Introduction

The planet today is at a crossroads with unrestrained consumption and production transgressing planetary thresholds, jeopardising the generativity of the earth and the social structures that are dependent on it (Magdoff & Foster, 2011). A lot of environmentalists, scientists, business enterprises are all offering solution to the problem; green consumption, growth of capital markets, technocratic fixes etc. A closer examination indicates that most of these fixes elucidates an implicit optimism in the market mechanism and fails to “embed ecological challenges in tangible social realities”(Laurent, 2014) . The mainstream approaches to the environmental crisis attempt a symptomatic treatment of the issue and often fails to trace the root cause of the crisis. Understanding causation is essential to make a deeper sense of the question, “who produces what kind of socio-ecological configurations for whom” (Heynen, Kaika, and Swyngedouw 2006 pg.7).

The mainstream or neo classical paradigm locates the origins of all environmental problems including climate change, to the absence of a well-functioning market for environmental goods. The source of environmental damage is that preferences for environmental goods are not revealed in market prices, and then the solution is to ensure that they are (O’Neill, 2001). When private and social costs diverge externalities arise. The term externality when used in mainstream language denotes that these factors are presumed to exist outside the purview of the system’s operation (Nadeau, 2010). Environmental externalities exist outside the purview of market and hence market prices fail to reflect the real cost of environmental damage. Thus it calls for internalising the externalities through tradable property rights or alternatively constructs shadow prices for environmental goods by ascertaining what individuals would pay for them, were there a market (O’Neill, 2001).