Making Markets Fast and Slow: Commodification and the Emergence of Counter-Movements

Market-oriented solutions to environmental problems have proliferated since the 1990s, and along with them, so have countermovements. As carbon-based cap-and-trade schemes have grown in prominence, so have protests against 'profiting from pollution' (Carton, 2014). As the United Nations has moved to implement its Reductions in Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD and REDD+) programs, paying poor landholders to manage forest cover for carbon sequestration, movements have sprung up condemning the 'commodification of the climate' and new forms of green imperialism (Beymer-Farris, 2012). The recent implementation of a system of biodiversity 'offsetting' in Brazil, and similar proposals in the United Kingdom and the European Union, have all met with stiff resistance to commodifying nature (Lockhart, 2015). But among this global movement and counter-movement trend, there is at least one stark outlier. The emergence of a large-scale market in habitat credits in the United States, including offsets indend to help 'make up' for harm to wetland and to endangered species habitat, has scarcely generated a peep of resistance. In the face of one of the most clear and well-developed examples of "selling nature to save it" (Mcafee, 1999) no discernible--yet alone influential--countermovement has developed. Why not?

In this article, I set out to understand how commodification processes do and do not generate countermovements. Using a comparison between the development of a market in carbon credits in the United States, which has inspired strong resistance, and a market in habitat credits, which has not, I theorize how variations in the *processes* of commodification influence how and where countermovements emerge. Using evidence from each case, I show how fast-moving commodification processes may be more apt to inspire counter-movements, and how slow-moving ones may not. These differences are not reducible to costs that commodification processes may impose on market incumbents, differences in social (or, in my cases, ecological) dislocation threatened by markets, or the visibility or cultural salience of the commodification processes. Indeed, slow-moving commodification processes may be more visible and offer more chances for counter-movements to intervene into commodification processes than fast moving processes do. Instead, I show how slow-moving commodification processes proceed by incrementally shifting taken-for-granted valuation techniques in market-oriented directions, thereby 'naturalizing' the commodity status of a good that had previously not been valued in pecuniary terms, and undercutting the salience and urgency that counter-movements draw upon to resist commodification. Fast-moving commodification processes, however, often involve stark reconfigurations of market dynamics, including sudden new costs to some market incumbents, and invoke sharp breaks in the "moral order" of markets (Fourcade and Healey, 2007). Together, these shifts produce conditions of instability and unsettledness (Swidler, 1986; Bail, 2012) in established market orders, and create opportunities for countermovements to take hold and to challenge pushes for commodification.

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Beymer-Farris, Betsy A. and Thomas J. Bassett. 2012. “The REDD menace: Resurgent protectionism in Tanzania’s mangrove forests.” Global Environmental Change 22:332– 341.

Carton, Wim. 2014. “Environmental Protection as Market Pathology?: Carbon Trading and the Dialectics of the ‘Double Movement’.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 32:1002–1018.

Fourcade, Marion and Kieran Healy. 2007. “Moral Views of Market Society.” Annual Review of Sociology 33:285–311. 

Lockhart, Andy. 2015. “Developing an offsetting programme: tensions, dilemmas and difficulties in biodiversity market-making in England.” Environmental Conservation 42:335–344. 

McAfee, Kathleen. 1999. “Selling Nature to Save It? Biodiversity and the Rise of Green Developmentalism.” Environment and Planning 17:133–154.

Swidler, Ann. 1986. “Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies.” American Sociological Review 51(2):pp. 273–86.

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