Abstract
Attempts to express environmental problems in economic terms have been at the forefront of environmental policy debates for over twenty years. But the process and politics of making economic valuations applicable to ecological entities have received relatively little attention within environmental sociology. This chapter starts by considering how social scientists have analysed what it means to create a market in a novel area or to ‘economize’ an issue. These social-scientific ideas are then applied to two leading ecological issues: attempts to manage carbon emissions through pricing, and concepts and practices for valuing natural resources. The chapter concludes by highlighting the way that pricing and market-making have changed the character of environmental governance, introducing new kinds of actor and incentives which social scientists need to study.
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Notes
- 1.
There are several exceptions here, most of which will be returned to below but see Jacobs 1994 and O’Neill 1993 for early critical perspectives and Sandel 2012 for a very well known, though philosophical rather than empirical, assessment ; there is also a growing sociological literature on practices of valuation, ranking and assessment (for example, around indexes and on-line voting and approval systems) which intersects with the points discussed below.
- 2.
In the last decade it has become more common to speak of the services provided as ‘ecosystem services’ (see Silvertown 2015); the intended implications of using this terminology will be examined later in this chapter. For now, environmental services and ecosystem services can be treated as more or less synonymous.
- 3.
These interviews were conducted as part of the EU-funded project “Environmental Sustainability and Institutional Innovation in Europe” which ran from 1 April 1994 to 31 July 1996; the UK project team was comprised of Steven Yearley and John Forrester. It is perhaps worth pointing out here that the Secretary of State is the normal title for the leading minister within a UK government ministry.
- 4.
In this context, the term ‘financialisation’ from economic sociology deserves a mention since it draws attention to the ways in which the dominance of mobile, global financial markets has influenced economic trends and the autonomy of political institutions ; for an example, see van der Zwan 2014.
- 5.
Consulted on 29 June 2017 http://uknea.unep-wcmc.org/About/tabid/56/Default.aspx.
- 6.
This headline assertion is scored with a ‘4’ in the report indicating that the claim is ‘Speculative’ characterised by ‘low agreement based on limited evidence’ (2011, 67).
- 7.
the naming of CFCs and hydrofluorocarbons is complicated but HFC-23 is a simple molecule; essentially a methane molecule with three of the hydrogen atoms replaced by fluorine: CHF3.
- 8.
see https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11155-kyoto-protocol-loophole-has-cost-6-billion/ consulted on 29 June 2017.
- 9.
see http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/aug/24/kyoto-protocols-carbon-credit-scheme-increased-emissions-by-600m-tonnes consulted on 29 June 2017.
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Yearley, S. (2018). Economic Valuation of the Environment. In: Boström, M., Davidson, D. (eds) Environment and Society. Palgrave Studies in Environmental Sociology and Policy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76415-3_7
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