Radical Pragmatism

Radical Pragmatism for a Just Transition to a Right-Sized Economy

The radical pragmatism approach has emerged amid the Covid-19 pandemic as an effective crisis response that involves a willingness to try whatever works, while being guided by an experimental mindset and commitment to empiricism and measuring results. Ecological economics needs to use this approach to promote better understanding and potential policymaking solutions to complex socio-ecological sustainability problems in a post-Covid crisis society.

Gertz and Kharas (2020) have described radical pragmatism as offering “a promising approach for moving beyond the state/market dichotomy debates of the last decade, since for many contemporary problems this is a false choice. Indeed, even before COVID, neither market-dominant nor state-led economies were providing compelling solutions to their most daunting challenges, such as the climate emergency, inequality, and stagnant productivity. And whether states or markets should be preferred is not some universal truth to be debated in abstract, but a contingent question to be put to practical test—in a particular context, which contributes most effectively to social progress?”

Radical pragmatism can be applied by “defining societal problems and then creatively and ambitiously ask what needs to be done, by whom and by when, to make progress on that agenda, without a priori privileging either state or market action.”