Although the ecological tradition tends to favour a substantive role for non-market institutions in securing objectives such as environmental sustainability, Green theorists have paid relatively little attention to the important challenge posed to such proposals by the pro-market arguments of Austrian economics. The methods of ecological economics, such as multiple criteria evaluation, offer important potential for responding to the Austrian thesis that democratic, non-market institutions face a coordination problem in the face of complexity. However, the development of an adequate ecological (...) response to the Austrians requires clarification of the conceptual underpinnings and potential scope of such methods. (shrink)