Review: The One-way Street of Integration: Fair Housing and the Pursuit of Racial Justice in American Cities by Edward G. Goetz

Abstract

comparison in chapter 7 further probes the themes noted above: bases of authority employed by actors to promote market-based approaches, the tension between market justice (i.e., individual sovereignty) and social justice (i.e., interdependence), institutional transfer of a universal market ideology to particularized national contexts, and recognizing prices as signals of social value. Core to Knox-Hayes’s argument is that climate markets cannot be separated from the temporal and spatial context in which they are implemented. In chapter 8, Knox-Hayes returns to the central question facing proponents and critics of carbon markets: “whether they will reduce greenhouse gas emission” (p. 208). Here, those cynical about the prospect of carbon markets to overcome the challenge of human apathy in the face of catastrophic climate change will find much reinforcement of their skepticism. Knox-Hayes sheds light on the deep quandary in any market-based approach to internalizing externalities. Namely, will the materiality of reducing actual carbon emissions be lost as carbon credits are financialized and commoditized? Likewise, how will carbon markets overcome the similarly problematic quandary of how markets can possibly price a counterfactual; that is, how will the market price carbon emissions that are not created? Only here, toward the end of the book, does Knox-Hayes present succinct conceptual models that aim to lay out the spatial and temporal dimensions of generating value, distinguishing present versus future values, objective versus subjective time frames, socioeconomic versus socioenvironmental dimensions, and objective versus subjective space. Unfortunately, this core theoretical part of the book seems unnecessarily disconnected from the main body of the text, as it rarely references the case studies. In her concluding chapter, “The Path towards Environmental Finance and Sustainable Valuation,” Knox-Hayes leverages her findings and conceptual models to identify steps policy makers and climate finance actors can take to respond to the challenges of values, authority, and culture in creating carbon markets. Knox-Hayes clarifies many of the challenges. Thus, some readers may be excused for feeling as if market-based approaches are quixotic, perhaps even counterproductive, unless core values of interdependence and collective welfare trump values of individualism and wealth consolidation in the design and implementation of carbon markets. As a parting thought, Knox-Hayes leaves the reader with the following argument: “Markets will never be a universalizing solution; they may be a critical component of the solution, but their greatest strength remains their ability to communicate and disseminate social values. It is ultimately up to policymakers to understand, integrate, and operationalize those values in the creation of policy” (p. 255). In sum, planners are left with a two-pronged upshot. First, market-based policies are powerful although they ignore their role in shaping environmental policy and planning at our peril. Second, because market approaches such as carbon pricing and cap and trade will almost certainly fail to be the silver bullet solution their advocates advance, efforts to advance climate mitigation through local policy and planning will remain critical for the foreseeable future.