The (social) construction of environmental regulations and markets: An institutionalist point of view

Abstract

This article aims to synthetize the approaches to the market as a category and to the construction of markets developed by economic and sociological theories, in order to establish certain implications of the construction and regulation of environmental markets within an interdisciplinary perspective. Most recent articles and books on environmental policies emphasize the growing use of "market-based instruments" as a method of regulating climate change, biodiversity problems, and common-pool resources. This statement is closely linked to a polarization of the academic debate between apologetic discourses and systematic condemnation of the commodification of nature. Though opposing normative views on human-nature relationships and their governance, these two poles converge around a common conception of the market, that of conventional economic thought, which can be described as an ideal-typical abstraction and characterized through two attributes: (1) The market is a space where allegedly universal instrumental rationality is deployed. It ensures the realization of social order almost without any social interactions but through the operation of natural "market forces" (related to price mechanisms); (2) The market is the opposite of the state, regulation, and hierarchy, and policy debates are focused on the problem of efficient design. On this basis, these poles cannot tackle the wide diversity and complexity of institutional and material arrangements and forms of organization that constitute and support the development of governance mechanisms for ecosystem services and biodiversity. A recent strand of literature is committed to requalifying the tools used in payments for ecosystem-services schemes and biodiversity-offset mechanisms, with the aim of distinguishing market and nonmarket ones. This article tries to contribute to this literature by linking its purpose to interdisciplinary literature that focuses on markets as sociotechnical constructions. Located at the intersections of institutional and economic sociology and of the anthropology of science and technology, this literature aims to overcome the "ontological indeterminacy" of markets that characterizes neoclassical economic thought - that is, the absence of consideration of the specific institutional, cultural, and material forms that markets take. This literature is of interest for two reasons: (1) The diversity and complexity of these forms, and thus of environmental regulations, are no longer conceived as mysterious gaps between theory and practice or the incidental effect of contingent configurations. They are the irreducible outcome of processes driven by collective action, political deliberation, and law; (2) There are new research issues to be investigated in relation to PES and biodiversity offsets: What are the logics that drive the emergence of their constitutive rules? What is the role of economics and natural sciences in the "economization" of ecosystems, biodiversity, and our relations to them? How do these mechanisms transform human-nature relationships, socioeconomic and ecological dynamics, and social relations more generally? We argue that these issues fit with the main theoretical and political stakes that underlie the development of "neoliberal conservation".