An introduction and overview on law, politics and governance: Institutions, organizations and procedures for Ecological Economics

摘要

The aims of this Special Issue (SI) are to provide a broad and structured overview on literature published related to Law and Ecological Economics (EE) as well as to offer latest insights into this wide and further emerging combined field of research by means of contributed papers. Thus, this introduction into the SI firstly implements a systematic database term search and further analyses 129 papers identified. It was found that the majority refers to the "laws" of thermodynamics. Only 33 publications could be related to EE and Law, latter in the sense of the Rule of Law, with quite even allocation among the three streams identified, namely theoretical and philosophical considerations, strategic transition and transformation studies, and practical case studies. The literature overview also chronologically indicates that the vast majority of those 33 papers have been written during the past 15 years. The second part of this introduction describes the content of the seven contributions to this SI more in detail. Afterwards it shows that these contributions tend similarly more into the directions of providing strategic transition and transformation studies as well as practical case studies, indicating an overall shift from theory towards practical implementation of EE within Law.