ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the environmental movements’ varied views of capitalist markets and its positions regarding the commercialization of the environmental cause. It distinguishes between “adaptive environmentalism”, which seeks to address environmental change within capitalism and has built on a variety of market-related tactics and instruments to do so, and “transformative environmentalism”, which sees capitalism as a systemic cause of environmental degradation and climate change and seeks to develop alternative economic institutions to overcome capitalism. Discussing evolutions since the rise of the modern environmental movement in the 1960s, the chapter suggests that while market-based environmentalism has been on the increase since the 1990s with the active support of many of the most powerful environmental NGOs, the past decade or so has seen renewed and growing criticism of this evolution within the environmental movement, in particular in light of the very limited results of past market-based efforts to address climate change.
