Governing Mobilities, Mobilising Carbon

Abstract

This paper explores the governing of climate change via the lens of mobilities. It argues that the central dynamic of the relationship between these two phenomena is that while the logic of governing climate change entails the management, shaping and ultimately reduction of a whole range of physical mobilities, climate change politics has been precisely organised around the generation of newly mobile objects – specifically the rights to generate carbon emissions, as mobilised via carbon markets. This reinforces the importance of cultural political economy to mobilities research. Mobile subjects and objects are to be understood thus as effects of power, mobilised in the pursuit of the reproduction of certain sorts of social order, and for the purposes of capital accumulation.

Key words:

• Climate change
• Political economy
• Carbon markets
• Subjectivity
• Accumulation

Notes

1. The conceptualisation of cultural political economy draws on the one developed in my book Automobile Politics (Paterson 2007). For other accounts of this term, with different sorts of conceptualisations, see in particular Best and Paterson (2009), Sum and Jessop (2013), Jessop (2010).

2. I use behaviour in scare quotes deliberately. It is the dominant framing of how individual practices are to be understood. Elizabeth Shove provides the neatest account of the limits of this framing common to both psychology and economics (2010), which relies on an untenable methodological individualism. I use it here to denote the framing in these policy and academic debates.

3. For the fullest analysis of these ETS in place, see Betsill and Hoffmann (2011), and for an up-to-date map, see the International Carbon Action Partnership interactive world map of ET systems, http://icapcarbonaction.com/index.php?option=com_wrapper&view=wrapper&Itemid=147. Accessed December 18, 2012.

4. See http://www.carbonexpo.com/en/carbonexpo/home/index.php. Accessed June 27, 2014.

5. On the World Bank’s programme, see https://www.thepmr.org/. Accessed June 27, 2014. On ICAP, see http://icapcarbonaction.com. Accessed June 27, 2014.