When efficiency is not enough: should equity be embedded in decision making and evaluation?

The Encyclical “Laudato si’” pushes scholars and researchers to reflect on the fact that «We are faced not with two separate crises, one environmental and the other social, but rather with one complex crisis which is both social and environmental» and, at the same time, that «Strategies for a solution demand an integrated approach to combating poverty, restoring dignity to the excluded, and at the same time protecting nature» (§ 139). This means that an integral ecological approach, based on a new paradigm of justice and equity, should be adopted. The neoclassical view of economics sharply separates the economic and the social sphere, and, in so doing, it has excluded the problem of inequality from economic analysis. Economic evaluations (cost-benefit analysis) claim to be able to consider intra- and intergenerational equity, by applying a system of distributional weights and a social-discount rate. Nonetheless, they remain anchored to the efficiency criterion. The paper proposes a reflection on whether to adopt new evaluation approaches and tools in decision making when the equity criterion is called into question. In particular, it suggests two possible ways. Related to intra-generational justice, the first approach suggests the adoption of evaluation strategies that are able to consider the distributional effects of the project on the capacity of the participants to influence the decisions (deliberative democratic evaluation). Related to intergenerational justice, the second approach fosters the adoption of the precautionary principle, which suggests an extremely cautious, risk-averse attitude, in defence of future generations.