Kathryn Plotner
Research Mentor: Richard Lane
Mentor Department: Organizational Studies, LSA
Author(s): Richard Lane, Kathryn Plotner
Session: Session 7 (4:00 PM – 4:50 PM)
Presentation Type: Poster 61
Abstract
Resources For the Future (RFF) is an environmental think tank, based in Washington DC and founded on October 7, 1952, that has been hugely influential in developing the discipline of ‘environmental economics,’ which has played a crucial role in shaping environmental policy around the economy. In 2002, it was described as “the most important think tank you’ve never heard ofâ€_x009d_ by the Atlantic for its market-based approach to environmental issues – resource allocation and pollution control chief among them. Despite this, there is a lack of scholarship on RFF’s institutional history and impact. This project takes an interdisciplinary approach, melding intellectual history, economic sociology, and a historical political economy analysis to understand RFF from the 1950s through the 1990s. Our methodology was similarly interdisciplinary, consisting of a combination of archival research, utilization of internal RFF publications, and a variety of other primary and secondary sources. We tracked individual RFF researchers and programs, constructing a social network, to understand their impact. We found that RFF was very influential in developing mainstream conceptions of questions of the environment, nature, and how to manage them – essential information in understanding what and why environmental policy is the way it is. The ‘great acceleration’ of the Anthropocene was caused, in part, by RFF and its emphasis on economic growth, while a lack of effective environmental protection policy stems in part from the focus on market-based solutions.
