The vast majority of approaches in environmental economics attribute the current ecological crisis to the fact
that, from its inception, the industrial economic system was founded on premises that made no allowance for
the limits and regulatory functions of ecosystems. According to these approaches, we must therefore remedy
the historical error of dissociating the fields of economics from the natural sciences, notably by restoring the
links between these two disciplines. Distinguishing themselves from the two historic approaches, environmental
economics and early ecological economics, the emerging institutionalist schools evoke not only the constructed
nature of the environmental crisis (generally viewed as an objective fact by both traditional environmental
economists and ecological economists), but also the socially constructed nature of the economy and its
institutions. An actionalist regulationist approach allows us to formalize this twofold construction and lays the
groundwork for a new economic sociology of the environment in which the technical modalities of ecological
modernization are studied in light of social relations, with the understanding that social relations are also affected
by the materiality of the environmental crisis. This actionalist regulationist approach also lends itself to anticipating
likely trajectories in the future ecological modernization of economic institutions