Business Interests and the Environmental Crisis

This book highlights the manner in which key aspects in policy discourse—commodity, pricing, ownership, and regulation—have borrowed economic and trade principles to address the environmental crisis and to what effect. The book addresses a fundamental issue in environment: if nature is no longer available as a limitless resource, how has the policy discourse on the environmental crisis come to view it, value it, and live with it?

Analysing policy instruments across sectors that respond to local ecological conflicts and challenges, the book offers a conceptual understanding of how natural elements are transformed into mobile, tradable commodities through the use of market-based instruments.

Contents: Preface. Introduction/Green and Pink Kanchi Kohli and Manju Menon. I. Examining nature in business: 1. Bringing Liquidity to Life: Markets for Ecosystem Services and the New Political Economy of Extinction/Jeremy Walker.2. Claiming Benefits, Making Commodities/Shalini Bhutani. 3. The Abstract Nature of Building/Himanshu Burte.4. Coal Accounting: The Story of Fuel Kept Cheap/Vinuta Gopal. II. Democratic Governance of Nature: 5. Value as a Justification in Water Resource Development/Shripad Dharmadhikary. 6. The Effectiveness and Equity of Payments for Reducing Forest Loss/Simone Lovera. 7. Selling Nature: Narratives of Coercion, Resistance, and Ecology/Soumitra Ghosh. 8. Putting Peoplehood at the Centre of the Green Economy/Sanjay Kabir Bavikatte and Daniel F Robinson. Index.