The Politics of Carbon Markets

Today’s beleaguered yet expanding carbon market represents a type of relationship between economy and ecology scarcely imaginable forty years ago. This collection brings together a comprehensive array of perspectives to critically scrutinise the development and on-going maintenance of this global carbon market.

The book’s contributors recognise that the market itself, as well as the notion of the environment that it instantiates, is highly political and contested; thus the chapters investigate the market system and its insertion into and influence on climate and environmental governance within the global political economy. The book does this by analysing the routines, institutions, techniques and technologies established or refuted through practices of social and material negotiation. As well as an examination of the carbon market from a political perspective, the book includes contributions that equally interrogate what politics means, does and requires within climate and environmental governance.

The book is organised into three sections. The first section investigates the political developments, technical arrangements and contextualising factors that lead up to the implementation of the carbon markets. The second section interrogates the social, political, material, technical and technological details of the carbon markets, as well as the relationship and connections between these details and the broader political economics/ecologic context. The final section asks what the political impacts and consequences of the markets are, what they mean for the climate governance regime and how they impact on the broader capitalist systems.

Benjamin Stephan and Richard Lane are researchers at the University of Hamburg, Germany and the University of Sussex, UK, respectively.