2018 Conference

Individual Paper Presentation

The popularity of market based governance as an environmental ethic has exploded since the development of highly successful endeavors such as the Forest Stewardship Council and Fair Trade Coffee provided models for using stringent standards and third party enforcement to generate market share. Since their boom of popularity in the early nineties, these approaches have inspired more and more environmentalist organizations and environmental government agencies to embrace these approaches hoping to discover ‘win-win’ solutions to seemingly intractable problems. However, in recent years there has been a perilous expansion of these types of approaches into all types of issues and products in an attempt to offload issues where command and control governance would have strong detractors to instead create softer voluntary approaches.

This paper reviews the historical trend of how these market-based governance models have become a dominant ideology for all different political orientations. Following several case studies, the paper demonstrates cases where the application of market-based governance was implemented despite the lack of traditional ‘market failures’. These case studies highlight how the search for ‘win-win’ solutions have become an ideology for environmentalists and how a pedagogy of supporting these approaches by universities has led to a generation of environmentalists armed with MBAs who seek to let profits dictate environmental outcomes.