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Paper short abstract

This article examines how Singapore is constructing authority in cross-border carbon markets without hosting most of the mitigation on which those markets depend.

Paper long abstract

This article examines how Singapore is constructing authority in cross-border carbon markets without hosting most of the mitigation on which those markets depend. Article 6 of the Paris Agreement has shifted carbon-market politics from the abstract exchange of offsets towards the institutional question of how mitigation outcomes are authorized, accounted for, transferred and rendered admissible across jurisdictions. Singapore is a revealing case because it combines limited domestic scope for large-scale nature-based mitigation with a rising carbon tax, a regulated International Carbon Credit framework, ten bilateral Article 6.2 Implementation Agreements, a state-linked exchange infrastructure centred on Climate Impact X, and a financial sector strategy led by the Monetary Authority of Singapore. Drawing on a documentary case study of legal, regulatory, market and transnational governance materials from 2018 to 2026, the article develops a mechanism-based account of three interfaces through which Singapore concentrates authority: domestic admissibility gatekeeping, platformed intermediation and cross-border cooperation templates. It argues that Singapore's influence operates as infrastructural and nodal power exercised through the interfaces that make carbon claims usable, credible and liquid, rather than through direct control over project territories. The hub-making project remains contradictory, since it depends on politically produced scarcity, contested integrity judgements and a tropical political geography in which monitoring and verification burdens are displaced towards project peripheries while intermediation rents are concentrated in Singapore.