UDTR Global Rights of Nature Radar

Ecosystem accounting for social-ecological policy: an applied ecological economics research agenda from Guatemala

Identification

Public canonical key

doi:10.31223/x5v78m

Authors

Juan Pablo Castaneda · Daniel Pinillos

Reported year

2026

Reported language

en

Source type

preprint

First detected

2026-11-09T19:17:31.004906+00:00

Last metadata observation

2026-11-09T19:17:31.004906+00:00

Last HTTP verification

Not checked

Documentary abstract — original language

Economy and ecology are inseparable since economic decisions affect the natural systems that sustain them. Conventional economics still treats this dependence as an externality to be corrected through prices, even as ecosystems lose resilience and the economy presses against planetary boundaries. Ecological economics offers a more adequate framework, one that situates the economy within a finite biosphere and within limits set by biophysical criteria. This article synthesizes the foundations of the field and brings the Anglo-American and Latin American traditions together toward an applied ecological economics rooted in social metabolism, strong sustainability, and the critique of extractivism. It then systematizes the measurement instruments that make ecological dependence visible for policy, from valuation methods and multicriteria analysis to the ecological footprint, doughnut economics, and the System of Environmental-Economic Accounting. The argument is grounded in Guatemala, a megadiverse Mesoamerican country with a heavily extractive export structure and one of the longest national series of environmental-economic accounts (also called natural capital accounts) in Latin America. The Guatemalan accounts reveal a systematic depreciation of natural capital that conventional economic accounts, including their most well-known indicator (gross domestic product), fail to capture. Forest, water, soil, and wealth indicators all register losses that standard statistics fail to record, and they reshape what counts as economic growth once the depletion of the biophysical base is included. Building on this evidence, the article proposes an applied ecological economics research agenda. The agenda is organized into five interrelated work areas that connect ecosystem accounting, earth system science, and economics. Together they trace a concrete route from theory to public policy and territorial governance, toward transitions that are ecologically viable and socially fair, using Guatemala as a case study.

Identifiers

OPENALEX

W7163706411

DOI

10.31223/x5v78m

Documentary context

Documentary family

Working paper

Source-reported types

preprint

Jurisdictions studied — explicit sources

GT

Natural entities mentioned

Forest · Ecosystem · Territory

Entity mentions are not evidence of legal recognition. Jurisdiction studied is separate from author affiliation country.

Sources

OpenAlex · Record 1 · Record 2

• DOI · https://doi.org/10.31223/x5v78m
• OpenAlex · https://openalex.org/W7163706411

Documented bibliographic relations

Source-declared references and links; they do not establish legal support or UGLC qualification. Up to 20 outgoing references are displayed.

• openalex:w1540250989 · CITES
• openalex:w2011848308 · CITES
• openalex:w2015870104 · CITES
• openalex:w2047169025 · CITES
• openalex:w2062390655 · CITES
• openalex:w2096885696 · CITES
• El Buen Vivir como alternativa al desarrollo. Algunas reflexiones económicas y no tan económicas · CITES
• openalex:w2170949745 · CITES
• openalex:w2206658039 · CITES
• openalex:w2272853385 · CITES
• openalex:w2565277564 · CITES
• openalex:w2746485780 · CITES
• openalex:w2785475654 · CITES
• openalex:w2990427797 · CITES
• openalex:w3003182401 · CITES
• openalex:w3013632702 · CITES
• openalex:w3128060395 · CITES
• openalex:w4234908682 · CITES
• openalex:w4386415144 · CITES
• openalex:w4386706488 · CITES

0 incoming references within the detected corpus

Documentary status

Relevance pending

Library

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