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- Convenors:
-
Alexandre Violle
(Mines Paris)
Béatrice Cointe (Centre de Sociologie de l'Innovation (CSI))
Kewan Mertens (Armines, Ecoles des Mines de Paris, Paris Sciences et Lettres (PSL))
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- Format:
- Traditional Open Panel
- Location:
- HG-09A16
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 16 July, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Amsterdam
Short Abstract:
The “environmentalization of economics” investigates how attempts to account for the environment are changing practices, tools and epistemologies in economics. This invites us to question which economy and which environment are being jointly produced, and what possibilities may thereby be ruled out.
Long Abstract:
It is hard to escape economic methods, models and concepts when considering environmental problems. We find them in the valuation of ecosystem services, the design of carbon markets and renewable energy support schemes, the “greening” of finance, or attempts to weigh the costs and benefits of climate action… Economics underpins a large part of environmental action, and is simultaneously blamed for its contribution to environmental crises.
The STS literature has mainly approached the relation between the environment and economics by studying processes of economization and valuation, that is, how environmental entities (carbon, forests, ecosystems…) are transformed into objects of economic analysis and valuation. Concepts such as economization, commodification, marketization or assetization have grasped the expansion of economic ways of thinking and their performative effect on the environment.
But this relation is not a one-way street. With the notion of “the environmentalization of economics”, this panel aims to open up thinking on the joint production of the economics and the environment as we know them, with a particular focus on knowledge production processes, practices and devices. How is economics transformed when it grapples with the environment? How do economics and environmental sciences meet? Which economies and environments does this perform and what possibilities may thereby be ruled out?
Topics of interest include: what happens when the environment is not amenable to concepts and methods of economics; the translation of methods and tools from environmental sciences into economic reasoning; the emergence of hybrid economic/environmental objects and epistemologies; the entanglement of ontologies and normativities that characterizes environmental problems.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 16 July, 2024, -Paper short abstract:
What happened to the tenets of neoclassical economics which shaped the design and justification of energy economies? We explore how civil servants speak of new economies of energy transition. Is industrial policy back in business or did it never go away?
Paper long abstract:
Power-to-X is an economy of wind, sun, water, pipelines, powerlines, land, and large machines - and an economy which asks for significant state intervention, support, and risk-taking. In economic terms the tenets of orthodox neoclassical economics are severely challenged and what we could call industrial policy is returning to the spotlight.
In Denmark, PtX has rapidly risen to prominence in the national energy future. PtX is supporting the electrification of the energy system while substituting fossil fuels where electricity is impractical. Perhaps more importantly, PtX is seen across many actors in the Danish industry as a promising new industrial venture, that - while helping the state in reaching its carbon reduction commitments - will generate jobs and export of products and technologies. A 2021 government strategy highlights these opportunities as a win-win for the national economy while pointing out that PtX, while expected to eventually be able to operate under market conditions, needs funding, better framework conditions, regulation, R&D, and additional infrastructure to take off.
In this paper, we study how civil servants in the Danish Energy Agency, as the midwifes of new policies and regulation, relate to the tension between commitments to efficient allocation (and minimal intervention) on one hand, and the on the other, the strong political push towards promoting and paving the way for specific technologies to succeed. Doing so we contribute with an account from bureaucratic practice of how an economy and its practical understandings/economics are mobilized in times of energy transition.
Paper short abstract:
Around the 80s, the French administration mandated statisticians to articulate the environment (seen as natural patrimony) and the national accounting framework. Based on archives, this presentation analyses this articulation process and how it challenges the classic accounting categories.
Paper long abstract:
Since the 1970s and the development of environmental statistics, national accounting has been repeatedly confronted with the question of integrating the environment into its accounting framework. In France, this issue was pioneered by the Interministerial Commission for the Accounting of the Natural Patrimony (CICPN) between 1978 and 1986. Our work is based on an original study of the archives of André Vanoli, National Accountant at INSEE (French statistical office), who chaired the CICPN's 'Methods' group. The task of this group was to coordinate the Commission's methodological work in order to explore the links between an original information system on natural patrimony and the conceptual framework of national accounts. We propose to trace back the questions raised by this work: How and why should the environment be constituted as a natural patrimony? How does this version of the environment come into tension with the traditional concepts of national accounting (patrimony, agent accounts, temporality, spatiality, monetary units, etc.), and what solutions are statisticians considering to make national accounting greener? This presentation invites us to follow the fragile co-construction of an environment seen as patrimony and an accounting framework that needs to be recomposed to become greener.
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines the use and negotiation of scientific knowledge by central banks as an input into the categorization and management of climate change as a systemic risk.
Paper long abstract:
While climate knowledge is proliferating in multiple economic domains, we have a poor understanding of how this information is concretely being used or integrated across sectors (Fiedler et al 2021; Siders 2019; Sobel 2021). This paper examines the use and negotiation of scientific knowledge by central banks as an input into the categorization and management of climate change as a systemic risk. Focusing specifically on the category of “physical risks”, the paper analyzes the choices made by experts assisting the Network for Greening the Financial System (NGFS) in their process of designing climate scenarios for the purpose of "stress testing" financial institutions. Through a set of preliminary interviews, I present an empirical account of which experts are (and which are not) involved in the discussions around scenario design and the kinds of assumptions underpinning their estimates of future economic damages from physical climate impacts. A growing community of climate scientists (Pitman et al 2022; Rissing et al 2022; Trust et al 2023) have critiqued this top-down economization of physical impacts, calling for more pluralistic approaches to risk assessment. Combining approaches from science and technology studies (STS) and economic sociology, this paper analyzes the distribution of practical labor and epistemic disputes between these different communities of experts, the use and diffusion of the NGFS’ assessment tools by financial institutions, and the political constraints on central bankers as they work to define joint ways of framing the problem of climate risk and incorporating such framings into forms of financial oversight.
Paper short abstract:
Due to the incorporation of ecological thinking, 'ecosystem economics' (Atluri/Dietz 2023) is an example of the meeting and confluence of environmental science and economics. STS engagements need to explore this to find ways to examine and engage with the implications of this new economic paradigm.
Paper long abstract:
This paper discusses the translation of the ecosystem concept into economic reasoning. The ecosystem concept appeared in economics in the 1990s. James F. Moore was the first to use it in the Harvard Business Review to develop a systemic approach to the corporate world where "companies coevolve capabilities around a new innovation" (Moore 1993).
The results of my anthropological studies point to different ecosystem adaptations in today's economy: While some actors use the ecosystem concept in dynamic ways to structure novel self-contained networks, adaptations formulated on the corporate side tend to use holistic reasonings to promote entrepreneurial activities.
Drawing on insights from the history of science (Tansley 1935, Benson 2020), I examine these different examples of translating the ecosystem concept from biology to economics and show the elements that get lost in this translation process, which can lead to simplistic adaptations and boundary drawing effects that are not necessarily inherent to the ecological origins of ecosystem thinking.
Paper short abstract:
Farmland attracts financial investors since the 2008 food crisis and growing agricultural and climate uncertainties. Yet the environmental crisis is generating new financial valuation of farmland that are understudied by STS. Ethnography of investors enables to unfold the renewal of farmland values.
Paper long abstract:
Studies on the financialization of farmland have focused on the driving role of the agricultural and climatic crisis. Investors in search of secure value take refuge in what appears to be like "gold with yield" (Fairbairn, 2020), i.e. an asset whose value derives from both storage value and agricultural production. However, these studies do not consider the emergence of a new type of funds investing in farmland based on new valorizations of farmland linked to the environmental crisis. With the recognition of the contribution of agricultural soils to carbon storage and biodiversity protection, new investment funds explicitly capitalize on these new environmental values of farmland. Based on an ethnographic survey of these funds (interviews, observation of investors' conferences) conducted on a French and European scale, the article will explore the articulation of financial-agricultural-environmental values in the construction of farmland profitability. In particular, it will highlight the instrumental role played by intermediaries in this market, i.e. the players who certify CO2 storage or biodiversity credits, whether private or public. On this basis, it will highlight the role of environmental policy in the financialization of farmland and will discuss the changes these developments have brought about in traditional farmland regulation and its objective of protecting agricultural activity.
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines how the rights of nature reorient Earth observation towards political applications aligned with decolonial struggles against extractivism
Paper long abstract:
In 2008, Ecuador became the first country to give constitutional rights to nature. This radical shift in the conceptualization of nature was followed by a 2023 democratic referendum blocking oil drilling in the Yasuní National Park and restricting mineral extraction from the Chocó Andino Biosphere Reserve. In this context, my paper problematizes how a newly formed Ecuadorian space expert community works in collaboration with Indigenous activists, environmental lawyers, and multimodal artists to produce satellite visualizations about the dismantlement of petroleum infrastructures and the withdrawal of mining activities in Amazonian-Andean forests. My ethnography depicts the development of an Earth observation program with a strong commitment to advancing the rights of nature by remotely sensing environmental liabilities and monitoring the expansion of agricultural frontiers. This program operated out of a satellite tracking station originally built by NASA in the late 1950s at the foothills of the Cotopaxi volcano and gained prominence during the early years of New Space, a term used to characterize a highly financialized and unregulated space industry.
Paper short abstract:
Conceptualising sustainable farming as a co-modification process, we explore who or what may be animated or pacified as a cranberry plant is economised.
Paper long abstract:
Guided by the buzz phrase of ‘farming with nature’, agricultural wastelands across Europe have become experimental sites for sustainable farming in an effort to repair these ecologies while maintaining their economic function. We focus on an exemplifying case of such an experiment in the Netherlands: the restoration of a degraded peat polder by means of cranberry cultivation. The economic potential of cranberries lies in their ecological ability to grow in wet conditions allowing the peat ecosystem to re-establish itself as both carbon sink and biodiversity haven. A ‘win-win-win scenario’. To bring such a scenario into being, intricate relations among cranberries, soil microbiome, other plants, fauna, groundwater, greenhouse gases, farmers, and consumers need to be facilitated and fostered. These intricate relations are animated by an economic register of valuing as cranberries are meant to become commodities. The aim, though, is no longer to just produce the cranberry as a pacified good (Çalişkan and Callon 2010). The ecology in which the cranberry grows is, in addition, meant to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions and to help restore biodiversity. These ‘ecosystem services’ might, in turn, also be commodified. Conceptualising the commodification of cranberries, and their ecologies, as a co-modification process (Asdal, 2018), we explore who or what may be animated and who or what may be pacified as the cranberry plant is economised as part of sustainable farming. In so doing, we seek to enrich the co-modification agenda within the anthropology of markets with some multispecies-inspired insights.