A growing body of scholarly contributions has shown how environmental issues are being “financialised”, as financial actors problematise the environment and the climate as a question of financial valuation. But what effects are their valuation processes having on financial and economic knowledge? By considering the case of the Network for Greening the Financial System (NGFS), I show how central bank economists are trying to create a “climate for investors” out of climate change, defining climate scenarios that give banks incentives to finance low-carbon activities and thus encourage the transition to a “good global economy”. I argue that NGFS economists are doing boundary work that treads a path, carefully highlighting certain threats of climate change for an audience of investors, without losing their legitimacy or running the risk of appearing to be political actors. In doing so, these central bank economists are also transforming their understanding of what makes up national economies.

This article is an inquiry into value under construction. By unfolding the context of early-stage impact investing I examine how investors qualify and give value to environmental aspirations. I trace the role of the investor in shaping what a ‘good investment’ is and highlight the close connection between judging value and constructing value. Earlier studies have emphasised how investors spur financialised forms of valuation and impose financial frames onto the companies they engage with. However, more than financial logic is in play when things are made valuable in finance. The findings of this article illustrate how making something valuable is entwined with making something ‘good’. I show how the qualitative and moral judgements of investors shape what is valued of environmental aims in significant ways. The qualifications constrict what is considered environmental solutions and draw boundaries between ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ aspirations. The approach contributes a holistic lens onto how things are made valuable in the economy.

This article examines the reclassification of palm fatty acid distillate (PFAD) in Sweden's biofuel sector and its broader implications for the ‘good economy’. Initially classified as a residue, PFAD was subject to minimal sustainability oversight, in line with the practice of transforming waste into valuable, sustainable products. However, due to its association with the controversial palm oil industry, PFAD was reclassified as a co-product, subjecting it to stricter scrutiny. Using the concept of ‘de-scription’, this study explores how this reclassification alters PFAD’s sustainability profile, highlighting how classification systems act as valuation tools. It also shows how a subtractive logic (ridding) can help maintain a favourable economic image. The research challenges the assumption that biofuel residues are inherently sustainable and critiques the minimalist regulatory approach of residual governance, which allows materials classified as residues to escape rigorous oversight.

This article discusses a concept that institutions from the OECD to the EU increasingly employ in their response to the ecological crisis: The bioeconomy, wherein materials for economic activity would be bio-based and renewable. As a present-day project, the bioeconomy translates the critique of (fossil) carbon into patterns of (material) resource use and (economic) resource allocation, not least through a new valorisation of innovation in the form of public– private partnerships. Yet where literature on the bioeconomy scrutinizes innovation, the concrete link between funders and funded has seldom been subject to focused analytical inquiry. This link is essential to the structure of the bioeconomy project. To broach the arrangements by which efforts to conjure a (bio-)economy underwrite specific patterns of value distribution, this article asks: Which discursive and conceptual resources are deployed to define the worth by which projects are construed as worthy of funding? Drawing on online ethnographic observation at funding events as well as on document analysis, we show how these arrangements are structured by a valorisation of efficiency. We propose to call this bio-efficiency, and relate it to a construal of the world as scarce.

What does it mean for a business or industry to be and do good? And who can count themselves within the good economy? This article investigates the justification of goodness in mineral exploration and mining and uses the entwinement between value creation and destruction characteristic of mining to trouble notions of goodness in impactful industries. Based on analyses of indepth interviews, ethnographic fieldnotes, and archival materials, the article follows the ways in which mining industry actors seek to negotiate contradictions between creation and destruction; and does so while using an innovative conceptual framework based in Peircean semiotics to open up justification for analysis of the underlying semiotic machinery that actors rely on to signify goodness. Mobilizing this conceptual toolkit, the article investigates how miners and explorers emphasize certain values, or signs, over others and how values are used to assert that some mines and miners do more good than others.

We investigate how temporality matters in processes of valuation. Taking our empirical point of departure in the case of a novel gene therapy that has been the centre of a heated pricing debate, we explore how the ‘goodness’ of such a pharmaceutical good was negotiated by researchers, patients, pharmaceutical companies and regulators, and how these negotiations were shaped by the mobilisation of past experiences and future expectations. Seeking to advance the beginning of an analytical sensitivity to temporality in valuation studies, we develop the notion of ‘temporal layering’. We argue that moments of valuation consist of multiple ‘temporal layers’ where select past experiences and future expectations are rendered visible – or left obscure – depending on how these layers are drawn upon in valuation struggles and by whom. Thus, what is at stake in determining the ‘good’ in particular moments of valuation is not just a contest over certain qualities or ways to evaluate an object, but also over which (particular layers of) pasts and futures come to count. We suggest that such fine-grained temporal analysis can provide new openings to questions of valuation for a wide-ranging array of economic objects, particularly for those situated in contemporary bioeconomies.

This article examines how notions of the good are entangled with instruments of valuation in the case of wind power in Denmark. Analytically, we develop what we tentatively call a comparative actantial approach to the study of policy instruments. Empirically, we inspect three support schemes introduced between 1979 and 1999 by the Danish state to foster the development of wind power. The comparative inspection shows wind power's notable shifts in what we call its actantial status: the same character appears as a very different kind of agent in the very different good economies for wind power portrayed by the instruments. The article contributes to two different but related literatures: it contributes to recent intersection between science and technology studies and economic geography inspecting the variable ontologies of energy resources, and it contributes to the discussion in this theme issue about instruments of valuation and the good economy.

Voluntary carbon markets are based on the idea that the carbon credits sold in markets are both the same, or climatically equivalent to one another, and different, reflecting how, when, where, and by whom they have been produced. This article examines how market actors deal with this tension and value units that are both commensurate and differentiated. Based on existing literature, interviews, and document analysis, I identify and present three instantiations of a good economy of carbon offsetting from the 2000s onwards. Each phase shows how valuation processes iterate between commensuration and differentiation. This is achieved through the development of elaborate sets of complementary valuation practices and tools, such as methodologies for valuing co-benefits, impact scores and overcompensation factors for securing climate impacts, and carbon removal crediting methodologies. While critique is central to driving the move from one good economy to another, this article also shows how the valuation practices of voluntary carbon markets appear locked into repetitive cycles of critique and reform, with recurrent disputes emerging over what to weigh and value and how. This poses new questions concerning how to critique such markets and their valuation practices.

In this article, I trace the transformation of climate adaptation in Denmark into a good economy. Empirically, I explore a shift in rainwater management from building sewers underground to making cheaper solutions on the surface. Moreover, these solutions are expected not only to handle rainwater but also to “add value,” particularly recreational value. I call this approach the politics of addition, emphasizing that it entails a specific set of principles for doing good while adapting to climate change. Theoretically, I relate this politics of addition to the concept of the good economy. By drawing on the orders of worth perspective, I emphasize how good economies are compromises between multiple versions of the good and that these compromises need to be stabilized through so-called composite objects. Relying mainly on document material supplemented by interviews, I identify several composite objects in climate adaptation, including tools of valuation as well as specific projects. By analyzing these composite objects, I describe how the politics of addition compromises several versions of the good in climate adaptation, eventually promising that adding value will ease “the battle for space” in cities by composing economic, technical, and recreational value into the same facilities.