Missing the Forest for the Trees: Justice and Environmental Economics

The field of environmental economics, while offering powerful tools for the diagnosis of environmental problems and the design of policy solutions to them, is unable to effectively incorporate normative concepts like justice or rights into its method of analysis, and so needs to be supplemented by a consideration of such concepts. I examine the two main schools of thought in environmental economics - the New Resource Economics and Free Market Environmentalism - in order to illustrate the shortcomings of their methods of analysis, taken on their own, and to demonstrate how a consideration of concepts like rights or justice might usefully supplement them.