Carbon

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By way of presenting ethnographic evidences from corporate practices of the conceptualisation and measurement of carbon emissions, this paper engages with the firm materiality presupposed by carbon markets - the robustness of carbon which is to be reduced. It discusses how the corporate actors whose job it is to manage carbon emissions draw on, (re)configure and (re)produce those power relations through which carbon emerges into corporate existence. Employing an understanding of these actors as agents of ecological modernisation, then, the paper draws out a critique of carbon markets as an economic-technical fix.
Grounded in ethnographic fieldwork at a leading multinational in the financial services sector over a period of more than 12 months, I focus on everyday work practices as taking place in a capitalist context. It is through practical work that the presences of carbon emissions are imagined and brought into being. Actors draw on hierarchies to exercise the shaping of their emissions. Acted out on a stage fashioned by the interwoven rationalities of profits, accounting and engineering, decision-making is torn between conflicting interests. Investigating the power relations involved in deciding about carbon data allows to further our understanding of how carbon markets may effect carbon realities at a global scale: Corporate carbon management practices are oriented towards the factuality of carbon markets. The mere existence of the latter co-configures the field of corporate carbon management. Thus, we discuss a prerequisite of the backbone of global green house gas mitigation efforts, i.e. the entities which gave rise to carbon markets, and question how they are assembled.

Following these relations allows to question the conceptualisations of the actors involved and how their practical interactions render carbon, nature and our society (un)sustainable. This, I hope, provides a chance to better conceptualise individuals, their social and material contexts, and through that, corresponding room for manoeuvre.

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By way of exploring ethnographic data on carbon construction practices by agents of ecological modernisation in a multinational corporation, this paper seeks to problematise the distributed and heterogeneous intelligence assembled by human and non-humans to make intelligible their carbon footprint.
Grounded in ethnographic fieldwork at a leading multinational in the financial services sector over a period of more than 12 months, I focus on everyday work practices as taking place in a capitalist context. It is through practical work that the presences of carbon emissions are imagined and brought into being. Thus, carbon emerges as co-constituted by thought. I will focus on instances in which the corporate machinery, i.e. automated thought, had to be supplemented by immediate human practices of 1) thinking themselves, 2) organising materials to think through and 3) ordering others to think. At another layer of analysis, I am to scrutinise carbon construction practices through the tension between creatively thinking / envisioning – and calculating / number crunching. Tracing members' practices allows to reconstruct how their usage of dichotomies renders carbon emissions intelligible.
Following these relations of thinking allows to question the conceptualisations of the actors involved and how their practical interactions render carbon, nature and our society (un)sustainable. This, I hope, provides a chance to better conceptualise individuals, their social and material contexts, and through that, corresponding room for manoeuvre.

Organised by Anita Engels and Benjamin Stephan (both at University of Hamburg) as well as Steffen Böhm (University of Essex) mid November a Workshop will take place at the Klima Campus (Hamburg), engaging with the emerging phenomena of carbon markets.

Two members of our group, Anup Sam Ninan and Ingmar Lippert [1] will give papers at this workshop.

References

1. Pure Data: Investigating Power Relations Inscribed in Carbon Emissions,
   Ingmar Lippert
   , Carbon markets and their future: A Social Science Perspective, 10/11/2010, Hamburg, Germany, (Submitted)

I am spending two weeks focussing on writing up short accessible articles on two topics:

• Greenwashing: for the upcoming Encyclopedia of Green Culture,
• Carbon Dioxiode: for the upcoming Encyclopedia of Consumption and Waste.

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This paper analyses the development of carbon markets: markets in permits to emit greenhouse gases or in credits earned by not emitting them. It describes briefly how such markets have come into being, and discusses in more detail two aspects of the efforts to `make things the same' in carbon markets: how different gases are made commensurable, and how accountants have struggled to find a standard treatment of `emission rights'. The paper concludes by discussing the attitude that should be taken to carbon markets (for example by environmentalists) and the possibility of developing a `politics of market design' oriented to making such markets more effective tools of abatement.

Finally, after a months of coding, and a couple of weeks of abstracting towards code families and themes, I decided about what to focus on as the core theme of my PhD: the social construction of carbon emissions.

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By way of scrutinising the construction of carbon emissions by the environmental managers of a multinational corporation, the paper introduces how the multinational relates getting the atmosphere right with getting their carbon emissions right. The hegemonic take on greening capitalism, i.e. ecological modernisation, assumes corporations to be the prime drivers of ecological innovation and, thus, salvation. Then, a study of the concrete management of the 'natural order' - by corporations - seems apt. This paper is concerned with the natural order of the atmosphere and the corporate practices explicitly aimed at managing the carbon load.
Drawing on ethnographic research over a period of ten months, the paper explores the environmental and carbon management of one of the world's largest financial services providers, employing more than 10,000 workers and serving more than 1,000,000 customers. This paper focuses on the everyday work practices of agents of ecological modernisation, i.e., environmental managers, to understand how order is produced at two levels: First, the multinational assumes that climate change is happening, and, thus, the 'natural order' is officially abandoned and through that, implicitly, accepted. Second, carbon emissions constitute the destructive relation between multinational and climate. From the point of views of members in the field, the construction of these emissions takes place orderly. At the same time, however, controllability is lacking: Although members both have to aim as well as actually aim at orderly managing the multinational's carbon emissions, lack of control is a significant issue.
The paper aims at explicating hidden and implicit assumptions about the multinational's carbon management: how and why corporate members enact the 'management' as well as how it is meaningful to them. Thus, I aim to understand how the human management of the target non-human (atmosphere) is practised, and in the course of this problematise the role of various non-humans, taken-for-granted too much to be actually managed. This, I hope, allows to better grasp the members, the management contexts, and through that, corresponding room for manoeuvre.

Notes:

to get a copy of the paper, please contact the author.

Ingmar Lippert has been invited by by the Board of Students of the course Environmental and Resource Management of Brandenburg University of Technology, Germany to carry out a role play with students on "How do you define your company's CO2 Balance?"

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The paper explores the material and metaphoric translations of CO2 (Carbon in the general parlance of the regime!) in the technopolitical construction of sustainability in climate change. It is a part of a larger project that explores how the Brundtland Commission's conception of sustainable development as the authoritative guiding principle of economic and social development (Lafferty& Meadowcroft 2000) is mediated through definitions, practices and instruments in the climate change regime.
The emergent form of environmental governance in climate change under the aegis of UNFCCC is subjected to varying contestations particularly on the competence of its instruments in facilitating its underlying objectives _ effective climate change mitigation through carbon offsets and the fostering of sustainable development (Bachram 2004; Byrne and Glover 2000; Christoff 2006; Lövbrand et al. 2007; Oslen 2005; Roberts and Parks 2007; Wara 2007; 2008). While the possible reasons for the shortcomings and the potential solutions to address these identified shortfalls are explored widely, there is a lacuna in the current research on how the regime operationally includes and excludes these concerns despite these being focal objectives. The proposed paper, in its larger context, identifies this as a significant domain of technopolitical process wherein it argues that the regime frames definitions of its institutional objectives, procedures and practices in such a way that actors make sense of the regime through certain ways of translating materialities and practices into a network of interrelations.
Drawing the insights from a discourse analytical perspective, the paper identifies climate change as an emblematic issue (Hajer 1995) in the current environmental discourses, and analyze the dominant discourse in the light of the symmetry of humans and non-humans and the idea of materialities in the Actor Network Theory (ANT). The paper looks into material translation of sustainability in the climate change regime citing the case of carbon. The paper points at carbon (CO2) within the climate change discourses to find that it is not only a chemical compound of a carbon and two oxygen atoms bonded together, it becomes a network through which a set of multivalent relations are mediated. It transforms to be a fungible commodity (MacKenzie 2008), a metaphor, a medium of economic transactions and a material outcome of a set of socionatural relations.