision-making, ensuring the consideration of the human, nonhuman, and spiritual domains across time while simultaneously being calibrated toward delivering mutually beneficial outcomes within kin-group networks. This ensures that economic success does not come at the expense of other people, nature, or future generations. An economy based on a Māori worldview is, fundamentally, an environmental economy. Following colonization, Māori suffered a loss of mana. Land was sold below market rate or stolen, and after massive deforestation and significant loss of native flora and fauna, Aotearoa New Zealand’s tapu was desecrated and its mauri reduced. In the mid- to late-20th century, Māori political activism and a resultant tribunal examining actions and omissions by the state during land acquisition resulted in Māori regaining mana. Consequently, Māori have overcome the drastic change in rights to their remaining land to act as kaitiaki (guardians) of this remaining land in ways both congruent with traditional practices (te ao tūroa) and adapted to changed context (te ao hurihuri). Māori have realigned the imposed governance structures of their organizations to reinstate their original focus on the intergenerational well-being of human and nonhuman communities, reinvigorating the influence of mana in business, and its capacity to create a virtuous circle. Māori have managed to thrive in the settler and global economy not despite their environmentally grounded economic approach, but because of it.

2019 marked the 20th anniversary of the removal of the Edwards Dam in Augusta, Maine (USA). Edwards Dam was the first federally licensed hydropower dam to be denied relicensing, and the dam was removed for the purpose of restoring the 10 anadromous fish species that use the Kennebec River. Since that time, numerous other small dams have been removed in the United States. The relicensing process considers benefit-cost analysis, yet remains fundamentally flawed in the consideration of the benefits of dam removals and fish passage. Successful dam removals rely (mostly) on local efforts and outside analysis.

The Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI) is an interesting alternative to Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as an indicator of society’s development. Historically, GDP has been used by policymakers, media analysts, and economists as the main indicator of development, even though economics textbooks often state that it is not a measure of social welfare. Strictly speaking, GDP is only an indicator of the production of economic goods and services, not an index of well-being or development. It does not include the environmental, social, or economic costs of producing goods and services. The theoretical basis of GDP is conventional macroeconomics, which adopts an isolated economic system as the object of analysis. In this approach, there is no flow of matter and energy to produce economic goods and services. The economy is considered a perpetual motion machine that does not need material and energy to produce and which consequently does not generate waste. However, the economy is a subsystem open to the flow of matter and energy, supported by a closed, natural subsystem—the global environmental system. In practice, the production of economic goods and services is dependent on the continuous flow of matter and energy from the environment, and inherently, the result of GDP is also the generation of waste. The GPI adopts this perspective. In the 1990s, Daly and Cobb created the Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare (ISEW), hereafter termed GPI. The objective was to incorporate environmental, social, and economic costs associated with GDP growth, and to generate an indicator that reflected a genuine development of society. The GPI has been estimated for several countries, including the United States, Australia, China, and Brazil. This indicator is neither perfect nor complete for assessing development or human well-being, but it is superior to GDP. Despite technological development, there has been an unequivocal increase in environmental degradation, contrary to the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) hypothesis. The result of environmental degradation has been an increase in the environmental, social, and economic costs of GDP growth. However, these costs have been ignored by policymakers, companies, and society in their production and consumption decisions. Improving the GPI and its estimates can provide better information for decision making by economic and political agents.

The Economics of the Law of the Sea (LoS) quite generally investigates how the LoS has developed in the past, how it functions at present, and how it could serve in the future. It explores economic factors that shape the LoS, assesses its economic effects, and evaluates different legal options from an economic perspective with a view to achieving specific goals. Accordingly, it can address a large variety of topics and pick from a wide range of ideas, analytical frames, and tools. Studies in this area can, for example, investigate economic drivers that have influenced the development of the modern LoS, analyze general economic characteristics of ocean resources, explore the economics of specific ocean-related activities governed by the LoS (exploiting the sea floor, fishing, protecting coasts against sea level rise, etc.), and assess important economic effects of selected LoS measures (drawing boundaries, creating marine enclosures, and establishing permit regimes). Economic analyses of the LoS are particularly valuable in linking information regarding facts and norms, for example, by illuminating the economic dimensions of conflicts to lawyers or translating specific regulatory approaches into costs and benefits. In this way, it may contribute to managing oceans more rationally, efficiently, sustainably, and peacefully.

In an era of calamitous climate change, entrenched malnutrition, and the chronic exclusion of hundreds of millions of people from access to affordable energy, food, and water, evaluating the policy options of African states to address these challenges matters more than ever. In the Nile Basin especially, a region notorious for its poverty, violent instability and lack of industrialisation, states have invested their scarce resources and political capital in a “hydraulic mission” in the belief that they can engineer their way out of international marginalization. Incumbents have bet on large-scale hydro-infrastructure and capital-intensive agriculture to boost food production, strengthen energy security, and deal with water scarcity, despite the woeful track-record of such a supply-side approach to development. While ruling elites in the Nile Basin have portrayed the hydraulic mission as the natural way of developing the region’s resources—supposedly validated by the historical achievements of Pharaonic civilization and its mastery over its tough environment—this is a modern fiction, spun to justify politically expedient projects and the exclusion of broad layers of the population. In the last two hundred years, the hydraulic mission has made three major political contributions that underline its strategic usefulness to centralizing elites: it has enabled the building of modern states and a growing bureaucratic apparatus around a riverain political economy; it has generated new national narratives that have allowed unpopular regimes to rebrand themselves as protectors of the nation; and it has facilitated the forging of external alliances, linking the resources and elites of Egypt, Ethiopia, and Sudan to global markets and centers of influence. Mega-dams, huge canals and irrigation for export are fundamentally about power and the powerful—and the privileging of some interests and social formations over others. The one-sided focus on increasing supply—based on the false premise that this will allow ordinary people to access more food and water—transfers control over livelihoods from one (broad) group of people to (a much narrower) other one by legitimizing top-down interventionism and dislocation. What presents itself as a strategy of water resources and agricultural development is really about (re)constructing hierarchies between people. The mirage of supply-side development continues to seduce elites at the helm of the state because it keeps them in power and others out of it.