Paper 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.

Paper 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.