UNCORRECTED PROOF Ecological Economics xxx (xxxx) xxx-xxx Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Ecological Economics journal homepage: www.elsevier.com Avoiding dualisms in ecological economics: Towards a dialectically-informed understanding of co-produced socionatures Vijay Kolinjivadi Institute of Temperate Forest Sciences, Université du Québec en Outaouais, 58 Rue Principale, Ripon, Québec J0V 1V0, Canada ARTICLE INFO Keywords: Institutions Ecosystem services Social metabolism Political ecology Dualism ABSTRACT Recurrent claims that ecological economics (EE) is moving conceptually closer to environmental economics arise from the tendency to understand economic transformation through dualistic and interacting representations of ‘nature’ and ‘society’. The methodological and value pluralism primordial to EE praxis is left under-theorized in the form of either humans acting upon a passive and external nature or a non-negotiable nature imposing limits on human activity. Solutions tend to get presented as analytical confgurations mechanistically adjoining ‘nature’ and ‘society’ for pragmatic purposes rather than through dialectic and relational understandings of a unifed so- cial and material analysis. This paper considers three sub-felds of EE research: social metabolism, institutional design within social-ecological systems, and ecosystem services, to illustrate how dualisms simplify human-na- ture relations and impede understanding of the continuous emergence of plural values. A dialectic positionality within these sub-felds sees humans and non-humans as relational, co-constituted and offering a politically and ethically explicit move towards distinctly anti-colonial futures in avoiding the tendency to reduce ‘nature’ and ‘society’ as inputs for economic production. I argue that greater sensitivity to geographical and historical nuance in the transformation of human-nature relations (or socionatures) is needed to more clearly distinguish and val- orize the analytical and methodological contributions of EE scholarship. 1. Introduction Ecological economics (henceforth EE) emerged as a discipline in rec- ognizing that human activities are bounded and produced by complex social and the biophysical relations (Røpke, 2005). EE distinguished it- self from environmental economics in the sense that the realm of eco- nomic production was seen to inescapably take place as embedded in social and biophysical relations. Specifically, the “economy”, conceived as the transformation of human labour and biophysical matter into wastes and productive outputs, could not be continuously reproduced without a fundamental dependence on nature. In this sense, the econ- omy is viewed as being embedded in society, itself embedded in nature (Røpke, 2005). Environmental economists for their part argue the con- trary, claiming that negative impacts of economic production on society and nature are simply technical slip-ups of the economy or “market fail- ures” which can be internalized through governance structures premised upon boundedly rational self-interested actors. From an environmental economics perspective, environmental degradation can continue so long as overall stocks of capital are in creasing and mobilized to technically “solve” environmental problems created by economic activity (Spash, 2013). In this manner, “nature” is viewed as outside of humanity, abstracted and reifed from its social context, and made measurable and fungible as a commodity in the mar- ketplace. In such a vision, humankind is effectively alienated from the non-human world which serves as its original reference point for all cre- ativity (Becker et al., 2005). Instead, natures conceived as non-human living beings, abiotic matter and phenomena, and the human being it- self as labour, are treated in the ensemble as objectifed inputs for eco- nomic production (Swyngedouw, 1996). In contrast to environmental economics, EE embeds the operation of economic activity to natural science perspectives, namely physical (e.g. Persson et al., 2018) and also socio-political processes (e.g. Spash, 2011). In doing so, EE places greater emphasis on “nature,” through the physical and social processes that shape and explain the dependencies and consequences of economic activity. Yet in doing so, “nature” re- mains as an abstract ensemble of non-human processes that infuence the human (only) sphere of economic activity. A duality between hu- mans and non-humans and non-human processes remains. The social sphere is reduced to existing outside of “nature” and hence subjected to Email address: vijay.kolinjivadi@mail.mcgill.ca (V. Kolinjivadi) https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2019.05.004 Received 4 December 2018; Received in revised form 1 May 2019; Accepted 2 May 2019 Available online xxx 0921-8009/ © 2019. Methodological and Ideological Options