Regulatory thickening and the politics of market-oriented environmental policy

ABSTRACT

Scholars of environmental market-based policy instruments (MBIs), such as cap-and-trade and biodiversity offsetting programs, have extensively documented MBI's market-like features, including the ways they incentivize producing environmental quality, risk subordinating nature protection to capital accumulation, and are supported by state-driven projects of market-building (‘re-regulation’). A less emphasized dimension of MBIs is examined: the ways these institutions are founded upon a substantial thickening of state infrastructural power, which amounts to expanding state control over economic and environmental life in ways that outstrip processes of re-regulation. Appreciating the linkages between MBIs and expanding state control over environmental quality may help explain routine conservative resistance to these policy developments. Affinities between MBIs and regulatory thickening also call into question the degree to which MBIs should be thought of as ‘liberalizing’ policy instruments and suggests that, perhaps counterintuitively, the growth of MBIs may present new opportunities for expanding public control over environmental quality.

KEYWORDS:

• Market-based instruments (MBIs)
• regulation
• state power
• infrastructural power
• wetland mitigation banking
• ecological offsetting

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Jim Salzman for prompting me to spell out this argument, to Sidney Tarrow for pushing me to make the linkages to political sociology more explicit, to Saskia Nauenberg for very helpful comments and criticisms on an earlier draft, and to two anonymous reviews and Anthony Zito, editor at Environmental Politics, who all helped clarify my prose and sharpen my arguments. All mistakes and missteps are my own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Not surprisingly, in-lieu fee programs have suffered from substantial problems related to the loss or disappearance of funds, or the implementation of questionable restoration work (Gardner 2011). These problems are at least partly addressed by strengthened requirements set out in 2008 regulatory reforms (see Federal Register (2008).

2. As of 17 October 2016, the Army Corps of Engineers Regulatory In-lieu fee and Bank Information Tracking System (RIBITS) reported 1.02 million acres of land protected in wetland mitigation banks, in-lieu fee programs, and similar off-site offset sites. Total wetland area of the coterminous United States is estimated at 110.1 million acres (Dahl 2011, p. 16).

3. ‘On-site’ offsets are located at the same location as a building project. Few studies evaluate the ecological effectiveness of mitigation in wetland ‘banks’ per se, which are larger ‘off-site’ restoration sites geographically separated from construction projects. For partial exceptions, see Ambrose et al. (2007) and Robertson and Hayden (2008).

4. For a recent review and interrogation of Mann’s concept, see Tarrow (2018).

5. Unfortunately, state-by-state breakdowns of the following data are not available.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency [F13A10071].