Positional Analysis for Sustainable Development

Book excerpt: Approaches to decision making and accounting at the national- and business levels have to be reconsidered in light of climate change, biodiversity loss, pollution of land and water, land-use changes, lack of equality and other problems. Cost-Benefit Analysis is clearly not helping to address these issues. In this book, Positional Analysis is advocated as a multidimensional and ideologically open approach. Positional Analysis is based on a political economic conceptual framework (as part of ecological economics) that differs from neoclassical ideas of individuals, firms and markets. It also raises issues of how national and business accounting can be reconfigured to meet these challenges.