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.

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.

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.

Long abstract:

Based on 14 months of historical and ethnographic fieldwork in India, this paper examines the logic and grammar of contemporary naturalization of economics through an examination of green financial reports, industrial reportage, and interviews with climate consultants. It argues that reconstitution of economics as a science of planetary scale speculation is underway through introduction of novel predictive methods that involve layering of different temporal scales of climate and economic modeling that argue nature is intrinsically economic (The World Bank 2022). It highlights how this 'naturalization of economics' and 'economization of nature' is far from seamless; appearance of dogmatic rationality gives way to unprecedented degrees of distortions and mediations that increasingly dissociate nature from historical processes of social metabolism (Saito 2021; Harvey 2000).

The premise that techno-scientific models of speculation are transforming economics is beginning to gain ground in the social sciences (Masco 2015; Ballestero 2019). However, dominant thinking on the matter either imagines these economic processes to be totally subsumptive (Malm 2016) or treat the “threatening” materiality of nature as external to these economic processes (Chakrabarty 2021). By focusing on ‘naturalization of economy ‘and ‘economization of nature’ , my paper provides a crucial vantage point to understand economy’s ecology-making capacities, as well as the political possibilities that are enabled and foreclosed by the expansion of large-scale financial operations as ways of containing "nature" within the life-process of capital (Foster 2022).

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.

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.

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.

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.

Long abstract:

In the context of multiple economic and ecological crises of the present, questions of how to take “nature into account/ing” have become ever more urgent. How did the natural environment become calculable? In my paper, I focus on my doctoral work to shed light on the co-constitution of the environmentalization of economics vis-à-vis the economization of the environment. Drawing on diverse work rooted in STS, social theory, and political economy, I examine the conflation of the contradictory constellations of actors, discourses, and institutions invested in the valuation of environments, how nature has become (I) calculable (II) governable and (III) investable from the 1960s to the present. In doing so, I probe a dialogue between a Foucauldian genealogical account and a STS approach to consider the performativity of both economic practices and environmental re/configurations.

Against common conceptions of the economization and commodification of nature with the consolidation of ‘ecosystem services’ in the late 1990s, I trace the becoming-environmental of economics through a study of economists in the 1960s and 1970s. Marked by a proliferation of new environmental awareness among economists (such as Boulding, Daly or Georgescu-Roegen) at the time, these recalibrations provided a critique of neoclassical economics to incorporate ecological concerns into economic models, studying the interfaces of ‘nature’s household’ (ecosystems) and ‘humanity’s household’ (the economy). Analogously, systems ecology emerged as a public science and an object of politics that treated the environment as a set of interdependencies than a mere storehouse of commodities.