Controversial valuations. Assembling environmental concerns and economic worth in clean-tech markets

International audienceEnvironmental concerns are increasingly seen a not only raising a threat to which firms need to adapt by becoming "greener" and more "socially esponsible", but also as offering opportunities or new business development. Instead of being relinquished to the status of externalities, which firms more or less willingly come to internalize, environmental qualities (or deficiencies) now sometimes happen to be brought to he enter of the calculation of the value of new products. The emergence of a "clean tech" sector epitomizes this move towards the economization (Callon and Caliskan 2009) of concerns which have hitherto been considered as lying outside of the market. This paper proposes to investigate the construction of clean tech markets by examining the mechanisms through which new technologies succeed (or fail) to be transformed into goods which possess a twofold value: environmental quality (their "cleanliness") and economic worth (their price)

Building markets for clean technologies: controversies, environmental concerns and economic worth

International audienceIn this paper, we investigate the construction of markets for clean technologies by examining the mechanisms through which new technologies succeed (or fail) to be transformed into goods that are both environmentally and economically valuable. We envisage this process as a particular form of market innovation in which new product qualities are inscribed into market architectures. We focus on the market for clean technologies that emerged as a result of the EU Integrated Pollution Prevention and Control (IPPC) directive that required polluting industries, including livestock farms, to implement the “best available techniques” in order to reduce their emissions. Our case study traces a Danish start-up firm's endeavors to commercialize one such “best availabletechnique:” a solution for reducing ammonia emissions from farms. Building on the literature on the shaping of markets, we show that the construction of a market for clean technologies hinges upon the composition of a complex network of actors with divergent, and sometimes conflicting, interests, in which market devices (in this case, a technology list) play a pivotal role. More generally, the paper contributes to discussions on controversies and performativity in market practices and on the construction of markets designed to address environmental issues

Clean and Profitable: Entangling Valuations in Environmental Entrepreneurship

International audienceIn public debates on climate change, environmental and economic value are often seen as standing in contradiction. This chapter examines regulatory and entrepreneurial attempts to reconcile environmental and economic value by turning polluting substances into matters of worth. Our case focuses on animal slurry in agriculture – a hybrid valuation object which produces both ammonia emissions in the atmosphere and fertilizer for the farm’s crops. Following the implementation of regulation aiming to reduce ammonia emissions from livestock farming, entrepreneurs have introduced new technologies to clean and thus valorize slurry; the construction of a market for such “clean” technologies has in turn raised the issue of how their value can be demonstrated and measured. We analyze the valuation work performed by regulators (the Danish Environmental Protection Agency) and entrepreneurs (a start-up that developed a solution for cleaning slurry), and contrast different modes of reconciling environmental and economic value

Constructing Transition Paths through the Management of Niches

no abstrac