Natural Capital as Economics Imperialism : History, Political Economy, and Ecological Critique

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Heisse, Christiane:
Natural Capital as Economics Imperialism : History, Political Economy, and Ecological Critique.
London, UK , 2025 . - 219 S.
( Dissertation, 2025, SOAS University of London)
DOI: https://doi.org/10.25501/soas.00822678

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Abstract

Mainstream economics is ill-equipped to deal with systemic crises such as climate change and biodiversity breakdown. Yet there is no shortage of approaches that extend neoclassical principles to nature-economy relations. One such approach is natural capital accounting, developed in environmental economics in response to escalating environmental crises in the 1980s and 1990s. For this critical analysis of the history, development, and practical application of natural capital, I draw on a combination of qualitative methods; a systematic literature review of more than 2000 academic publications on natural capital, the analysis of policy documents especially relating to the World Bank’s WAVES (Wealth Accounting and the Valuation of Ecosystem Services) programme, and semi-structured interviews with natural capital experts working in international development institutions and the private sector.
I argue that the concept emerged as it did, when it did, because of economics imperialism, the tendency of neoclassical economics to take over new and different subject areas. This is evident in its formation as BBI (bringing back in) environmental concerns into economic analysis via capital as a conceptual framework, typical of economics imperialism in its second market-imperfection phase. From the onset, natural capital thus came with a reductionist understanding of ecological-economic relations with significant limitations for analysis of both the ecological and the economic. The concepts’ subsequent success in ecological economics points to the presence of economics imperialism even in a field that was established with the intention of breaking with the discipline’s neoclassical core.
Due to its reliance on economics imperialism and poor representation of the systemic, natural capital and solutions derived from natural capital are liable to be inadequate in strength and direction in addressing the ongoing and escalating multiple environmental crises under capitalism. This has ramifications beyond the academy. The latter part of this dissertation thus discusses the limitations of natural capital in practice with special reference to the World Bank. Here, I demonstrate that initiatives to promote natural capital accounting have, over the years, been deployed within wider structures of development and financialization. In this sense, there is a significant impact that economics imperialism has had on the ‘real world’ and the management of real environmental crises, by providing natural capital as a framework. To the extent that it draws legitimacy from economics imperialism, natural capital and other environment-as-externality framings distract from systemic questions and play into discourses and ‘climate action’ that run counter to climate science.