Abstract

Between 1948-1971, UK public officials across government came to practise cost-benefit analysis routinely as a means of justifying investment and regulatory decisions. From 1966, a small number of these analyses ‘took nature into account’ by quantifying as money the value ‘to the community’ of beautiful, leisure-ready environments. Only from around 1986, however, do we find civil servants beginning to monetize the value of environmental costs and benefits widely and on a regular basis in policy analysis. They still do so — calculating the contribution of biodiverse ecosystems, raw materials, and non-toxic atmospheres to human wealth, health, and happiness — making environmental CBA one prominent component of our ongoing response to the contemporary ecological crisis. How should we explain and interpret this process: of public officials bringing ‘the environment’ more routinely into cost-benefit analysis, and cost-benefit analysis more prominently into environmental governance? I argue that the most important developments in this story took place at the transnational level, as UN and EC agencies turned to environmental CBA as a means to give everyday administrative expression to the abstract goal of ‘sustainable development’. By doing so, these transnational authorities essentially scaled up and adapted practices that national governments and nationalized enterprises had developed for the management of public goods in the mid-twentieth century. This project, I conclude, was heavily influenced by the novel problems of political representation created by the twin processes of global environmental degradation and European integration. In bureaucracies’ attempts to monetize the value ‘to the community’ of natural environments in public decision-making, we find a deeply flawed attempt to fashion and represent a collective agent on a scale equal to the ecological crisis, distinctively non-national in its dimensions.