Can We Survive the Tragedy of the Commons? Environmental Economics Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow. Under this title, the Environmental Economics Section of the Hungarian Economic Association (HEA) and Budapest University of Economics and Business (BUEB) are organising a joint conference on Thursday, 26 November 2026, at 5:00 p.m. at BUEB’s Színes Community Space (1054 Budapest, Alkotmány u. 9–11, 1st floor).
We are living through a profound ecological crisis. As we increasingly experience its consequences firsthand in our everyday lives, we hear more and more about water retention, climate change and urban greening. Members of the generation of scholars who came of age around the time of the political transition, some of whom have spent decades working to establish the foundations of environmental policy and research in Hungary, have been warning us about these issues for a long time. How do they perceive the escalating threats today? At the conference, two researchers who have witnessed the integration of environmental economics into the Hungarian-language academic discourse and the domestic scientific community from its early days — Sándor Kerekes, Professor Emeritus at Corvinus University of Budapest and Honorary President of the HEA’s Environmental Economics Section, and János Szlávik, Professor Emeritus at Eszterházy Károly Catholic University — will reflect on the past decades and look ahead to the future.
The professors who built the foundations of this field, together with their former students — Mária Csutora, Professor at Corvinus University of Budapest and a member and former president of the HEA’s Environmental Economics Section; Patrícia Németh, Associate Professor at Budapest University of Economics and Business and former secretary of the Section; Tamás Fürjes, an employee of Ketjen Hungary Ltd. and a two-time alumnus of BUEB; and Mihály Dombi, Senior Research Fellow at BUEB and President of the HEA’s Environmental Economics Section — will explore questions such as how the body of knowledge in environmental economics as we know it today came into being; how this knowledge has contributed to our development over the past decades; how it relates to mainstream economics and ecological economics, and how these relationships have evolved over time; and what prospects lie ahead for teaching and research in this field in Hungary.
We plan to livestream the event on the HEA’s YouTube channel at the following link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mv7hvUV7IxM.