The Enclosure of Heaven: Global moral struggles and the creation of the global carbon market

• In Event: 4255 - Section on Economic Sociology Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 2. Environmental Concerns

Abstract

Why, in the face of climate change, did the world’s governments decide to build an unprecedented global market in rights to use the atmosphere? How did carbon trading—once an obscure and widely opposed idea—come to be a dominant way to address the climate crisis? To answer these questions, I delve into the moral questions that global warming raised, and the bitter struggles that these questions gave rise to in the international climate change negotiations. Offering a close, in-depth analysis of how state officials or representatives actually interact on the world stage, I show how, in the face of the moral questions raised by global warming, representatives of different countries split into two camps, each seeking to affirm their moral worthiness and define the terms of their relationship with each other through their moral categorizations. In the context of these moral struggles, I argue, the carbon market could not be understood as just a neutral mechanism for exchange or allocation but as a social technology loaded with moral meaning, capable of reinforcing a contested moral claim. In particular, developed-country officials pushed for it because it offered a “stigma-free” social technology for countering moral condemnation and upholding claims of innocence.

Author

• Herbert Rizal Villalon Docena, University of the Philippines, Diliman