The Journal of Interdisciplinary Economics, 2003, Vol. 14, pp. xx 0260-1079/03 $10 © 2003 A B Academic Publishers Printed in Great Britain Political Economy and Nature: From ANT and Environmental Economics to Bioeconomics?* Ben Fine Department of Economics, SOAS, University of London, UK 1. INTRODUCTION It was after some persuasion that I agreed to put this paper together around themes suggested by the launch of bioeconomics, Mohammadian (2000). There were two reasons for this lack of enthusiasm. First, although I have worked long and hard on the relationship between economics and other disciplines, I had decided that outcomes were sufficiently diverse across disciplines and topics to warrant restricting the scope of my research. Biological or evolutionary models of the economy formed one broad area that I decided to set aside. Second, unlike law for example, which I also passed over, the literature on nature and the economy (and society more generally) has been vast, diverse and rich. Making a worthwhile and meaningful contribution would have been a formidable task. In addition, two closely related but independent factors caused me to change my mind. First, I had been invited to a one-day conference on Michel Callon’s work on markets. 1 This thrust me into close consideration of actor-network theory, ANT, for which he is a leading representative alongside Bruno Latour and John Law, and thereby raised grave concerns. For, irrespective of the merit and intent of the ANT approach, my fears were and remain that it could facilitate the progress of “economics imperialism”, and certainly fail to impede or offer an alternative to it in practice. 2 As ANT has traditionally been focused on society/nature relations, it seemed important to lay out my doubts about it to those engaging in assessing the virtues of, and prospects for, bioeconomics. Second, having worked on consumption in general and on food in particular, I suddenly and unexpectedly found that my own commitment to food systems analysis had been roughly brushed aside by proponents of ANT on the grounds of its supposed ill- considered treatment of society/nature relations. 3 The content and style of these criticisms have only served to reinforce the conviction that a venture to establish something like bioeconomics would also be dismissed out of hand by the mighty ANT in an unwitting pincer movement with economics imperialism. Against this background, the paper is organised as follows. Section 2 sets a much broader intellectual context than that immediately commanded by bioeconomics. It argues that neo-liberalism, and postmodernism are both on the wane but that their retreat is complemented by a newly aggressive form of economics imperialism (or the colonisation