Ecological Economics 38 (2001) 311 – 315 NEWS AND VIEWS Eco-efficiency as abandonment of nature Janne Hukkinen * Laboratory of Enironmental Protection, Helsinki Uniersity of Technology, PO Box 2300, Otakaari 8, 02015 HUT, Espoo, Finland Received 19 March 2001; received in revised form 1 June 2001; accepted 6 June 2001 Abstract The paper argues that eco-efficiency is fundamentally disruptive when promoted as a universal prescription for environmental policy. Eco-efficiency runs against the cognitive and institutional bases of sustainable human – environ- mental interaction. At the cognitive level, eco-efficiency assumes that an individual’s concern for the environment can be decoupled from his or her material dependency on ecosystem services. At the collective level, eco-efficiency builds upon decoupling environmental governance from the local socio-economic and cultural context. The assumptions are not well-supported by empirical work on systems of human – environmental interaction, which stresses the importance of material connections to maintaining environmental concerns. The criterion for adopting eco-efficiency should be the extent to which it promotes the recoupling of human perception of environmental issues with human action on the environment, and the concomitant recoupling of collective local organization with locally crafted ecosystem management. © 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Eco-efficiency; Dematerialization; Human – environmental interaction; Governance; Environmental history; Ecosystem management www.elsevier.com/locate/ecolecon Ecological efficiency, or eco-efficiency, has in- spired environmental policy makers worldwide as a concept that concisely articulates their ongoing concerns in environmental management. Reflect- ing the transition from end-of-pipe pollution con- trol to product-oriented solutions, eco-efficiency strives toward dematerialization, that is, a dra- matic reduction in the material and energy inten- sity of industrial production and products (OECD Policy Brief, 1998; Commission of the European Communities, 2001; United Nations, 1999; World Bank, 2000; World Business Council for Sustain- able Development, 2001). As such, dematerializa- tion breaks the long tradition of merely isolating human technologies and their wastes from na- ture’s ecosystem services. Instead, it aims at func- tional decoupling of the industrial economy from the natural one. Translating dematerialization into quantitative indicators of eco-efficiency appears to be an attractive way of formulating concrete management goals for national * Tel.: +358-9-451-3975; fax: +358-9-465-077. E-mail address: janne.hukkinen@hut.fi (J. Hukkinen). 0921-8009/01/$ - see front matter © 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. PII:S0921-8009(01)00217-8