Supplying the supply curve: an ethnography of environmental reverse auctions

ABSTRACT

As economic ideas gain prominence in environmental governance, scholars of economic practices are well positioned to analyze how environmental markets are constructed and maintained. To do this, I present an ethnographic study of environmental reverse auctions conducted in Cidanau, Indonesia. I invert the question of how economic assumptions transform environmental management decisions to specific practical challenges and their resolution as revealed in decisions taken by auction organizers, such as where to conduct the auction, how many participants are needed to engender competition, which exchanges among competing participants to restrict, how to organize facilitators, and what to announce to encourage strategic bidding. In contrast to sociological theories of auctions or the microeconomic model of individual competition, specific attributes of the auction’s materiality, such as the design of bid slips, sealed bids, announcements of winners, and the multi-round auction structure, sustain the performance of competition. A paradoxical tension emerges in the process of auction organizing, wherein sticking to the auction script necessitates working around it. Building on ethnomethodological studies of economic activities, I argue for a need to go beyond studying how auctions are socio-materially performed and instead study how the performance is demonstrated as adequately accountable for the concerns at hand.

KEYWORDS:

• Performativity
• auctions
• environment
• ethnomethodology
• materiality

Acknowledgements

The research was supported by grants from the Institute of Social Sciences and the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies in Cornell University. I would also like to thank World Agroforestry Center (ICRAF) in Bogor, Indonesia and Rekonvasi Bumi for their support in Indonesia. I am grateful to comments from Dr. Steven Wolf, Dr. Trevor Pinch, and Dr. Malte Ziewitz and my colleagues in Cornell University on previous drafts. I would also like to thank the point editor and the two anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Ritwick Ghosh is a PhD candidate in Cornell University, scheduled to graduate in May 2018. As an inter-disciplinary scholar of environmental governance, Ritwick engages critically with growing references to big data, performance metrics, and quantification in coordinating environmental policy interventions.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Institute of Social Sciences, Cornell University; Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies in Cornell University.