How do societies decide what counts as wealth, necessity, productivity, waste, or sacrifice—and what happens when the ways they value the world become ecologically and socially unsustainable? Addressing these questions, this book reconstructs the relationship between ecological economics and political ecology around the problem of valuation. At the core of the book is the concept of valuation regimes: historically specific arrangements through which societies coordinate material reproduction, monetary signals, institutions, power, and ideas of desirable life. Drawing on critical realism, complexity theory, and social metabolism, the book develops a framework for examining the relations between biophysical feasibility, institutional viability, and social desirability. It reinterprets commodities, prices, and money as devices through which socio-metabolic reproduction is organised and governed. It then examines capitalism as a fossil-fuelled valuation regime whose expansion has depended on cheap energy and labour, monetary abstraction, geopolitical hierarchy, and the displacement of social and ecological costs. The final chapters consider the crisis of this regime and the challenge of postcapitalist valuation: how complex societies might organise their material reproduction without reproducing capitalist forms of cheapness and externalisation. This book will be of interest to readers in ecological economics, political ecology, heterodox political economy, critical geography, degrowth, and sustainability studies.
