Hybridity, possibility: Degrees of marketization in tradeable permit systems

Abstract

https://mc04.manuscriptcentral.com/epa Environment and Planning A Hybridity, possibility: Degrees of marketization in tradeable permit systemsTradeable permit systems for allocating rights to impact the environment have become an important part of the regulatory toolkit over the last 35 years. Informed by elegant neoclassical economic thought, these regulatory markets promise lowest-cost environmental benefit by delegating decision-making to market participants. This article examines tradeable permits systems, including cap-and-trade carbon markets, tradeable water quality permits, and individual transferable quotas for fisheries, to understand the actual outcomes of attempts to transfer environmental governance to markets. Drawing on heterodox economic thought and the neoliberal natures literature, this article examines the institutional forms tradeable permit systems engender in conjunction with a neoclassical definition of 'market' to provide an internal critique of environmental marketization. In general, tradeable permit systems do not facilitate highly liquid financial markets that might signal the increasing importance of regulatory markets as an accumulation strategy for capital. Instead, market-based regulation tends to behave rather differently, acting as performance standards, quotas, or environmental taxes. The article concludes by reflecting on the political possibilities afforded by the recognition that regulatory markets, for the most part, bear little resemblance to high-flying financial markets.

Reflecting on neoliberal natures: An exchange

“…Linked to this is the major indication that, on the whole, the incursion of neoliberal capital into nature has been thin, variegated, hybridized, frustrated, even stymied in some places (e.g. Bigger, 2017; Dempsey and Suarez, 2016; Fletcher and Breitling, 2012; Milne and Adams, 2012). Indeed, as Dempsey (2017: 201) notes concerning the achievements of the financialization of conservation, ‘failure is a big part of the story to study and tell’.…”

Value–rent–finance

“…A recent special issue (Ouma et al, 2018: 2) captures a concern for epistemologically variegated and empirically fine-grained accounts that unpack the realisation of financial profits (M’) without losing sight of the ‘use value (C’) from which a more abstract financial value is derived’. Addressing how nature and resource-based revenues are calculated by finance, the papers shed light on the complexities, behaviours, processes and material practices that play out across socio-environmental issues like tradable permit systems (Bigger, 2018), forest-based carbon sequestering (Asiyanbi, 2018), moral judgements attached to farmland investments (Sippel, 2018) and the ‘values’ that inform the rationales of financial investors in agricultural land (Kish and Fairbairn, 2018: 585). Even though there is acknowledgement that the income of financial capital is ‘probably more accurately rents’ (Ouma et al, 2018: 501), the analytical basis of this category within Marxian political economy is eschewed, and just one of the papers concludes with a remark about ‘ground rent and land ownership concentration’ that can be included within an ‘expanded moral critique’ (Kish and Fairbairn, 2018: 585).…”

Accounting for Sustainability in Asia: Stock Market Regulation and Reporting in Hong Kong and Singapore

“…These stock market regulations follow similar moves in the US and Europe to require sustainability reporting as part of wider efforts to harness capital markets to the cause of environmental sustainability. To date most of the research in economic geography on the 'greening' of finance has focused on the operation and impacts of new quasi-markets and financial instruments, such as emissions trading and biodiversity offset markets (Bumpus and Liverman 2008;Bigger 2018), green bonds (Bracking 2015;Johnson 2014), and ethical investment funds (Hadfield-Hill 2007;Hughes 2011). The underlying mechanisms of accounting and certification that make such financial processes possible have largely been ignored.…”