Disciplining the Market, Calling in the State: The Politics of Economy-Environment Integration

Abstract

This chapter seeks to look behind the different invocations of sustainable development and ecological modernisation, to uncover the competing normative and methodological assumptions and claims that are embedded in different problem definitions and associated policy prescriptions for economy-environment integration. Free-market environmentalism represents the most concerted defence of the virtues of private property and the market in solving environmental problems. Free-market environmentalists attribute most environmental problems not to market failure but to ‘state failure’. Politicians, bureaucrats and other public officials are assumed to act in self-interested ways rather than pursue ge..