Abstract:
Climate change has fundamentally challenged the legal and economic
foundations of development models that prioritise continuous growth and
expanding consumption. In response, contemporary policy and regulatory
discourse increasingly promotes the circular economy and digital
transformation as pathways toward climate-resilient and sustainable
development. However, whether these approaches represent a genuine shift
away from growth-centric paradigms or merely reconfigure them through
technology remains an open question. This paper examines this tension
through the lens of the history of economic thought, offering a normative
framework relevant to climate change law and governance. Revisiting classical
political economy, the paper shows that early thinkers such as Adam Smith,
Thomas Malthus, David Ricardo, and John Stuart Mill viewed economic
activity as embedded within moral obligations and natural limits. These
concerns were progressively displaced by neoclassical growth theories that
abstracted the economy from ecological constraints and treated environmental
harm as an externality. Marx’s critique of capital accumulation further
exposed the structural drivers of environmental degradation, while twentiethcentury
ecological economics reasserted biophysical limits and
intergenerational responsibility. Against this intellectual background, the
paper critically evaluates the contemporary circular and digital economy
agendas. It argues that the circular economy holds meaningful potential to
support climate-compatible development when anchored in binding legal
mechanisms such as lifecycle responsibility, resource accountability, and
absolute environmental thresholds. By contrast, the digital economy presents a
more ambivalent trajectory: while enabling environmental monitoring,
transparency, and regulatory enforcement, it simultaneously intensifies
energy use, extractive pressures, and new forms of inequality. The paper
concludes that climate change law must move beyond efficiency-based and
technologically optimistic responses toward historically informed governance
frameworks that integrate ecological limits, distributive justice, and
accountability. Such an approach reframes development not as unlimited
expansion, but as a legally regulated process of equitable transformation
within planetary boundaries.
