Beyond Green Capitalism: Informal Economies, Communitarian Societies, and Heterodox Pathways to Environmental Justice in the Global South

Heterodox debates already accept that market-centric “green†fixes are limited; what is missing is a mechanism-level account of how they misrecognize regulatory informality and autonomous communitarian societies. This article makes three contributions. First, it offers a typology separating regulatory informality from communitarian societies, showing why formalization-centric governance criminalizes the former and encloses or bypasses the latter. Second, it synthesizes four heterodox traditions, Original Institutional Economics, Feminist Political Economy, post-Keynesian macro, and Ecological Economics, into a comparative table that specifies pathways from informal/communitarian practices to environmental outcomes and predicts where price-centric tools will fail. Third, it applies these mechanisms to three emblematic cases, Delhi’s methane-to-energy waste project, Ecuador’s Yasuní “leave-oil-in-the-ground†effort, and community forestry in southern Mexico, demonstrating capital bias, enclosure, and the systematic undervaluation of reproductive and commons labor. The article advances a policy agenda that (a) builds value-articulating institutions, (b) recognizes/remunerates care and commons work, (c) channels adaptation finance to community-governed enterprises, and (d) aligns Northern degrowth with Southern sufficiency. Rather than treating “informality†as deficit, we reconceptualize informal economies and communitarian societies as sites of ecological reproduction, autonomy, and justice. JEL Classification : B52, B59, P16, Q57, Q01