Abstract

"Ruling the Natural World: The Political Economy of Standards and Natural Resources"

Grace Ballor, Bocconi University (grace.ballor@unibocconi.it)

Standards are among the most powerful tools of political economy. Norms and technical specifications define commodities, delimit market access, and determine winners and losers – equally reflections of industry and its regulation. This chapter argues that standards also transformed the natural world into an industrialized one of global supply chains, global institutions, and global hierarchies. By tracing the development of standards for natural resources from fossil fuels in the nineteenth century to rare earths in the twenty-first, it historicizes the role of standards in international political economy and engages with criticism of standards as blunt instruments of the anthropocene.