Magdalena Kuchler

Stakeholding as sorting of actors into categories: implications for civil society participation in the CDM

Following a deliberative shift towards public–private partnership networks in global environmental governance, the multi-stakeholder framework is increasingly advocated for engaging multiple actors in collective decision-making. As this arrangement relies on proper participatory conditions in order to include all relevant stakeholders, input legitimacy is crucial to achieving legitimate outcomes. However, ‘stakeholding’ implies that actors—recast into a specific institutional context—are sorted into new formal or informal categories. This paper scrutinizes the clean development mechanism (CDM) under the Kyoto Protocol to interrogate the problematic issue of ‘stakeholding’—i.e. the ‘sorting’ of actors—in enacting the multi-stakeholder framework. Based on an analysis of 25 CDM projects that provides insight into the widest range of participation opportunities for civil society regarding specific projects, this paper considers how certain institutional context of the Mechanism’s stakeholder framework affects the involvement of civil society actors and the implications of this for balanced and fair input legitimacy. The findings suggest that, in practice, the informal corporate-induced sorting of actors into internal and external stakeholders keeps civil society actors outside the CDM’s inner circle, forcing them to voice their concerns regarding specific projects via CDM insiders or through irregular channels. Furthermore, the absence of a clear definition of stakeholder in local consultations results in the inclusion of unsorted actors, destabilizing the distribution of participation opportunities. The paper concludes that recasting the deliberative principles of openness and plurality into the CDM’s corporate-inspired stakeholding creates a specific institutional context that imposes more than one set of perhaps incompatible stakeholder categories while impairing input legitimacy.

The human rights turn: ENGOs’ changing tactics in the quest for a more transparent, participatory and accountable CDM

ABSTRACT Non-state actors are increasingly participating in international climate diplomacy. The tactics employed by diverse civil society agents to influence climate policymaking are radicalizing through the adoption of more confrontational language. Activist groups have been seeking opportunities to influence policymakers regarding the rules related to transparency, public participation and accountability in the Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). By scrutinizing efforts of three environmental NGOs (ENGOs) – Climate Action Network, Center for International Environmental Law and Carbon Market Watch – the analysis concentrates on what tactical shifts have occurred in the framing positions and approaches of these activists during the 1997–2015 period. After several years of legal advocacy, expertise and/or critique in an effort to reform input legitimacy of CDM governance, the selected ENGOs have recently drifted away from narratives of green governmentality and ecological modernization and, instead, radicalized their rhetorical tactics by turning to a human rights perspective under the umbrella of climate justice.

Bioenergy as an Empty Signifier

The article provides insight into the contemporary international bioenergy debate and scrutinizes how the idea of biofuel production as a win-win-win solution to energy insecurity, climate change, and agricultural stagnation came into being, what discursive forces bind such a conceptualization, and where dislocations arise. Based on critical assumptions of discourse theory developed by Laclau and Mouffe, the analysis explores assessments, reports, policy papers, and other central documents from three influential international organizations—the International Energy Agency, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization—that provide an entry point to the global debate on biofuels. We show that the bioenergy concept occupies specific positions and conveys different meanings within the three overlapping discourses of energy, climate, and agriculture. These three discursive areas are further “sutured” around the notion of biofuel production, where a hegemonic thread of the capitalist market economics, fixated on economic growth and presupposing the necessity of cost-effectiveness, results in internal contradictions and dislocations within the win-win-win conceptualization, emptying bioenergy of any content.