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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.