Any analysis of the effectiveness of a public policy implies adopting a normative approach, i.e. defining “what should be” and then discussing the best way to achieve it. In the context of ecological compensation, this objective is defined as the achievement of equivalence between the losses related to a project and the gains linked to the compensatory measures. This equivalence is based on a substitution logic, which is the core concern of environmental economics. In this paper, we start by presenting the contributions of this theoretical field to the study of compensation effectiveness. We also highlight its limitations. This led us to give preference to the framework of the new institutional economics which studies the effectiveness of the compensation as a problem of organization of the actors, taking into account their institutional and environmental background. Moreover, we show that the hypotheses underlying the reasoning of environmental economics set the debate in the sphere of weak sustainability while its political reading is more closely related to the sphere of strong sustainability for which the new institutional economics offer original and relevant contributions.