Thinking Infrastructurally about Business Activities and Economic Value for a Socio-Ecological Transformation

More than 70% of global carbon emissions responsible for climate change are nowadays produced by only 100 firms. This makes transforming corporations towards more sustainable pathways a crucial challenge of today. ReValue explores an innovative approach to meet this challenge, by combining new infrastructural perspectives in legal analysis with philosophy and the use of social science methods. Until now, the policy and scholarly focus has been placed on setting ambitious carbon-neutrality goals for leading firms in key industries with the aim of greening their global supply-chains. ReValue transcends this focus. It does so by broadening the focus to those actors with the regulatory authority to constitute markets and thereby to re-configure the rationalities that shape corporate decisions. For these purposes, ReValue focuses on two key private governance institutions that currently shape the preferences of transnational corporations in the global economy: (1) the legal-regulatory infrastructure provided by predominant accounting institutions, which govern what counts as income or wealth in financial markets; and (2) the legal-regulatory infrastructure provided by predominant stock-exchange institutions, which govern how the price of shares and other financial instruments are determined. These private governance institutions do not just report income, price, or risk. ReValue investigates the extent to which they rather performatively shape the information that they purport to describe, through private regulatory choices that configure corporate preferences and market orders and thereby can transform them towards more sustainable pathways by determining what is susceptible of economic value and how it is valued.