Making climate change governable: accounting for carbon as sinks, credits and personal budgets

Abstract

This article explores how climate governance is accomplished in practical terms. To that end we develop an ‘analytics of carbon accounting’ that draws attention to the calculative practices that turn stocks and flows of carbon into objects of governance. Carbon accounting as a rationality of government is primarily concerned with the ways in which carbon can be measured, quantified, demarcated and statistically aggregated; but the concept also alludes to questions about (political) accountability in relation to emissions of greenhouse gases. The paper outlines three different regimes of carbon accounting – ‘the national carbon sink’, ‘the carbon credit’ and ‘the personal carbon budget’ – to illustrate how stocks and flows of carbon are constructed as administrative domains amenable to certain forms of political and economic rationality, such as government regulation, market exchanges and self-governance by responsible individual subjects.

Keywords:

• carbon accounting
• climate policy
• governmentality
• sinks
• credits
• budgets

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Frank Fischer, Matthew Paterson and two anonymous referees for their thoughtful comments on earlier versions of this paper. We are also grateful for comments from the participants at the 5th Interpretive Policy Analysis Conference in Grenoble, June 2010, and the Transnational Climate Governance workshop at Durham University, September 2010. The study has been made possible through financial support from BECC, the Swedish government's strategic focus on climate change hosted by the Faculty of Science at Lund University; the Low-Carbon Energy and Transport Systems (LETS) project, financed by Swedish Environmental Protection Agency (among others); and the Linköping University LiU FoAss programme.