Eco-efficiency as abandonment of nature

Abstract The paper argues that eco-efficiency is fundamentally disruptive when promoted as a universal prescription for environmental policy. Eco-efficiency runs against the cognitive and institutional bases of sustainable human–environmental interaction. At the cognitive level, eco-efficiency assumes that an individual's concern for the environment can be decoupled from his or her material dependency on ecosystem services. At the collective level, eco-efficiency builds upon decoupling environmental governance from the local socio-economic and cultural context. The assumptions are not well-supported by empirical work on systems of human–environmental interaction, which stresses the importance of material connections to maintaining environmental concerns. The criterion for adopting eco-efficiency should be the extent to which it promotes the recoupling of human perception of environmental issues with human action on the environment, and the concomitant recoupling of collective local organization with locally crafted ecosystem management.