Banking on Conservation: Market Reconstruction and Environmental Regulation in an Era of Exchange

• In Event: 571 - Section on Economic Sociology Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 03. The Construction and History of Markets

Abstract

American regulatory responses to ecological problems have taken a decidedly market-oriented turn in the last 20 years. Sociologists have scantly studied these changes, and social scientific research more broadly tends to subsume processes of regulatory marketization into general theories of economization and capitalization. These approaches are useful for assessing the functions these markets serve, but they poorly explain exactly how and where new market-oriented forms of environmental regulation emerge in the first place. A theory of market reconstruction fills this analytical gap. This approach focuses on how meso-level social conflicts reconstruct the ways that goods are embedded in social and economic life, thereby re-making both markets and the regulatory institutions that constitute them. Through the case of species conservation banking (SCB), I show specifically how, 1) exchange blockages; 2) blockage maintenance; 3) consonant commodification; and 4) market mobilization together drive the process of market reconstruction, and can help explain how and where market-oriented forms of environmental regulation develop. Beyond SCB, the market reconstruction approach could be adapted to explain the development of other market-oriented forms of environmental regulation, like carbon trading, and perhaps other institutional examples where social-political interventions into exchange remake markets and reshape existing regulatory frameworks.

Author

• Chris M. Rea, University of California-Los Angeles