Realizing Carbon's Value: Discourse and Calculation in the Production of Carbon Forestry Offsets in Costa Rica

Abstract: This article examines the relation between discourse and value in the production of a carbon forestry offset project among indigenous smallholders in Costa Rica. By analyzing a pivotal cost–benefit calculation that changed the trajectory of the project, this article makes two principal claims. First, the intelligibility of the calculation is grounded in a discursive formation that is emergent from a history of development projects in the region, where particular ways of speaking about the relation between indigenous bodies and agriculture have allowed carbon's commodification to emerge as a desirable project. Second, the calculations resulted in quantified representations of space that were necessary for the offset to become useful within the framework of the Kyoto Protocol. In this case, the forestry offset's use value derived from quantified representations of agricultural space; a process that opened some forms of land use for receiving carbon while foreclosing on others.     

Australia's Indigenous Carbon Economy: A National Snapshot

Many Indigenous communities in Australia are well situated to provide greenhouse gas abatement and carbon sequestration benefits, but little is known about the factors affecting the capability of Australia's Indigenous organisations to participate in climate change mitigation strategies. This paper provides a ‘snapshot’ summary of certain aspects of Australia's Indigenous organisations' participation in carbon offset schemes. The snapshot provides insight into the degree to which Indigenous organisations are aware of carbon market opportunities in Australia, the level that these Indigenous organisations participate in or engage with carbon‐based economic enterprises, and the key pathways through which Indigenous carbon market opportunities are pursued. Analysis of data collected from a national survey conducted between 2011 and 2012 show that most obstacles to Indigenous participation in carbon offset schemes relate to land tenure arrangements; geographic and biophysical factors; low levels of requisite technical, human and financial resources; and appropriate recognition of Indigenous knowledge and cultural responsibilities. The snapshot also highlights the value of supporting regionally specific capacity‐building strategies to enable Indigenous people to participate in emerging carbon offset activities and the generation of associated ecosystem services. Cultural, socio‐economic or demographic factors that are also likely to influence the ability of many Indigenous communities to participate in carbon market opportunities are identified as important areas for further research.     

Carbon Sequestration in Community Forests: Trade‐offs,Multiple Outcomes and Institutional Diversity in the Bolivian Amazon

Carbon sequestration in community forests presents a major challenge for the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) programme. This article uses a comparative analysis of the agricultural and forestry practices of indigenous peoples and settlers in the Bolivian Amazon to show how community‐level institutions regulate the trade‐offs between community livelihoods, forest species diversity, and carbon sequestration. The authors argue that REDD+ implementation in such areas runs the risk of: 1) reinforcing economic inequalities based on previous and potential land use impacts on ecosystems (baseline), depending on the socio‐cultural groups targeted; 2) increasing pressure on land used for food production, possibly reducing food security and redirecting labour towards scarce off‐farm income opportunities; 3) increasing dependence on external funding and carbon market fluctuations instead of local production strategies; and 4) further incentivising the privatization and commodification of land to avoid transaction costs associated with collective property rights. The article also advises against taking a strictly economic, market‐based approach to carbon sequestration, arguing that such an approach could endanger fragile socio‐ecological systems. REDD+ schemes should directly support existing efforts towards forest sustainability rather than simply compensating local land users for avoiding deforestation and forest degradation.     

RE‐INVENTING TRADITIONAL LAND TENURE IN THE ERA OF LAND COMMODITIZATION: SOME CONSEQUENCES IN PERIURBAN NORTHERN GHANA

In northern Ghana periurban areas are encroaching on rural areas and agricultural land ends up being sold for residential purposes mainly by chiefs and “earth” priests. The changing customary land tenure systems have generated a state of uncertainty and tension as the title and responsibilities of titleholders are subject to the interpretation by those who administer custom. Increasing commodification is taking place that benefits an emerging political‐traditional and economic elite. The centralized systems restrict the benefits of the commoditization process mainly to chiefs and their collaborators, whiles acephalous systems allow more space for objections and struggles by those whose land is expropriated. Neoliberal development policies have shaped the commodification of land and entrenched existing socio‐economic inequalities that marginalize the poor who are unable to seize the opportunities of the emerging urban economy.     

Carbon offsetting and renewable energy development

New carbon crediting and offsetting mechanisms are being developed under the Paris Agreement. Polluters can meet their emission reduction targets by acquiring and retiring carbon offset credits. Globally, most of these credits come from renewable energy sources. However, their additionality is increasingly questionable. Global renewable electricity capacity continues to grow. Greenhouse gas emissions from coal-fired power generation are starting to fall, as governments and organisations pledge to curtail emissions, more capital is mobilised for energy transition, and renewable energy technologies become commercially competitive. The opportunity to earn carbon offset credits is becoming less indispensable to renewable energy development. Aggregate emissions could rise above the baseline level when polluters increase their emission budgets by using carbon credits generated from a renewable energy installation that is part of the baseline scenario. To safeguard environmental integrity, the conditions for including renewable energy in carbon crediting and offsetting schemes should be reconsidered.     

No Net Loss: Wetland Restoration and the Incomplete Capitalization of Nature

The practice of restoration ecology (the creation and restoration of ecosystems)has important implications for theorizing nature in the traditions of O'Connor's'capitalized nature,' Haraway's hybrid socionatures, and other recent work in poststructural approaches to political ecology. The prominent US environmental discourse of 'no net loss of wetlands' has spurred the rapid expansion of restoration practices, which promise to open a new frontier in the commodification and capitalization of nature. Through wetland mitigation and banking, restoration science is representing entire ecosystems as abstract, mobile, and fungible entities; however, a simple reading of a restored landscape as fully capitalized is unsatisfactory. Close attention to the wetland commodification process reveals two important points: 1) the commodification and capitalization of nature is never automatic; rather, the crucial steps of abstraction and valuation are composed of negotiations between and within differentiated segments of the state and civil society, in which there are many spaces for resistance; and 2) the materiality of restoration sites provided important challenges to the commodification process, which are not contemplated within critical approaches to nature as currently constituted. The transformation of restoration sites into sites of commodity provision is incomplete at best. A major challenge for poststructural political ecology will be to specify ecological phenomena and their important role in the social construction of material environments, without falling into an ontological commitment to the primacy of ecological data.     

In the Nature of the Non‐City: Expanded Infrastructural Networks and the Political Ecology of Planetary Urbanisation

This paper proposes extending Urban Political Ecology's (UPE) ideas about the urbanisation of nature in order to include the geographical imprints of expanding, global metabolic flows of matter, energy and capital. It does so through the analysis of Huasco, a small agricultural village in northern Chile that has been overburdened with massive energy undertakings aimed at powering the operations of mines that supply raw materials to international markets. Like the sewage and technological networks that feed the life of cities, the paper argues that Huasco—as a metabolic vehicle of planetary urbanisation—has also been hidden from view, and thus the fetishisation of urban infrastructural networks initially theorised by UPE, has been ratcheted‐up to the global level by the mediating powers of neoliberalising capitalism. Just as the socio‐material arrangements that facilitate the smooth functioning of the modern city and household are riddled with glitches and exclusions, the paper suggests that globally up‐scaled infrastructures reveal even larger contradictions that put into jeopardy the very premises upon which the ongoing commodification of nature is grounded.     

Between Mumford And Marx: Anatomising Imperial San Francisco

The practice of restoration ecology (the creation and restoration of ecosystems) has important implications for theorizing nature in the traditions of O'Connor's 'capitalized nature,' Haraway's hybrid socionatures, and other recent work in poststructural approaches to political ecology. The prominent US environmental discourse of 'no net loss of wetlands' has spurred the rapid expansion of restoration practices, which promise to open a new frontier in the commodification and capitalization of nature. Through wetland mitigation and banking, restoration science is representing entire ecosystems as abstract, mobile, and fungible entities; however, a simple reading of a restored landscape as fully capitalized is unsatisfactory. Close attention to the wetland commodification process reveals two important points: 1) the commodification and capitalization of nature is never automatic; rather, the crucial steps of abstraction and valuation are composed of negotiations between and within differentiated segments of the state and civil society, in which there are many spaces for resistance; and 2) the materiality of restoration sites provided important challenges to the commodification process, which are not contemplated within critical approaches to nature as currently constituted. The transformation of restoration sites into sites of commodity provision is incomplete at best. A major challenge for poststructural political ecology will be to specify ecological phenomena and their important role in the social construction of material environments, without falling into an ontological commitment to the primacy of ecological data.     

The changing nature of the peri‐urban zone in Africa: Evidence from Dar‐es‐Salaam,Tanzania

Research on the peri‐urban zones of African cities since the mid‐1980s has focused around three main themes, these being peri‐urban agriculture as a survival strategy, debates about the relative efficiencies of peri‐urban agriculture, and the question of production priorities. Drawing on recent evidence from Dar‐es‐Salaam in Tanzania, this paper suggests that a combination of structural adjustment measures and the eased economic crisis in Tanzania has changed conditions, the result of which has been the increasing commodification of land in the peri‐urban zone during the 1990s. This has turned the peri‐urban zone more into a zone of investment and economic opportunity, rather than a zone of survival, with the result that the poorer urban groups are being increasingly excluded. A further complication concerns confusion arising out of current Tanzanian land law, and particularly the tensions between customary and statutory law.     

Beyond the commodity economy: the persistence of informal economic activity in rural England

A widely held view in economic geography is that the commodity economy — in which goods and services are produced by capitalist firms for a profit under market conditions — has permeated, albeit slowly and unevenly, ever more areas of daily life. Until now, however, little evidence has been provided of the extent and unevenness of its penetration. This is the intention of this paper. First, secondary data are used to evaluate the penetration of commodification in the advanced economies. Rather than find its permeation into every crevice of daily life, a non-commodified sphere as large as the commodified sphere is identified. Reporting case study evidence on the commodification of household services in rural England, explanations are then sought for the persistence of these non-commodified spaces and the uneven penetration of commodification. This reveals that despite household services being more commodified in higher income rural areas, commodification and its uneven contours cannot be explained simply in terms of economic determinants. Although economic forces prevent the advance of commodification, especially in lower income rural areas, strong 'cultures of resistance' to the edicts of commodification also impede its deeper penetration. The paper thus concludes by outlining the roles played by both economic and cultural forces in shaping commodification and its uneven contours, as well as the need for economic geography to broaden its scope beyond the commodity economy.     

Understanding Local Leadership in Building the Capacity of Rural Communities in Australia

Current approaches to rural community development in Australia provide for limited government intervention. Such intervention is usually housed within programmes that seek to build the internal capacity of communities to achieve long term socio‐economic sustainability. A fundamental implementation strategy for capacity building has been developing local leadership. The underlying assumption of this approach is that good leadership will result in existing resources being mobilised for a more sustainable function and new resources attracted. What though is good leadership in terms of building the capacity of rural communities to develop sustainable socio‐economic futures? This paper compares the conceptualisation of leadership within rural development policies and leadership training programmes with the nature of local leadership as it exists in on‐ground community building projects. From an in‐depth review of the role and nature of local leadership within six Australian rural communities it was found that local leadership could result in improved adaptive capacity if the leadership is similar in nature to Burn's (1978 ) transformational model of leadership. Within policy, local leadership was most often conceptualised as being similar to this transformational model. However, rural leadership training programmes tended to conceptualise leadership as a top‐down process, similar to Burn's (1978 ) transactional model. While this study of leadership within rural communities revealed that transactional skills, as taught in leadership training programmes, were important for successful project management, such skills did not necessarily result in improved community adaptive capacity. It is suggested that, while transactional leadership can have an important role in influencing the development of rural communities, greater attention needs to be given to developing strategies to support transformational leadership.     

Colonization and the Commodification of Nature

This paper explores some of the theoretical issues surrounding the commodification of nature and its value as a research topic. In particular it examines the relationship between European colonization, the rise of capitalism and the increased use of abstract space. An appeal is also made for adding environmental history to the research agenda of historical archaeology. Case studies from South Africa and Virginia illustrate the manner in which abstract notions of space and the environment contributed to the commodification of nature. The Virginia case study from Jamestown Island provides a particularly vivid example of how micro- and macro-level environmental changes can be linked to important political and economic events.     

Paths ahead for East Asia and Asia–Pacific regionalism

East Asia and the Asia–Pacific are core components of the global economy, and there have been important recent developments in the regionalism of both regions. After the 1997–1998 financial crisis, East Asian countries initiated more exclusive regional cooperation and integration ventures mainly through ASEAN Plus Three, but lately this process has stumbled. The Asia–Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum has also failed to make substantial progress. Attention has instead increasingly turned to free trade agreements (FTAs), yet these have hitherto been overwhelmingly bilateral in nature. There are still only a few truly regional FTAs in East Asia and the Asia–Pacific—and these are on a sub‐regional scale. However, various frustrations over the messy and fractious pattern of heterogeneous bilateral agreements led to the recent initiation of ‘grand regional’ FTA talks. The Trans‐Pacific Partnership (TPP) is an Asia–Pacific‐based, United States‐led project while the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) is an East Asia‐centred project. Each contains highly diverse memberships and the successful conclusion of TPP and RCEP talks is not assured. It is argued that, if negotiated, the RCEP is more likely to advance meaningful and effective regionalism than the TPP due to the former ascribing more importance to regional community‐building. Furthermore, bilateral FTAs already in force may over the long term transform into more comprehensive economic agreements that address new regional and global challenges such as energy security and climate change.     

THE PROBABILITY OF THE IMPROBABLE: SOCIETY–NATURE COEVOLUTION

This article aims to show how evolutionary theory, social‐metabolism and sociological systems theory can be utilized to develop a concept of society–nature coevolution. The article begins with a conception of industrialization as a socio‐metabolic transition, that is, a major transformation in the energetic and consequently material basis of society. This transition to industrial metabolism was essential for the emergence and maintenance of industrial societies and is at the same time the main cause of global environmental change. The article proceeds by asking what the notion of society–nature coevolution can potentially contribute to understanding environmental sustainability problems. An elaborated concept of coevolution hinges on (1) a more precise and sociologically more meaningful concept of cultural evolution and (2) understanding how cultural evolution is linked to the environment. Next I briefly outline major lines of thought and controversies surrounding the idea of cultural evolution. The direction proposed here commences with an abstract version of Darwinian evolution, which is then re‐specified for social systems, understood as communication systems, as developed by Luhmann. The re‐specification implies three important changes in the theoretical outline of cultural evolution: first, shifting from the human population to the communication system as the unit of cultural evolution and to single communications as the unit of cultural variation; second, shifting from transmission or inheritance to reproduction as necessary condition for evolution; and third, shifting from purely internal (communicative) forces of selection towards including also environmental selection. Adopting elements from the work of Hägerstrand and Boserup, the primary environmental selective force in cultural evolution is conceptualized as the historically variable constraints in human time–space occupation. In the conclusions I tie the argument back to its beginning, by arguing that the most radical changes in human time–space occupation have been enabled by major socio‐metabolic transitions in the energy system.     

Rubber and Carbon: Opportunity Costs,Incentives and Ecosystem Services in Acre,Brazil

The concept of ‘opportunity costs’ has been important in theoretical discussions of Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES). It focuses attention on economic trade-offs of individual landholders and can make providing ecosystem services, such as tropical forest carbon sequestration, appear to be a cost-effective way to reduce near-term carbon emissions. Yet in practice, the concept may be less useful. This article examines how a programme in the Amazonian state of Acre, Brazil, has moved away from the concept of opportunity costs, challenging its theoretical importance. Instead of payments, the Acre programme offers ‘incentives’ intended to make rural people produce more whilst deforesting less. It resonates with the neoliberal commodification of carbon and the dominant valorization of intensive agriculture. Yet it also enlists lessons from Acre's history of rubber production and its rubber tapper-led social movement, namely that the living forest can be monetarily valuable and that its use can facilitate its protection. This article shows how local history and culture can be used to reshape PES.     

Grabbing Land for Equitable Development? Reengineering Land Dispossession through Securitising Land Development Rights in Chongqing

This article examines the securitisation of land development rights under the dipiao scheme in Chongqing, China. It argues that this instrument is based on the dispossession and exploitation of rural households but these unequal relations have been concealed and naturalised through the complex geographies and temporalities of dispossessory arrangements, financing mechanisms and discursive tactics. By overcoming political barriers to land commodification and dispossession in this way, the Chongqing government has expanded the frontier of commodifiable land and sustained a land‐based, urban‐centric and debt‐financed accumulation. Instead of narrowing the urban–rural divide, this instrument reproduces and solidifies it. On this basis, the article argues that conceptual and political innovations for inclusive and equitable development needs to shift the attention from land to people.     

Stable Carbon and Oxygen Isotope Spacing Between Bone and Tooth Collagen and Hydroxyapatite in Human Archaeological Remains

Spacing between stable isotope values in bones and teeth is a valuable tool for examining dietary influences and diagenesis. This study examines carbon and oxygen isotope values from collagen and hydroxyapatite (structural carbonate and phosphate) in archaeological human bones and teeth to derive species‐specific correlation equations and isotope spacing values. The δ¹³C_collagen and δ¹³C_{structural carbonate} in bone and dentin collagen show a strong correlation (R = 0.87, 0.90, respectively) with an average Δ¹³C_carb‐coll spacing of 5.4‰. The consistency of this isotope spacing with other large mammals and in humans with both low and high protein intake (as indicated by enriched δ¹⁵N values) suggests a similar allocation of protein‐derived carbon and whole diet‐derived carbon to collagen and structural carbonates, respectively, as other terrestrial mammals regardless of absolute meat intake. The δ¹⁸O_{structural carbonate} and δ¹⁸O_phosphate show the strongest correlation in enamel (R = 0.65), weaker correlations in dentin (R = 0.59) and bone (R = 0.35), with an average Δ¹⁸O_carb‐phos of 7.8‰. This isotope spacing is slightly lower than previously reported for large mammals and limited available data for humans. The results potentially indicate species‐specific fractionations and differing access to body water and blood‐dissolved inorganic carbonates in the presence of collagen formation. The use of correlation between δ¹⁸O_{structural carbonate} and δ¹⁸O_phosphate to determine diagenetic state is not recommended. The strength of this correlation observed in bones and teeth is variable and alternate indicators of diagenetic state (i.e. C:N ratios of collagen) provide more robust and independent evidence of isotope preservation despite presence/absence of a strong isotope correlation. Published 2012. This article is a U.S. Government work and is in the public domain in the USA.     

Atlas Swam: Freedom,Capital, and Floating Sovereignties in the Seasteading Vision

Abstract: Political actors have long drawn on utopian imaginaries of colonizing marine and island spaces as models for idealized libertarian commonwealths. A recent inheritor of this tradition is the seasteading movement, which seeks to “further the establishment and growth of permanent, autonomous ocean communities [by] enabling innovations with new political and social systems” on semi‐stationary, floating platforms. Fueled by a cocktail of ideologies (techno‐optimism, libertarian secession theories, and strains of anarcho‐capitalism), seasteading is touted as the newest “frontier” in creative, entrepreneurial, and social engineering. Inherent in the project, however, are buried ideals about the nature of ocean space, the limits of sovereignty, and the liberatory role of technology and capitalism in the drive for social change and individual freedom. We explore these notions through an examination of seasteading's broader philosophical and economic underpinnings, and their deployment through multiple structural, legal, and social frameworks. Although seasteading is a highly speculative, and even fanciful project, it reflects attempts to resolve contradictions within capitalism: between, on the one hand, the need for order and planning, and, on the other hand, the desire to foster and lionize individual freedom. In the United States, this tension has most visibly entered mainstream discourse through the rise of the Tea Party movement, whose ideology combines adherence to classical liberal ideals about individual entrepreneurship with hostility toward government intervention. Although the seasteading movement, like its better known and more realizable libertarian contemporaries, proposes a solution that its leaders say will resolve this tension, our analysis reveals that it would merely rework it, and thus it unwittingly reinforces the structures it seeks to escape.     

The Fictions of Autonomous Invention: Accumulation by Dispossession,Commodification and Life Patents in Canada

Abstract: In 2002 the Canadian Supreme Court ruled to deny Harvard College a whole organism patent over the oncomouse. In 2004, the same court ruled that Canadian farmer Percy Schmeiser had violated Monsanto patents covering GM canola. Both decisions rejected whole organism patents, running counter to US precedents. Yet both, nevertheless, consolidate private claims to life as patentable inventions, and critics claim, with some support from Justices in the Schmeiser case, that patents over genes amount to de facto patents over whole organisms. In this paper I argue these cases are broadly consistent with the notion of accumulation by dispossession as a means to expand the scale and scope of capital accumulation via so‐called ‘extra‐economic’ means. As such, I examine the cases as privatizations, but also as relational moments in the commodification of nature. However, in hoping to unpack and fill out this notion of the extra‐economic, as well as to critically examine the necessarily incomplete character of commodification as a tendency, I look to the ways in which judges and interested activists deliberate over the economic, legal, ecological, ethical, and even metaphysical arguments and representations required to uphold discrete genes, processes, and whole organisms as inventions.     

The Politics of Carbon Market Design: Rethinking the Techno‐politics and Post‐politics of Climate Change

Carbon markets have provided fertile ground for research on the changing nature of political contestation. MacKenzie locates a “techno‐politics” of carbon markets that creates new possibilities for a “politics of market design”. In contrast, Swyngedouw argues carbon markets are part of a “post‐political” shift that narrows potential pathways through “depoliticisation”. This article engages with these debates by examining three recent attempts to reform the ailing European Union Emissions Trading System: restricting industrial gas offsets, backloading allowance auctions and the 2030 climate and energy package. It conceptualises the respective episodes as contests over the reach, force and priority of value determinations in climate policy, emphasising the contradictory imperatives facing states on each issue. The outcomes of contestation between industry groups and environmental organisations—real but limited reforms and a consolidation of the carbon market over alternatives—demonstrate the constraints facing technocratic campaigning and the ongoing politicisation of climate change.