Supplying the supply curve: an ethnography of environmental reverse auctions

As economic ideas gain prominence in environmental governance, scholars of economic practices are well positioned to analyze how environmental markets are constructed and maintained. To do this, I present an ethnographic study of environmental reverse auctions conducted in Cidanau, Indonesia. I invert the question of how economic assumptions transform environmental management decisions to specific practical challenges and their resolution as revealed in decisions taken by auction organizers, such as where to conduct the auction, how many participants are needed to engender competition, which exchanges among competing participants to restrict, how to organize facilitators, and what to announce to encourage strategic bidding. In contrast to sociological theories of auctions or the microeconomic model of individual competition, specific attributes of the auction’s materiality, such as the design of bid slips, sealed bids, announcements of winners, and the multi-round auction structure, sustain the performance of competition. A paradoxical tension emerges in the process of auction organizing, wherein sticking to the auction script necessitates working around it. Building on ethnomethodological studies of economic activities, I argue for a need to go beyond studying how auctions are socio-materially performed and instead study how the performance is demonstrated as adequately accountable for the concerns at hand.