Markets, Deliberation and Environment

About this book

What is the source of our environmental problems? Why is there in modern societies a persistent tendency to environmental damage? From within neoclassical economic theory there is a straightforward answer to those questions: it is because environmental goods and harms are unpriced. They come free.

This position runs up against a view which runs in entirely the opposite direction, that our environmental problems have their source not in a failure to apply market norms rigorously enough, but in the very spread of these market mechanisms and norms. The source of environmental problems lies in part in the spread of markets both in real geographical terms across the globe and through the introduction of markets mechanisms and norms into spheres of life that previously have been protected from markets.

In this book, John O'Neill conducts a thorough examination of these two opposing viewpoints covering a discussion of the ethical boundaries of markets, the role of private property rights in environmental protection, the nature of sustainability and the valuation of goods over time.

This book is essential reading for undergraduate and postgraduate students studying courses in ecological and environmental economics.

Contents

Introduction: Globalisation and the environment Part One Environmental Goods and the Limits of the Market Chapter 1: Markets and the Environment: The Solution is the Problem The Solution is the Problem The limits of monetary valuation 1.3. Constitutive incommensurabilities 1.4. Property rights and equity 1.5. Reason blindness 1.6 Two models of democracy 1.7 The limits of compensation Chapter 2: Managing Without Prices: On the Monetary Valuation of Biodiversity 2.1. Managing without prices 2.2. Maximising well-being 2.3. Trading-off values 2.4. Pragmatic justifications. Chapter 3 Property, care and environment 3.1. Property rights and the environment 3.2. Care, property and community 3.3. Normative public goods 3.4. Property, community and care over time 3.5. In defence of neglect or the meanings of care Chapter 4: Public Choice, Institutional Economics, Environmental Goods 4.1. The challenge of public choice theory 4.2. What is dead and what is living in critiques of orthodox environmental economics? 4.3. Institutional economics: the old and the new 4.4. Institutional economics and environmental goods: an agenda Part Two Time, Community, Equality Chapter 5: Time, Narrative and Environmental Politics 5.1 Time, narrative and separability 5.2 The self and its future 5.3 Between past and future generations: community, environment and public decisions 5.4. A brief social history of time Ch. 6 Sustainability: ethics, politics and the environment 6.1. Sustainability, justice and equality 6.2. Intergenerational justice and sustainability Sustainability: weak and strong Nature without capital 6.5. Environmental justice within generations Part Three Bringing Environmentalism in from the Wilderness Chapter 7: Wilderness, Cultivation and Appropriation 7.1. Wilderness and its critics 7.2. Wilderness protection: political problems 7.3. What's left of the wilderness? Chapter 8: The Good Life Below the Snowline 8.1. Environmental virtues and public policy 8.2. Liberal environmentalism? 8.3 Plural goods and social union 8.4. Narrative 8.5. The good life above and below the snow-line Part Four Deliberation and its Discontents Chapter 9: Deliberation, Power and Voice Chapter 10: The Rhetoric of Deliberation 10.1. Reason, rhetoric and deliberation 10.2. Reason, authority and credibility 10.3. Autonomy, maturity and emotion Chapter 11: Representing People, Representing Nature, Representing the World 11.1 Representation and the Environment 11.2. The Alejandro solution 11.3 Representation: social scientific or political 11.4. Political theory and the problem of representation 11.5. Deliberative democracy and the sources of legitimacy 11.6. Giving voice to the voiceless: nature and future generations. 11.7. Speaking for nature? Chapter 12: The Political Economy of Deliberation 12.1 Deliberative democracy and political economy 12.2. Hayek, epistemology and ecology 12.3 Pluralism, markets and the present of the future

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Lancaster University, UK