Ecological macroeconomics models? Caveat emptor

Ecological Macroeconomic Integrated Assessment Models (EM-IAMs) have emerged as tools for exploring post-growth narratives and challenging the dominant discourse of continuous economic growth. Their use may be strategically advantageous: by employing modelling approaches that are epistemically legitimate within economics, EM-IAMs can contest the growth paradigm with their own tools. Yet, the framing of socio-ecological processes in EM-IAMs, through quantification and evaluative logics, risks interfering with the other goal of EM-IAMs; to address social inequality and injustices. As such, EM-IAMs risk operating as what ecologist Langdon Winner coined as ‘conceptual Trojan horse’. We question whether EM-IAMs may truly provide “robust modelling tools to explore alternative future scenarios, enabling the ex-ante evaluation of direct and indirect effects of policies on well-being, employment, and the ecosystem” (Ecological Economics, 2025). Our doubts rest upon complexity that does not reduce uncertainty, the politics of model simplification, the limitations of EM-IAM models for aspects that resist quantification, the reinforcement of historical power imbalances, and, ultimately, the performative effects of models themselves. We suggest that, rather than extending EM-IAMs to incorporate well-being analysis, we should adopt a different approach to modelling, learning from ecological values; appreciating diversity, variability in space and time, self-regulation, and entanglements.