Declan Kuch

Sharing Subjects and Legality: Ambiguities in Moving Beyond Neoliberalism

This chapter draws from an extensive study of grass-roots innovation in response to climate change challenges, across a continuum from social activism to social enterprise. We examine the diverse motivations of entrepreneurs for starting community-supported agricultural projects, car-sharing schemes or co-working spaces. First, we show how the various biographical trajectories of the entrepreneurs shape the ways they create initiatives that espouse economic, environmental and social benefits. Second, we argue that such benefits should be understood through the ambiguity of a socio-legal lens. While sharing subjects may occasionally catalyze opportunities to move beyond neoliberalism, the ways in which lawyers and legal techniques shape the infrastructure of collaboration are deeply implicated in the economics of the neoliberal inheritance.

How to do things with metaphors: engineering life as hodgepodge

This paper presents a collaboration between social scientists and a chemist exploring the promises for new therapy development at the intersection between synthetic biology and nanotechnology. Drawing from ethnographic studies of laboratories and a recorded discussion between the three authors, we interrogate the metaphors that underpin what Mackenzie (Futures 48:5-12 2013) has identified as a recursive relationship in the iconography of the life sciences and its infrastructure. Focusing specifically on the use of gene editing techniques in synthetic biology and bio-nanotechnology, we focus our analysis on the key metaphors of ‘evolutionary life as hodge-podge’ within which ‘cutting’ of DNA and the ‘sticking’ and ‘binding’ of engineered particles to proteins can be performed by researchers in laboratory settings. Taken together, we argue that these metaphors are consequential for understanding metaphors of life-as-machine and the prevalence of notions of ‘engineering life’. Exploring the ways in which notions of cutting, targeting and life as an evolutionary hodgepodge prefigure a more contingent notion of engineering and synthesis we close by considering the interpretive implications for ethnomethodological approaches to contemporary life science research.

The Rise of Emissions Trading as a Market Mechanism and the Promise of ‘Civilized Markets’

Who and what makes a difference to contemporary markets? The unnerving sense of collective disaster around crossing the two-degree Celsius ‘guardrail’ of global-warming emissions puts this question into stark relief: Can carbon markets save us by ‘civilizing markets’, as many hope, or are they part of the infrastructure that will hurtle us over the guardrail as critics have feared? The alluring promise of carbon pricing to civilize otherwise barbarically destructive tendencies in capitalism has achieved a near hegemonic status in climate-policy circles, leading to major experiments with carbon emissions trading schemes (ETS) at city, regional, national and international levels in places such as Australia, the European Union, New Zealand, and at the city level in Asia.

The Paradox of Measurable Counterfactuals and the Fall of Emissions Trading

What we want to stress is the epistemological ambivalence and the contradictions of neo-liberalism — the ways that the fallibility of expert knowledge are alternately highlighted and downplayed — are marshalled as a vital defence mechanism against unwanted governmental intervention. (Davies and McGoey, 2012: 73) If we remain stuck in the short time frame of the now we are also likely to become bereft in the imagination of futures. (Back and Puwar, 2012: 8) Counterfactuals are speculations about the future; literally thought experiments in possibility. At base they are ‘if X then Y statements’. In this sense, they are essential inputs to and outputs from economic modelling: potential futures must be speculated upon to make them calculable. Modellers themselves are all too aware of the limits of their tools; however, these tools must be understood by policymakers who have their own agendas and rationales (MacKenzie, 1983). The paradox of measurable counterfactuals lies in the ambivalent epistemology of emissions reductions against some imagined ‘command-and-control’ future. At base, the paradox is: The emissions reductions are objective and therefore beyond politics.… We agreed on how to measure the Baseline against which emissions are to be reduced.

Marketizing Civil Regulation: Acid Rain Regulation as the Experimental Bridge to Carbon Markets

The conventional history of emissions trading underpinning debate about carbon emissions trading begins in the 1960s with American attacks on inflexible, ‘command and control’ regulations. This chapter challenges this reading of regulatory history, placing these developments in a longer history of pollution control whereby law and science interact to shift problems created by industry. A crucial change from the nineteenth-century to twentieth-century regimes of acid regulation was the shift in prominence from civil society and associated experts using moral language, on the one hand, to economic expertise claiming to operate on the basis of efficiency, on the other. This was not a shift from ‘command and control’ to markets, but rather one form of governmentality to another in the sense that cost began to figure increasingly in rationales for government action.

Conclusion: Beyond 8%: Resituating Emissions Trading

The case studies of emissions trading schemes in the preceding chapters have all been remarkably resistant to the kinds of civilizing processes proposed by Callon. Scheme after scheme has seen caps on carbon undermined by weak targets or overly generous offset provisions. The Australian federal government’s baseline-and-credit ‘Direct Action’ policy passed in October 2014 is the latest example of this tendency. This policy seems to have unlearned the last two decades of climate policy, reverting to an effectively voluntary scheme similar to the predecessor of the NSW scheme discussed in Chapter 3. The policy sets sectoral baselines at the highest historic point of emissions, rather than using best-available technology standards. This decision will create windfall gains for business-as-usual fluctuations in emissions and improvements in technology, whilst the limited financial consequences for non-participation will allow the biggest polluters in a field to continue polluting (Green, 2014). Furthermore, the EU appears firmly mired in the ambition paradox discussed in Chapter 6. The latest target designed to stimulate demand for the EU emissions trading is likely to be a cakewalk, according to the European civil society organization Sandbag’s October 2014 analysis.1

The Technopolitics of National Carbon Accounts

Technopolitics of classification is sorely lacking in much climate policy analysis. Policy details matter much more than the headline figures of emissions-reduction numbers imply. These numbers wrongly presume a common and agreed calculative ‘frame’, to use Michel Callon’s term for the often-unstated infrastructure of economic exchanges. This chapter explains how land-use calculation relies upon decisions and judgements. For this reason, the rationalist dream of a decisively framed global ‘nature’ against which a global carbon price can be calibrated is inherently political. Furthermore, rationalists’ reliance on a misguided concept of nature obscures expert judgements and the very practice of making the world accountable. In exploring the decisions required to make land-use change accountable, this chapter shows how the politics of the Kyoto Protocol are not reducible to pre-existing social interests on one side and natural representations (especially of trees) on the other, as assumed by many liberal commentators; but, rather, this politics involves social-group formation around issues.

‘Economists in the Wild’: Clean Development and the Global Politics of Carbon Offsets

Joint Implementation and the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) were the key offset mechanisms developed following the Kyoto Protocol negotiations. They emerged in the year 2000 as a compromise between the industrialized countries’ fear of costly mitigation targets and developing countries’ demands for technology transfer, development aid and an insistence that financial penalties be imposed on any industrialized country that exceeded its emissions targets.

Governing Carbon Emissions: NSW GGAS

Electricity production in Australia was progressively reformatted according to neo-liberal theories of self-correcting market efficiency throughout the 1990s. The resulting National Electricity Market (NEM) promised to eliminate the wastefulness and bureaucratic excesses of state bureaucratic regimes that were thought to be pandering to a narrow set of industrial concerns, and at great fiscal risk to state treasuries. The creation of a market around the kilowatt hour price of electricity was designed to replace expert bureaucratic judgements about electricity investment with the transparency of a price.

The politics of carbon markets, edited by Benjamin Stephan and Richard Lane (Routledge Studies in Environmental Policy), London, Routledge, 2015, xiii + 284 pp.,

with obtaining a broader grasp on how social conflicts and subsoil dynamics are co-constitutive of the current remapping and governance of the subsoil in much of Latin America. Subterranean Struggles makes a compelling call for more comprehensive analyses. Nonetheless, the collection may have benefited from accounts from other regions of Latin America, especially given the growing momentum of agendas such as IIRSA and the strengthening of Mercosur (Mercado Común del Sur) and CAN (Comunidad Andina).