Sustainability as a localised performance: The production of carbon credits in a developing country site

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Abstract:

One of the underlying objectives of the climate change regime under the aegis of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is to facilitate sustainability with a special focus on atmospheric resources. The regime, through its instruments like Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), clearly aims to have a sustainable development trajectory particularly for the countries those lagged behind the industrialisation process. While specific provisions to further sustainable development are incorporated in the definition and functioning of the climate regime, the very understanding of sustainability or sustainable development is contested both at the theoretical and empirical levels (example, Redclift 2005; Luke 2005; Baker 2006; Olsen 2007). It is also often found that the instruments like CDM function in an unsustainable way despite their laid objectives. The aim of the current paper is to observe this inherently conflicting process, of having the set objectives at one end and achieving a set of completely opposite outcomes at the other end, and how it is made happen institutionally. It broadens the present discussions about the practices of sustainability by positing institutions as a network of interrelations differentially integrated to knowledge production, regulatory mechanisms, consumption etc.

Based on an Actor Network Theory (ANT)-inspired ethnographic study on a CDM project in India, the paper looks into the performance of sustainability wherein the self-contained localised practices produce different and sometimes conflicting meanings on governing and consumption behaviours through its different linkages to the climate regime. Sustainability becomes a network effect of an array of not so intermeshed self-contained technologies of practices. These institutional mechanisms as sites of performance negotiate the local and the global often in a seamless manner. It also functions as the sites of producing unsustainable consumption practices elsewhere (in the developed world) by the virtue of producing carbon credits that allows the developed world counterparts (the buyers of the carbon credit) to sustain their unsustainable practices. Thus, the site of carbon offset is a space where different sustainable and unsustainable practices are performed and negotiated.

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