Pat Devine and Fikret Adaman recently reacted to an article published in 2022 by a group of authors called Planning for Entropy, who are members of the Democratic Economic Planning research group of the CRITS. The 2022 paper proposed linking models of democratic economic planning to approaches to social metabolism. It argued that the negotiated participation model developed by Devine and Adaman did not offer specific institutions to respond to ecological concerns. In their 2025 response, Devine and Adaman show how social ownership and subsidiarity are central to their model and how it can therefore tackle ecological problems.
Both texts were published in the journal Science & Society and are behind a paywall.
Here is an excerpt of the introduction:
Although the presentation of our model in their paper is reasonably accurate, we feel that the authors have not fully understood the framework it provides for dealing with the biological context and the procedural insights of ecological economics. This communication first notes their misunderstandings and criticisms, and responds to them. It then questions whether the suggestion for a merger of the three models makes sense and argues that their proposal for a new framework based on Laibman’s two dimensions and Tremblay-Pepin’s additional three dimensions—although valuable and inspiring in themselves—adds nothing fundamentally new to the discussion of how democratic planning can embrace ecological issues.
To read the full article: https://doi.org/10.1177/00368237241312553