The empirical core of the paper is a state-of-the-practice survey, reviewed and approved by the Internal Review Board at the University of Colorado Denver, that asked scholars about the research methods they have used over the past decade, the dependent variables that anchor their studies, the economic theories embedded in doctoral training, and the institutional incentives that shape career decisions. Respondents also answered open-ended questions about the barriers that keep the information systems community from engaging with climate and environmental challenges, and about alternative pathways for doing better. The researchers coded these responses using established qualitative content analysis techniques, with generative AI tools used only to summarize pre-coded themes and select representative quotes, all of which the authors independently verified against the original data.

The picture that emerges is one of a field that is aware of the problem but structurally unprepared to address it. Scholars overwhelmingly recognize the importance of environmental issues, yet the survey reveals that research agendas remain dominated by revenue, innovation, customer, and performance outcomes, while explicit incentives to pursue climate-related work are rare in departments and doctoral programs. Doctoral curricula lean heavily on free-market and mixed economics, leaving graduates with little exposure to the ecological, political, or critical economic traditions that question growth itself. The authors argue that this training pipeline reproduces a narrow view of what information technology is for, treating it primarily as an engine of productivity and profit rather than as a force embedded in biophysical systems.

The technical backdrop to this critique is stark. The information and communication technology sector’s energy and emissions footprint is growing as data volumes soar, and the rise of generative artificial intelligence is accelerating demand for power-hungry data centers, a trend documented in industry analyses from Deloitte and the World Economic Forum. Local communities are beginning to push back, as in the reported rejection of an Amazon-linked data center project amid fears over water use. The authors also cite material flow research showing that the volume of man-made stocks increased twelvefold between 1900 and 2015, with roughly 35 percent of that material now solid waste and 25 percent emitted into the environment. Consumption-based accounting of material footprint shows a consistent rise alongside GDP, raw material extraction, and carbon dioxide emissions since 1970.

Against this backdrop, the paper’s theoretical move is to import the frameworks of ecological economics into information systems research. The field’s intellectual foundations, the authors argue, rest on assumptions inherited from neoclassical economics: that economies can grow indefinitely, that technology will decouple output from resource use, and that market mechanisms will price environmental damage appropriately. Ecological economics starts from a different premise. The Earth is effectively a closed system for materials, open only to incoming solar energy, so no amount of digital innovation can conjure new resources or make waste disappear. Economist Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen argued as early as 1975 that the transition from fossil fuels to solar energy is not merely a policy option but an ultimate necessity for economies to operate within biophysical limits, a point the authors treat as foundational for any credible theory of sustainable computing.

Central to the proposed transformation is Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics, whose dual focus on ecological ceilings and social foundations the authors adopt as a template for reorienting the discipline. In this framing, humanity must live below planetary boundaries, such as climate stability and intact ecosystems, while ensuring that everyone has access to the social essentials of a dignified life. The authors suggest that information systems research should be evaluated not by whether it increases firm performance or adoption rates, but by whether it helps societies stay within the doughnut. Alternative indicators already exist to support such a shift: the Genuine Progress Indicator adjusts personal consumption for inequality, household labor, and environmental costs, and long-term data show that GDP and GPI moved together until the late 1970s before diverging, with GDP rising while genuine progress declined.

The survey respondents themselves offered a set of alternative pathways, which the authors organized into four aggregate dimensions: institutional change, leadership, research approach, and other measures. On the institutional front, scholars called for departments to provide explicit financial rewards and promotion criteria for climate-related research, and for doctoral programs to broaden the economic theories taught alongside methodological training. On the research front, respondents pointed toward studying green information systems in organizations, circular economy practices enabled by digital technologies, carbon management systems that promote ecologically responsible behavior, energy informatics, and the detection and reduction of data waste through machine learning. Others emphasized the need to distinguish between artificial intelligence for sustainability and the sustainability of artificial intelligence itself, given the technology’s own growing resource demands.

The authors are careful to note that the barriers are not primarily attitudinal. Information systems scholars already perceive the community as having reasonable awareness of climate and environmental challenges; what is missing, they argue, is domain knowledge, relevant theories, and data sources for measuring climate impacts within the field’s traditional research domains. This gap between awareness and capability is compounded by incentive structures: ranking systems that track publications in the field’s leading journals reward conventional topics, and junior researchers rationally follow the path of least resistance. Without changes to what gets rewarded, the authors warn, individual goodwill will continue to produce only marginal, incremental contributions while the window for meaningful action narrows.

The paper’s recommendations extend to journal editors and institutional leaders, not just individual researchers. Editors are encouraged to welcome work that measures ecological and social outcomes alongside economic ones, and to treat ecological framing as legitimate across the full range of information systems topics rather than confining it to special issues. Institutions are urged to align hiring, promotion, and doctoral education with the reality of the environmental crisis. The authors also acknowledge the practical grounds for optimism: the International Renewable Energy Agency reported in 2025 that solar photovoltaic projects were on average 41 percent cheaper than the lowest-cost fossil fuel alternatives, and onshore wind 53 percent cheaper, meaning that the technological economics increasingly favor the transition that ecological theory demands.

What makes the study notable is its willingness to question the discipline’s own growth-oriented foundations at a moment when the digital sector’s material consequences are becoming impossible to ignore. The authors conclude that, given the urgency of the crisis, ecological perspectives should serve as a guiding meta-framework for designing and conducting general information systems research, shaping research priorities, institutional structures, collaborative practices, and methodological approaches alike. Whether the community takes up that challenge will depend less on the persuasiveness of any single paper than on whether the incentives that govern academic careers can be redesigned to reward work that treats the planet’s limits as a first-order research constraint rather than an afterthought.

Subject of Research: Environmental sustainability and ecological economics in information systems research

Article Title: [State-of-the-Practice-Survey] Environmental Sustainability in Information Systems Research: Beyond Incrementalism Toward a Transformative Path Forward

Article References: Oh, O., Gregg, D. G., & Aghakhani, N. (2026). [State-of-the-Practice-Survey] Environmental Sustainability in Information Systems Research: Beyond Incrementalism Toward a Transformative Path Forward. Information Systems Frontiers. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10796-026-10825-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10796-026-10825-0

Keywords: environmental sustainability, information systems, ecological economics, Doughnut Economics, climate crisis, green information systems, survey research, data centers, generative AI energy use, circular economy, Genuine Progress Indicator, academic incentives

The intellectual stakes are considerable. Current fiscal practice across most advanced economies remains anchored in the New Economic Consensus, an offshoot of neoclassical economics that treats budget deficits as inherently inflationary, subordinates fiscal policy to central bank interest rates, and largely ignores the environmental damage generated by economic activity. Sustainability researchers have sharpened their critique of this orthodoxy, arguing that its core assumptions fail to capture ecological limits, nonlinear dynamics, and distributional realities. Dimitrieva’s analysis instead draws on post-Keynesian traditions and Modern Monetary Theory, which hold that currency-issuing governments are not financially constrained in the way households are, and that the true limits on public spending are real resources, productive capacity, and inflation risk.

The six frameworks differ profoundly on the desirability of growth itself. Green Growth, championed by the OECD, the UN Environment Programme and the World Bank, rests on the hope of decoupling GDP expansion from environmental harm through technological innovation, carbon pricing and circular economy practices. Yet critics, most prominently in work questioning whether green growth is possible at all, point to the speculative nature of absolute decoupling and the stubborn problem of rebound effects, where efficiency gains simply fuel more consumption. Degrowth takes the opposite stance, insisting that wealthy nations must democratically and deliberately scale down energy and material throughput without compromising wellbeing. Post-Growth, grounded in Herman Daly’s steady-state economics, envisions the destination: an economy of constant stocks and flows operating within the planet’s regenerative and absorptive capacities, where knowledge and culture may flourish even as material extraction stabilises.

Doughnut Economics, developed by Kate Raworth, supplies the study’s normative compass. Its visual logic is elegant: an inner ring of social foundations, from water and housing to gender equality and political voice, derived from the Sustainable Development Goals, and an outer ring of planetary boundaries drawn from the Earth-system science of Johan Rockström and colleagues, whose recent work shows humanity has already breached six of nine boundaries. The band between the rings is the safe and just space where humanity can thrive. Notably, the analysis highlights a structural weakness of the SDGs themselves: their economic assumptions remain largely neoclassical, and Goal 8’s pursuit of GDP growth can directly conflict with the climate and biodiversity goals, a tension researchers have quantified as a sustainable development oxymoron. The paper argues the Goals need recalibration to incorporate distributive and biophysical insights from the more transformative paradigms.

Modern Monetary Theory plays the operational role in the proposed synthesis. Because monetarily sovereign governments, such as those of the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and Japan, spend in currencies they issue, they need not wait for tax revenue or bond markets to fund transformative investment. Taxes, in this framing, create demand for the currency, manage inflation, and redistribute income; they are not the financing precondition for spending. This insight, the paper notes, became impossible to ignore after the 2008 financial crisis and the pandemic, when governments ran large deficits without fiscal collapse. MMT therefore unlocks what the author calls fiscal space: the capacity to finance universal public services, renewable infrastructure and a Job Guarantee, an employment buffer stock first proposed by Hyman Minsky that stabilises both prices and livelihoods.

The crucial move is differentiation. The study argues that Green Growth strategies are best suited to low-income countries and sectors naturally amenable to greening, such as renewable energy, transport and tourism, where expanding access to public goods remains essential and clean-technology leapfrogging offers genuine development gains. Degrowth-oriented policies, by contrast, fit high-income, high-consumption economies, where deliberately downscaling throughput is vital for staying within planetary boundaries. These differentiated pathways then converge on a Post-Growth steady-state economy, anchored in the Doughnut’s vision of a safe and just space. The paper’s conceptual pathway diagram traces this progression: MMT-enabled fiscal space at the start, context-specific Green Growth or Degrowth transitions in the middle, and Doughnut-guided steady-state convergence at the end.

The comparative analysis is conducted across five dimensions: vision of the economy, relation to growth, role of the state, role of money, and concrete use of fiscal tools. On money, the frameworks split revealingly. Green Growth treats green finance, green bonds and climate-adjusted central bank operations as instruments within capitalist structures, a critique voiced by degrowth scholars who see financialisation commodifying nature. Degrowth and Doughnut Economics propose more radical redesigns, including full-reserve banking, complementary currencies, and the democratisation of money creation, treating money as a social relationship rather than a neutral medium. MMT reframes money as a sovereign public utility limited only by inflation and real resources. The Sustainable Development Goals camp promotes sovereign green bonds and retooled central bank mandates to close the vast financing gap, particularly the pandemic recovery gap widening between rich and poor nations.

On fiscal instruments themselves, the convergences are striking. Nearly every framework endorses progressive, equity-oriented taxation: shifting the tax base away from labour and toward wealth, resource extraction, rent, inheritance and ecologically harmful consumption. Degrowth scholarship adds minimum and maximum income thresholds, universal basic income, and shorter working weeks, though a systematic review of fifteen years of degrowth research found concrete, empirically grounded proposals remain scarce. Here the author identifies a critical blind spot: mainstream degrowth and post-growth literature often defaults to orthodox fiscal framing, assuming wealth taxes must precede public spending. MMT dissolves that sequencing problem. Eco-social policies can be funded directly through sovereign monetary capacity, with taxation serving afterwards as the instrument for demand management, inflation control and redistribution, tools of governance rather than prerequisites for action.

The paper is candid about limits. Monetary sovereignty is not universal: Eurozone members, low-income countries and states burdened by foreign-currency debt cannot simply spend their way to sustainability, raising urgent questions about how non-sovereign nations can expand fiscal space without deepening vulnerability. The author also acknowledges omitting important perspectives, including the Wellbeing Economy, commons-based approaches, the care economy, and Latin American Indigenous frameworks such as Buen Vivir, and points to the Porter Hypothesis tradition in arguing that well-designed environmental regulation can enhance, rather than erode, competitiveness and innovation.

The implications, if the synthesis gains traction, are significant. Fiscal policy would be repositioned as the central engine of socio-ecological transformation: public investment steered toward renewables, low-carbon infrastructure and social services; subsidies and taxes aligned with throughput limits rather than GDP targets; democratic oversight and international cooperation securing coherence between national development needs and planetary ceilings. The Sustainable Development Goals, recalibrated to shed their internal contradictions, could serve as the institutional scaffold for a global consensus. What emerges is not a single doctrine but a pluralist meta-framework, one that treats Green Growth, Degrowth, Post-Growth, Doughnut Economics, MMT and the SDGs as complementary lenses on a shared problem: how to raise and allocate public resources so that economies serve people and planet alike, within the biophysical limits of a finite Earth.

Subject of Research: A comparative analysis of six sustainability-oriented economic frameworks and their integration into a meta-framework for sustainable fiscal policy

Article Title: Sustainability and fiscal policy: bridging economic frameworks for global equity and ecological balance

Article References: Sustainability and fiscal policy: bridging economic frameworks for global equity and ecological balance. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12232-026-00549-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12232-026-00549-7

Keywords: fiscal policy, green growth, degrowth, post-growth, doughnut economics, modern monetary theory, sustainable development goals, planetary boundaries, steady-state economy, just transition, ecological macroeconomics, monetary sovereignty