Rebecca Pearse

Ten reasons why carbon markets will not bring about radical emissions reduction

Almost two decades since the Kyoto Protocol was adopted, global greenhouse gas emissions are still rising rapidly. We argue that the global climate policy focus on carbon markets has played a significant role in the failure to reduce emissions. There are 16 compliance carbon markets in operation across the world. Many more are planned, although there have been numerous problems with carbon trading, including ineffectiveness, weak regulation and implementation, instances of fraud, little to no emissions reduction and major legitimacy issues for governments and the private sector. In this paper we take a “strong” position, arguing that carbon markets do not have a role to play in a policy scenario that requires radical emissions reductions in order to avoid dangerous greenhouse gas concentrations. We put forward 10 reasons why carbon markets should not be the preferred climate policy choice, which we have collated from positions taken by grassroots social movement organizations, think tanks, NGOs and other political advocacy groups as well as individual scientists and scholars.

Gender Norms and the Economy: Insights from Social Research

ABSTRACT Feminist economics has taken up the concept of gender norms, most commonly conceived as a constraint on womens voice and gender equality. This contribution examines the concept of gender norms and summarizes key insights from sociology and other social sciences. Norms do not float free: they are materialized in specific domains of social life and are often embedded in institutions. An automatic process of “socialization” cannot explain the persistence of discriminatory norms. Norms change in multiple ways, both in response to broad socioeconomic change and from the dynamics of gender relations themselves. Restructuring of gender orders, and diversity and contradictions in gender norms, give scope for activism. The rich literature on normativity supports some but not all approaches in feminist economics and indicates new possibility for the field.

Back to the land? Legitimation, carbon offsets and Australia's emissions trading scheme

Carbon offsets produced from terrestrial (land-based) emissions reduction projects are a contested frontier of carbon market expansion. Experiments in legislating for and producing terrestrial offsets that come under the title REDD+ have met heated opposition. However, a political consensus about the desirability and feasibility of carbon offsets from avoided deforestation and various land-management practices has slowly emerged. How do terrestrial carbon offsets gain legitimacy in the face of contestation and compelling evidence that creating carbon commodities from land ecosystems is an elusive commodity fiction? It seems that a quiet compromise is emerging over the (re-)commodification of land through carbon trading vis-à-vis the broader process of legitimating marketized climate policy. This paper offers a political-economic analysis of state-led efforts to legitimate a market for land carbon sinks in Australia and the Asia-Pacific region. The dynamics of legitimation and contestation play out as an iterative ‘double movement’.

Moving targets: Carbon pricing, energy markets, and social movements in Australia

ABSTRACT Reporting on the origins and directions of social movement strategy on climate and energy issues in the last decade, the shifts in ‘climate movement’ practice are discussed using a neo-Polanyian account of the political economy of climate change combined with sociological analysis of the strategic decisions campaigners reported making. Since the mid-2000s, Australia’s climate movement has been engaged in three concurrent arenas of political contestation. The longest-standing arena of movement activity has been negotiations over climate policy. More recently, activists and communities are engaged in a struggle over the expansion of fossil fuels. A third contest has been waged over the present and future position of renewable energy technologies in Australia’s electricity market. In the wake of climate policy failure, energy campaigns have been deepened, and it seems that a broader energy justice agenda is being forged. New strategic dilemmas are visible in the field.

Negotiating with the North: How Southern-tier intellectual workers deal with the global economy of knowledge

This article examines a group of intellectual workers who occupy a peripheral but not powerless position in the global economy of knowledge. How do they handle relations with the global metropole, especially in new fields of research where established hierarchies are in question? Three new domains of knowledge – climate change, HIV/AIDS and gender studies – are studied through interviews with 70 active researchers in Southern-tier countries Brazil, South Africa and Australia. A pattern of extraversion, involving active adoption of paradigms from the metropole, is widespread and institutionally supported. Major alternative knowledge formations have not emerged in these domains. However contestations of more specific kinds are frequent. Paradigms are adapted, criticism is offered, activism is engaged, capacities are developed and allegiances sometimes changed. The valorization of local knowledge, which goes beyond the abstractions of universalized paradigms, is particularly significant. Not stark subordination, but a complex collective negotiation characterizes the response of intellectual workers in the Southern tier.

Climate Capitalism and its Discontents

Can capitalism become sustainable? Are green management policies and institutions capable of taming global markets for sustainable ends? If not, what forms of social agency can arrest the global climate crisis? These questions are not new in the social science literature on environmental change. But they are more and more pressing as we move further into the twenty-arst century. We are in an unprecedented period of global environmental change. Action to avoid runaway climate change is most urgent. The backdrop is the failure of climate policy to produce emissions reductions in line with the scale of the task. “Market mechanisms” such as carbon taxes, energy efaciency measures, and technological innovation are the main political responses to climate change. Modest streams of climate anance have started oowing, and in the last decade public and private actors have created a complex architecture of transnational carbon trading markets. Will these current and potential market reforms contribute to what Peter Newell and Matthew Paterson called “climate capitalism,”1 a situation where capital accumulation becomes aligned with low-carbon development? There is great need for social scientists to engage creatively with the task of theorizing the ecological and political impacts of market approaches to climate change and more broadly the prospects for sustainability vis-à-vis the dynamics of fossil fuel capitalism. The three books reviewed here are welcome additions to the critical literature taking up this task. This common thread in each book brings to light complementary aspects of debates over the prospects for a green (capitalist) economy.

‘Continuity and Change’: Environmental Policy and the Coming Energy Transition

Environmental policy debate barely featured in the election of 2016. This absence is best understood with regard to the recent political history of partisan conflict in federal parliament over climate change and energy issues. Carbon pricing has been a central object of debate since Kevin Rudd won the 2007 election. What followed was a deeply divisive contest between the Australian Labor Party’s (ALP) and the Australian Greens’ high-minded resolve to ‘price carbon’ versus the Coalition’s populist push against Rudd and Julia Gillard’s emissions trading schemes. Neither of the major parties, nor the Greens, have emerged from this conflict with clearcut victories on climate policy.

Re-making the global economy of knowledge: do new fields of research change the structure of North–South relations?†

How is global-North predominance in the making of organized knowledge affected by the rise of new domains of research? This question is examined empirically in three interdisciplinary areas - climate change, HIV-AIDS, and gender studies - through interviews with 70 researchers in Southern-tier countries Brazil, South Africa and Australia. The study found that the centrality of the North was reinstituted as these domains came into existence, through resource inequalities, workforce mechanisms, and intellectual framing. Yet there are tensions in the global economy of knowledge, around workforce formation, hierarchies of disciplines, neoliberal management strategies, and mismatches with social need. Intellectual workers in the Southern tier have built significant research centres, workforces and some distinctive knowledge projects. These create wider possibilities of change in the global structure of organized knowledge production.