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Tradeable permit systems for allocating rights to impact the environment have become an important part of the regulatory toolkit over the last 35 years. Informed by elegant neoclassical economic thought, these regulatory markets promise lowest-cost environmental benefit by delegating decision-making to market participants. This article examines tradeable permits systems, including cap-and-trade carbon markets, tradeable water quality permits, and individual transferable quotas for fisheries, to understand the actual outcomes of attempts to transfer environmental governance to markets. Drawing on heterodox economic thought and the neoliberal natures literature, this article examines the institutional forms tradeable permit systems engender in conjunction with a neoclassical definition of ‘market’ to provide an internal critique of environmental marketization. In general, tradeable permit systems do not facilitate highly liquid financial markets that might signal the increasing importance of regulatory markets as an accumulation strategy for capital. Instead, market-based regulation tends to behave rather differently, acting as performance standards, quotas, or environmental taxes. The article concludes by reflecting on the political possibilities afforded by the recognition that regulatory markets, for the most part, bear little resemblance to high-flying financial markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the import for fiduciary investors (pension funds, insurance companies, and mutual funds in OECD countries) of companies' environmental performance levels in light of existing and nascent energy-usage and environmental management policies. The study is based on an experiment using a sample of fiduciaries located mainly in Europe, North America, and Australia. Subjects are allocated to one of two groups: one group invests with reference to environmental considerations, while the other tracks a conventional equities index. Responding participants indicate the frequency with which they use nominated sources of information and rate the importance of nominated types of information in their decisions concerning the portfolio. The results suggest that the wider population of fiduciaries considers existing policy measures to be of limited value, yet, on liquidity grounds, might be prepared to take environmental considerations into account in the portfolio construction process. Another contribution of this paper is its framing and consolidating of literature on energy and environmental management policy, environmental investing, and decision psychology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper shows the main limitations and difficulties in the efficiency argument of ecological modernization. Eight limitations in the concept of eco-efficiency are revealed. Recommendations to improve the use of eco-efficiency in ecological modernization policy and management are derived from the critique. Eco-efficiency serves as an important technical tool, practical instrument, or indicator in environmental policy and management, but is not suitable as the overall goal and strategic vision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors draw upon survey evidence of expert conceptualisations of the value of public knowledge in environmental decisionmaking. In the context of local air quality management in particular, they consider how experts understand the potential benefits of technological citizenship, and what status they accord to lay knowledge relative to their own roles. Evidence suggests a continuing expert-deficit model of lay knowledge, with suspicions that the public misunderstand environmental issues. Although the need for public ‘buy-in’ to the solutions to problems such as air pollution is supported, this does not translate to a more proactive engagement of lay knowledge in the assessment of such issues. Experts seem to be personally challenged by such notions. The authors discuss the need for a cultural shift in expert understanding of the value of lay knowledge, supported by a move away from an oversimplification of the need for, and value of, public participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite its many promises, devolved governance may pose great challenges to environmental conservation, especially in the context of newly democratized polities where local communities tend to be dominated by place-bound clientele networks that pursue developmental interests at the expense of conservation. In this paper the authors examine how a conservation movement in Huben Village of Yunlin County in Taiwan has successfully been organized to save the endangered bird species Fairy Pitta (Pitta nuymphia) against gravel extraction activities that were backed by local clientele networks of politicians and business interests. The case illustrates how challenges of devolved governance can be addressed not necessarily by centralized authority but by connecting grassroots victims of environmental degradation with broader conservation movements supported by networks of civic organizations that transcend narrow geographical interests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]