Environmental governance and performances of equivalence

The long-standing promise of creating and governing environmental markets depends on the development of practical and political commensurabilities between nature and commodities. Various approaches can be taken to produce accounting equivalence and translate the complexity and diversity of the natural world into tradable, economic entities. Building on empirical analyses of a high profile pay-for-performance initiative in US agri-environmental policy and of the French approach to ecological compensation, the presenters show that creating and governing environmental markets rests on combining multiple and hybrid modes of coordination. Such pluralization produces creative opportunities but also introduces conditions where questions of value and authority are in flux.