Valuation and Its Problems: Economics and Markets for Environmental Concerns and Their Failure

Science and Technology Studies scholars have in recent years made a major impact on the conjoining field of Social Studies of Markets, demonstrating how economics is performative and actively takes part in shaping markets. Research has shown how markets emerge through processes of economization, organization, and design, in which economic theory becomes inscribed through devices and material arrangements. But economics do not always perform and often fail to be realized. A prominent example of a grand failure is the idea of handling environmental problems by ascribing a price to nature. Despite being seen as the perfect theoretical answer and spearheaded by economists, market prices that reflect the value of nature are rarely realized. To understand such failures, this paper suggests a more relational approach than that offered by the predominantly realization-oriented performativity paradigm. This is to better observe that there is more than one version of economics and economization and how different “versions of economization” may compete and conflict. To enable this move, the analysis turns the attention beyond the organization of markets alone and toward other organizational forms, namely bureaucracy and public administration as key sites for the enactment of markets and the contestation over economics.