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- Convenors:
-
Shaila Seshia Galvin
(Geneva Graduate Institute)
Diego Enrique Silva Garzon (Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies)
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- Chair:
-
Shaila Seshia Galvin
(Geneva Graduate Institute)
- Discussant:
-
Jerome Whitington
(New York University)
- Format:
- Traditional Open Panel
Short Abstract:
Placing focus on socio-technical networks and infrastructures, data practices and technologies, and issues of environmental, agrarian, and climate justice, this panel examines how accounting and data practices associated with climate mitigation interventions transform socio-environmental relations.
Long Abstract:
The rise of nature-based solutions and land-based carbon removals as a response to the climate crisis brings with it new ways of rendering, reckoning with, and transforming socionatures. In this context, carbon and, more broadly, greenhouse gas accounting, has emerged as a domain of knowledge and a set of practices operating through socio-technical networks to enable interventions intended to combat climate change by reducing or removing greenhouse gasses from the atmosphere.
Carbon accounting is, however, more than a calculative and valuation effort. It is a technoscientific practice that reconfigures local realities to render them amenable to quantification (Spash 2015). Others have examined how carbon accounting reduces the multiple relations that lie behind the production of carbon emissions to a commensurable substance–units of CO2 equivalent (MacKenzie 2009; Bumpus 2011). In this panel, we build on critical debates about commensuration and equivalence (Carton 2021) to examine how calculative and valuation interventions have the capacity to transform socio-environmental relations, from changes in the management of forests, agrarian, land and marine environments, to the local impacts associated with the arrival of new carbon resources and finance (Galvin and Silva Garzón 2023).
This panel analyzes how new modes of accounting for carbon shape agrarian and environmental relations. We ask: what type of socio-technical networks are emerging in the process of making GHGs measurable, quantifiable and exchangeable? What sorts of relations among humans and nonhuman organisms, as well as technical devices, data infrastructures and practices, are promoted within these accounting networks? How do these infrastructures shape or transform local realities in ways that could exacerbate and/or attenuate forms of environmental, agrarian, and climate injustice? We welcome contributions that address these questions directly or indirectly in relation to carbon accounting, data practices and technologies, and emergent forms of valuation and exchange within land and marine environments.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Barbara Abrahao (University of Oxford)
Short abstract:
This paper feeds into debates on how financial value is extracted from peoples everyday life, and how climate change and its politics engenders social transformation within affected communities. It also contributes to debates on how community translates such changes into their own cultural terms.
Long abstract:
This paper focuses on the processes and practices that render an Amazonian traditional community ‘auditable’ and it discusses the social transformation this engenders. I draw on 14 months of fieldwork in a quilombola community where carbon credits are being produced. During my ethnography I observed all the necessary steps to create an environmental asset produced on a communal land and to increase its value to sell it on a global marketplace. Audit and certification emerged as key processes used by companies who produce carbon to secure financial returns for investors or clients. Making a community auditable required the mapping of the everyday lives of quilombolas and collecting of data on their relationship with the forest and their land. Verification implied creating evidence for all socio-environmental practices in order to register the social transformation across time. The carbon company was then able to come out with projections of a better future and improved practices that could be verified through auditing. To do so, the company follows the CCB (Community, Climate and Biodiversity) methodology & standard. CCB aggregates value across carbon credit units and increases the liquidity of assets. Using the analogy of C of community, I ask what the making of a community "auditable" reveals about financial market imaginaries about what a traditional community is or should become. "Community" and" traditional" have different meanings which conflict and overlap. I will also highlight how such ideals and moral standards clashed with the community's social and political organisation based on secrecy and sorcery.
Juan Felipe Riano Landazabal (University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA))
Long abstract:
In the Puerto Carreño region, on the Eastside savannas of Colombia, everyone seems to be engaging in some form of carbon accounting. Agro-industrial firms, forestry investors, and bioenergy entrepreneurs are resorting to carbon accounting to justify offsetting schemes that bring additional revenues to their enterprises. Some of the carbon accounting methodologies used to analyze how much carbon is sequestered by some products like cashews, native trees, and biomass for bioenergy generation are still in the making. Agronomists, forestry engineers, and energy technicians are studying how local environmental and climatic conditions shape how much carbon is sequestered by these nature-based commodities. But carbon accounting prospects in this region take place after years of technoscientific efforts to adapt these commodities and turn them into industrial-scale profitable businesses. This paper analyzes how previous histories of forestry and agro-industrial development influence current carbon accounting efforts. I follow carbon practitioners as they try to make sense of environmental conditions that challenge, contest, and adapt to the carbon economy, evidencing the uncooperative nature (Bakker, 2003) of commodities to be entirely subsumed by novel forms of market-based carbon schemes (Carton, 2017). I show how, despite carbon practitioners’ and scientists’ assumptions, carbon accounting is not solely an ahistorical technoscientific practice, but it absorbs previous social histories of land use, community place-making, and stories of land-grabbing and displacement. Understanding previous environmental histories of agro-industrial development reveals how novel carbon accounting efforts deliver nature to new carbon economy flows, but it also evidences the potential shortcomings of these aspirations.
Nikhit Agrawal (UCLA)
Short abstract:
This paper discusses how greenhouse gases are made quantifiable and tradeable through very different socio-technical pathways across the two India-based agtech start-ups - one generating carbon credits while intervening in industrial agriculture while the other focused on organic agriculture.
Long abstract:
Agriculture in India is undergoing a socioeconomic crisis marked by ecological degradation and farmers' suicide (Vasavi, 2012). In response, techno-fixes have proliferated that promise the ecological and economic sustainability of farming and aim to create new domains of capital accumulation. One such fix is the generation of carbon credits by transforming agricultural practices (Galvin and Garzón 2023). In this paper, I draw on twelve months of institutional ethnography at two Indian agtech firms (digital-technology-based emerging agribusinesses) based in Bengaluru and Pune. While the Bengaluru-based firm is working to generate carbon credits by intervening in industrial agricultural practices in paddy through its large army of fieldworkers, the Pune-based firm critiques industrial agriculture and monocropping practices to argue for transitioning farmers towards regenerative agriculture. Drawing on participant observation, shadowing and interviewing fieldworkers and employees, and interviews with agricultural scientists and social activists working in Indian agriculture, I demonstrate how greenhouse gases are made measurable, quantifiable, and tradeable through very different socio-technical pathways across the two agtech firms. While both firms seek certification from agencies like Verra and Ecocert, respectively, to demonstrate trustworthiness, digital technologies and sensing practices (Gabrys, 2019) play important roles in how trust among end users is constructed differently in the two firms. Finally, I focus on the voices of farmers to understand their reasons for trusting/participating (and, at times, mistrusting/rejecting participation) in these complex socio-technical worlds. Farmers’ reasons are influenced by both economic and sociocultural factors, reflecting their complex positionalities amid increasing pressures of capital.
John Paulraj (Geneva Graduate Institute)
Short abstract:
This paper looks at how data and calculative practices around carbon shape the way forestlands are imagined and appropriates in Northeast India. However, the performativity and success of these practices depend on the state who regulates it through forest and climate policies.
Long abstract:
Over the last decade, there has been a growing interest in reimagining the forested landscapes of Northeast India as carbon sinks, carbon neutral regions, or regions with abundant carbon stocks. This is reflected in reports like the State of Forest Report (2021) released by the Forest Survey of India (FSI) which show that the region accounts for 28.87 percent of India’s total available forest carbon stock. Seen within the climate change context, an emphasis on such calculations and numerical figures signal the reorganisation [in meanings and use] of forestlands by the government to align with India’s global climate commitments. This paper engages with discussions around the performative nature of data and calculative practices around carbon that shape the way forests are resignified within the discourse of climate change mitigation. It argues that imageries guided by calculations and numerical figures have the potential to resignify land, thus repurposing them for different uses. However, it requires socio-political networks to appropriate it on the ground. Drawing on findings from my fieldwork in Nagaland, it is seen that the performativity of data to change material meanings of forest depends on the acceptance of the state government and its recommendation through policies. Unless the government produces rules and regulations to initiate new modalities of forest carbon on the ground, these resignification remains unchanged. Furthermore, the performative nature of data and accounting practices encourage communities to study and perform rural development within the framework monetising forests through carbon (as observed in the ground).
Fiona Kinniburgh (Technical University of Munich) Wim Carton Silke Beck (TUM)
Short abstract:
This paper examines current commensuration practices for agri-food system emissions in national long-term climate plans based on UNFCCC inventory rules. It argues that these practices hinder mitigation accountability, with strong implications for global climate justice.
Long abstract:
This paper delves into the concept of residual emissions (RE) within sectoral carbon accounting, focusing on the agri-food sector. Residual emissions, commonly regarded as hard-to-abate and necessitating compensation through carbon sinks, lack a consistent definition in long term climate strategies (LT-LEDs) and beyond (Buck et al. 2023). Despite this, many countries quantify sectoral residual emissions using UNFCCC inventory rules, which, for agriculture, creates a separation between agricultural emissions and those from directly related categories such as energy and land use.
We examine current commensuration practices in LT-LEDs to shed light on their implications for mitigation accountability and global climate justice. Three main implications are discussed. First, accounting for carbon emissions from a national production perspective overlooks consumption politics, creating risks of emissions leakage from high-consuming countries compensating national decarbonization with high-emissions imports. Second, separating agriculture from related accounting categories obscures emissions embedded in inputs for industrial farming (such as fertilizers, pesticides, and imported animal feed), undervaluing mitigation options whose indirect emissions reductions would count elsewhere. Third, treating biotic agricultural carbon sinks as permanent and fungible with other forms of carbon removal poses significant risks to the long-term credibility of mitigation efforts and claims.
The paper argues that current accounting practices co-produce fragmented national policy approaches to governing agri-food systems, hindering mitigation accountability and the adoption of system-based perspectives and alternative methodologies. It concludes by discussing alternative foresight exercises and commensuration practices to enable the development of national mitigation pledges in line with climate justice principles.