Panel 38: “Environmental Market Space(s): Discourse, Power, and Legitimacy”

Chairs:

Arno Simons, Technische Universität Berlin, arno.simons@tu-berlin.de
Aleksandra Lis, Central European University Budapest, lis_aleksandra@phd.ceu.hu

Around the world and in problem areas as diverse as climate policy, fishery management, and biodiversity protection, markets have been developed as a means of environmental governance – often replacing or pushing aside alternative approaches.

The proliferation of environmental markets (EMs) has changed not only the ways in which environmental action is perceived and practiced but also the identities of actors and the relations between them.

Design and adequacy of EMs have triggered fierce political debates and raised strong emotions. Sometimes such debates have attracted public attention. More often, however, they have taken place within informal networks of experts and policy makers – raising serious questions about the democratic legitimacy of this process.

While EMs have been able to enroll heterogeneous interests and led to the emergence of whole new sectors (like the “carbon industry”), they have also provoked strong resistance, partly in reaction to specific design problems or scandals, partly as an expression of fundamental critique. Interestingly, we can find both proponents and opponents of EMs left and right of the political spectrum, in the global North and South, and in different sectors of society.

How are we to make sense of EMs from an interpretive policy analysis (IPA) perspective? This panel seeks to investigate the highly political (but not necessarily politicized) terrains in which EMs are debated, constructed and enacted – terrains that we might call “environmental market spaces”. We invite contributions that analyze various aspects of these spaces such as past or ongoing discourses, changing practices, contested meanings, emerging identities, dynamics of actor networks, emerging resistance, the role of critics, shifting (or non-shifting) power relations, the use of metaphors and imagery, socio-technical set-ups etc. The idea is to bring together international IPA scholars working on such issues from different theoretical perspectives and employing different methodologies to see what is in there for the interpretive analysis of environmental market spaces.