Promising Carbon: Culture of Expertise, Uncertainties, and Making Carbon Markets in South Korea

• In Event: 046 - Section on Environment and Technology Roundtable Session (one-hour).
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 14. Energy Consumption and Carbon Markets

Abstract

This paper explores how carbon trading emerges as a central institution that conveys and reproduces developmental discourses in South Korea. Based on an ethnographic research to situate carbon markets in terms of community of experts, calculative devices, and the entangled networks of legislative performances, this paper proposes following findings: First, when a market is saturated with institutional uncertainties, caused by such as political precariousness, lack of comprehensive legal policies on property rights, or just simply of its early stage of development, the success, or the functionality, of a market heavily depends on the availability of diverse modes of valuation and the flexibility of involved agents to coordinate those heterogeneous valuation processes. Second, speculative nature of carbon markets, a preemptive practice that brings “possible” futures into the present, is key to its consistent dominance in climate change discourse. In South Korea this speculative aspect is also closely related with conjuring up the tale of economic development from the past to render historical anticipations. Finally, the dichotomies between market abstraction and cultural/social value, quantification and qualification, and virtual and real are not suitable for understanding the dynamics of contemporary market processes. Since carbon markets constantly reform and produce social and economic meaning to the environmental crisis through market transactions, looking at how market objects and actors are simultaneously inserted into and abstracted from the social relation is crucial.

Author

• Jonghwa Kwon, State University of New York-Binghamton