Eco-development, Sustainable Development and Ecological Economics: In Which Sense do They Represent Alternatives to the Dominant Paradigm of Development?

The reasons why scholars choose one paradigm to the detriment of another are not only scientific but also epistemological. This theoretical-epistemological amalgam, in its turn, provides a certain specific kind of economic development proposals. Neoclassical economics is closely connected with logical positivism (as an epistemological approach) and favors the conception that the virtually unlimited economic growth would be a necessary (and sufficient) condition to economic development. The strong reliance on economic growth in GDP-terms as an adequate indicator of economic development reflects and exemplifies the dominance of the mainstream in Economics at all three levels: methodological/epistemological, theoretical and pragmatic/political. When faced with new challenges such as the need for a Sustainable Development, for instance, and the persistence (or even the increase) of the economic inequality between North and South, the shortcomings of the dominant paradigm become accentuated. In this paper we argue that, in order to overcome this state of affairs, alternatives to the mainstream ought to be discussed and articulated at all three levels mentioned above, and that this goal has been followed by the Eco-development/Sustainable Development proposal.