In recent years, ‘environmental economics’ has provided the dominant logic underpinning policies for ‘sustainable development’ in the form of government managed price-based and rights-based mechanisms. The advocacy of property rights in environmental management is taken further in the libertarian ‘free market’ approach and this ‘privatisation’ perspective is reflected in the growing use of property rights instruments in climate change policy. This article examines the efficacy of using economic instruments in the environmental context where ‘market ecology’ promotes the commodification of environmental ‘goods’ and ‘bads’ and their management by market forces. It argues that the pricing of ‘nature’ or its useful properties is a crude abstraction that implies ecological values can be alienated, but this is incompatible with the material and relational qualities of such values. The limits of this conceptualisation are further demonstrated through an examination of the Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), a price and property rights instrument which enables private project developers in developing countries to produce carbon credits in order to offset greenhouse gas pollution in developed countries. The evident negative social and environmental effects flowing from implementation of the CDM reinforce the limitations of economic logic in the environmental context.

In 2011, the UK government set in motion a process to establish a formal biodiversity offsetting programme in England, as an attempt to tackle biodiversity loss as a result of development. Drawing on critical approaches to the commodification of nature, this article traces the dilemmas encountered by the UK government in its endeavours to roll out a biodiversity offsetting programme in the English planning system. Based on 34 in-depth interviews with key stakeholders, documentary analysis and participant observation at policy-focused events, the paper aims to show how the promise of reconciling development and conservation proved difficult to deliver. In government attempts to enrol sympathetic actors, disputes emerged over the purpose and fine detail of the proposals. Deeper tensions were revealed in clashes between governmental emphasis on deregulation and advocates’ calls for strong mandatory rules and well-resourced oversight, while efforts to balance complex ecology with market demands for simplicity and certainty undermined the promise of objective biodiversity metrics delivering uncontroversial hard numbers. Though the English case is in many ways context-specific, the problems experienced raise wider political questions around establishing meaningful offsetting schemes in any part of the world.