Project members Marie Stilling and Stine Engen were invited to present their ongoing work at a seminar on "the good economy" organized by the research centre SPIRAL, Université Liège Cité. Read on for the full seminar description:
Recent work in STS has examined the intersection of valuation, visions of good economies and environmental markets. According to Asdal et al. (2021), the contemporary bioeconomy is enmeshed with a specific shift: it is in need of justification beyond its contribution to surplus and on top of its eventual success at the market. This has been termed as the pursuit for a ’good economy’, or an economy that does good beyond profit. Here, ’the bio’ is valued as inherently good, but it is also multiply enacted as an expert issue of different economic valuation practices, such as accounting and business strategy tools that bring together the pursuit of profit with the pursuit of other forms of good. Further questions arise with these notions: how and why do such practices configure economies differently, and through what kind of practices? How are these emerging notions of a good economy related to shifts in bio-economy-society relations and politics?
In this session, we discuss these dynamics in relation to phenomena such as environmental impact bonds, climate risk management and voluntary carbon markets, where different kinds of novel and tailored visions of a good economy are enacted. Informed by perspectives in STS, economic sociology, valuation studies and sustainability transition studies, we focus both on the theoretical and empirical components of studying the valuation practices of the bioeconomy.
Presentations (15 mins presentation + 25 mins discussion)
Olli Tiikkainen (University of Helsinki): Visions of a good economy as critiques of inefficiency: the critical capacity of an environmental impact bond
Stine Engen (University of Oslo): Believing in climate risk: The central banker’s critique and normativity as a tool for risk management
Marie Stilling (University of Oslo): Good weeds of the Anthropocene? Critical situations in the cultivation of Norwegian seaweeds
Kamilla Karhunmaa (University of Helsinki & University of Liège): Making things less the same: creating difference as a way of enhancing “the good” in voluntary carbon markets