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Tradeable permit systems for allocating rights to impact the environment have become an important part of the regulatory toolkit over the last 35 years. Informed by elegant neoclassical economic thought, these regulatory markets promise lowest-cost environmental benefit by delegating decision-making to market participants. This article examines tradeable permits systems, including cap-and-trade carbon markets, tradeable water quality permits, and individual transferable quotas for fisheries, to understand the actual outcomes of attempts to transfer environmental governance to markets. Drawing on heterodox economic thought and the neoliberal natures literature, this article examines the institutional forms tradeable permit systems engender in conjunction with a neoclassical definition of 'market' to provide an internal critique of environmental marketization. In general, tradeable permit systems do not facilitate highly liquid financial markets that might signal the increasing importance of regulatory markets as an accumulation strategy for capital. Instead, market-based regulation tends to behave rather differently, acting as performance standards, quotas, or environmental taxes. The article concludes by reflecting on the political possibilities afforded by the recognition that regulatory markets, for the most part, bear little resemblance to high-flying financial markets.

According to an increasingly prevalent set of discourses and practices within environmental and development finance, cities across the Global South are facing a costly infrastructural crisis stemming from rapid urbanization and climate change that threatens to further entrench poverty and precarity for millions of people. The cost of achieving urban resilience across the world dwarfs available public finance, however, from both development banks and governments themselves. Meanwhile, vast amounts of money on capital markets are searching for profitable investment opportunities. The World Bank is attempting to channel return-seeking investment into urban infrastructure in response to these challenges. To harness this private finance, though, cities must be reformatted in investment-friendly ways. In this article, we chart the emergence of this discourse and associated practices within the World Bank. We call this rescaled and climate-inflected program of leveraged investments coupled with technical assistance Green Structural Adjustment. Drawing on policy documents, reports, and interviews with key staff, we examine programs that include Green Structural Adjustment to show how it aims to restructure local governments to capture new financial flows. Green Structural Adjustment reduces adaptation to a question of infrastructure finance and government capacity building, reinscribing both causes and effects of uneven development while creating spatial fixes for overaccumulated Northern capital in the Global South.

As the effects of austerity continue to ravage cities and the impacts of climate change become more pronounced, municipal officials around the world are struggling to pay for climate adaptation. Some cities have already begun to anticipate the new infrastructures that climate change will require, while others have been forced to adapt in real time as climate crises have arrived in spectacular ways. Two of the most emblematic events are Superstorm Sandy, which drenched New York City in October 2012, and the drought-induced crisis of water scarcity in Cape Town, South Africa, which was most visible between 2016 and 2018. In both cases, the cities turned to green bonds, a form of municipal finance that foregrounds environmental ambitions. In this paper, we track the forms of adaptation projects that green borrowing are earmarked to fund. Drawing from scholarship on the financialization of nature alongside recent work on racial capitalism and austerity, we find that rather than transformative municipal change each city is largely carrying on with projects that reinscribe existing inequalities in the city. In addition to reflecting inequalities already present in the two cities, however, the use of municipal debt for adaptation intensifies risks, both financial and environmental, borne primary by the poor or working class people of color. Building on qualitative fieldwork in Cape Town, New York, and across the green bond investment chain, we argue that the risks posed by climate change in the city cannot be financialized away. Ultimately, we call for the end of municipal austerity driven by national and supranational budgeting choices in favor of increasing national funding of municipal adaptation by rescaling borrowing to higher political scales that can more progressively distribute risks.

Value can appear so complicated that it is not only a terribly intimidating topic, but actually fruitless to pursue. That is, the concept of value is either a dead end or best left to the experts. We disagree. At the most general level, having value can be understood as having the capacity to be measured and compared against another thing (or a standard). This is consistent with Marxian concepts (which are elaborated with special reference to the capitalist value form), but it is also simple and general enough to provide a transportable frame for discussing the role of value and measurement in any context imaginable, whether it be a discussion of spiritualism, collective action, economic data, or physical science. Marx directs our attention to the political constitution of systems of measure on the very first page of Capital, and there is now a great deal of work in geography and in science and technology studies on the social constitution of systems of valuation. We believe a crucial topic deserves an accessible approach that reveals unities rather than barriers, and thus supplement them with the moral and critical political-economic critique made possible by Marxian value theory.

The assertion that 'ecosystems are infrastructure' is now common in conservation science and ecosystem management. This article interrogates that claim, which we argue underpins diverse practices of environmental investment focused on the strategic management of ecosystem functions to sustain and secure human life. We trace the genealogies and geographies of infrastructural nature as a paradigm of investment that coexists (sometimes in tension) with extractivist commodity regimes. We draw links between literatures on the political economy of ecosystem services and infrastructure and highlight three themes that hold promise for future research: labor, territory, and finance.

Abstract The United States military is treating climate change as a crucial factor in its preparation for future conflicts. This concern manifests not only in strategic planning and forward-looking documents, but also in building infrastructural capacity and material provision. Yet, the impetus to 'green' the military goes beyond the deployment of existing technologies. We examine several facets of the military's role as an environmental actor, particularly through its promotion of the US Navy's 'Great Green Fleet' (GGF), which actively supports the development of advanced biofuels by subsidizing their development and facilitating wider marketization. The GGF promises to reduce military reliance on conventional fossil fuels and reconfigure its energy sourcing, thus reducing dependence on imported hydrocarbons; this is with an eye towards ultimately severing the logistical relationship between existing energy infrastructures and the spaces of military intervention. Taking an integrated lens of political ecology and geopolitics - 'geopolitical ecology' - we seek to provide an understanding of the production of weaponized nature. We demonstrate that the US military's discursive use of climate change to justify the provision of new military hardware and advanced biofuels promotes a vision of resource conflicts to support the development of technologies to overcome the constraints to delivery of fuel to emergent front lines. We argue that while this may appear to be militarized greenwashing, it signals a shift in the logics and practices of fuel sourcing driven by a dystopian vision of climate change, which the US military played a significant role in creating.

This paper examines the US military's impact on climate by analysing the geopolitical ecology of its global logistical supply chains. Our geopolitical ecology framework interrogates the material‐ecological metabolic flows (hydrocarbon‐based fuels, water, sand, concrete) that shape geopolitical and geoeconomic power relations. We argue that to account for the US military as a major climate actor, one must understand the logistical supply chain that makes its acquisition and consumption of hydrocarbon‐based fuels possible. Our paper focuses on the US Defense Logistics Agency – Energy (DLA‐E), a large yet virtually unresearched sub‐agency within the US Department of Defense. The DLA‐E is the primary purchase‐point for hydrocarbon‐based fuels for the US military, as well as a powerful actor in the global oil market. After outlining our geopolitical ecology approach, we detail the scope of the DLA‐E's operations, its supply chain, bureaucratic practices, and the physical infrastructure that facilitates the US military's consumption of hydro‐based carbons on a global scale. We show several "path dependencies" – warfighting paradigms, weapons systems, bureaucratic requirements, and waste – that are put in place by military supply chains and undergird a heavy reliance on carbon‐based fuels by the US military for years to come. The paper, based on comprehensive records of bulk fuel purchases we have gathered from DLA‐E through Freedom of Information Act requests, represents a partial yet robust picture of the geopolitical ecology of American imperialism.