Coaxing a Market: Environmental-Societal-Financial Sustainability Interfaces

What sort of market is emerging in clean energy technology (CET) industries? Are the all-important market rationale—value creation, price flexibility, risk assessment, information symmetry—needed to catalyze private investment both corporate and individual in CET markets in place? If not, whom are the main actors “coaxing” them and where and, perhaps, most importantly, how are they being coaxed? This chapter aims to identify the progress being made in environmental risk mitigation market creation and development, in terms of CET markets. It does so by positioning environmental risk as part of the “gearing up” of an integrated system and the eventual emergence of a “green economy.” Three cases are included in order to discuss the role of these market rational variables, in turn, in shaping a number of the Environmental-Societal-Financial (E-S-F) Sustainability Interfaces, the component and path interdependent parts that comprise a complexly integrated system.