$8M Grant Supports UVM-McGill ‘Leadership for the Ecozoic’ Graduate ProgramLeadership for the Ecozoicfull story >>>

$8M Grant Supports UVM-McGill 'Leadership for the Ecozoic' Graduate Program

An $8M grant, awarded to Leadership for the Ecozoic, will provide crucial new funding for graduate students and researchers as they work to transform what economics can be, and share their findings with policymakers and the public.

The Leadership for the Ecozoic (L4E) program, a partnership between the University of Vermont and Montreal's McGill University, has always been a multifaceted effort, says grant principal investigator and UVM Prof. Joe Ament in the Community Development and Applied Economics (CDAE) department. The central focus is on training graduate students in ecological economics to facilitate research into a socially just and ecologically sustainable economic transition.

With L4E applications now open for the next cohort of students and postdocs, Ament welcomes interested applicants and is eager to see what these emerging scholars will pursue in fields including ecological economics and his own focus, degrowth and the macroeconomy.

"I work with students on what degrowth means for monetary and fiscal policy," Ament explains. "Degrowth concerns maintaining the highest level of human well-being and flourishing possible while decreasing the waste into and extraction from nature that results from the drive for continuous growth."

L4E research is broad-reaching and includes both essential resources (such as food, housing and natural resources) and essential systems (such as climate, education and international trade). Several students focus on food systems including sustainable food production, agroecology, non-commodity food economies, and domestic and international trade dynamics of food.

The seven-year grant, from an anonymous foundation that is inspired by UVM's history of ecological economics teaching and research, will fund 15 students total, eight of them in UVM's Sustainable Development, Policy, Economics and Governance Program. Additionally, four UVM postdocs (and three at McGill) will join L4E via the grant. UVM will receive $4.2M of the total grant.

The grant will allow new research and community connections, Ament says. "We can now pay community partners to sit with us and engage with us, maybe for a semester, maybe for a year."

Ament notes the opportunity to send L4E students-who already engage with students and faculty at McGill-to other institutions around the world, including universities and thinktanks. Ament also anticipates deepening collaborations for L4E students and faculty across the UVM campus, in addition to already-strong ties with the Gund Institute for Environment, Food Systems Research Center, and Institute for Agroecology.

The Gund Institute, with its firm foundation and leading faculty in ecological economics, has always been an ideal base for L4E, Ament notes. The Institute joins the U.S. Society of Ecological Economics to award the biennial Eric Zencey Prize in Ecological Economics; Gund fellow Josh Farley, the Ecological Economics lead of the L4E, coauthored the first textbook on the subject.

Most importantly, with the new grant in place, Ament says, the group is better able to turn their attention outward, to share their findings with the public and various stakeholders. L4E Project Director Julie Starr, who assumed the role in September, will take the lead here, including dissemination of the new L4E podcast, Radio Ecozoic, launched by L4E staff and students

Policy outreach, too, is key. "A critical aspect of this new grant is creating opportunities for our students, research fellows, and faculty to get their research in front of policymakers," Ament says.

"This grant expands our policy outreach and communication capacities, to take everything that students and faculty and researchers are doing and get it out into the world to effect change," Ament says. "That's in this project's DNA."

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