Paper long abstract:

This paper proposes to consider the way tropical forests are dealt with by climate change negotiations as an empirical lens for the analysis of market engineering and global political action. In the mid 2000s tropical deforestation became a problem relevant to CO2 emissions mitigation. Since then, negotiators discuss how to reduce the phenomenon through the use of economic incentives. Different options are explored. The paper examines three of them: the pantropical perspective where developing countries reducing their deforestation rate would calculate their rewarded performance thanks to remote sensing specialists; the developmental approach that would tackle the institutional causes of deforestation by consolidating fragile governments through incentives associated to the implementation of reforms, programs, and policies; and finally the project-based carbon market where locally decreasing forest loss would be converted into exchangeable commodities used to offset emissions from northern industries. While they are all based on the idea that market-based relationships are the appropriate tools to act collectively, the paper argues that these agencements display different governmental properties. Each of them articulates the objective of reducing deforestation to other aims, such as the supervision of global forest cover, the government of weak governments or the stimulation of technical innovation, and is thus characterized by a certain distribution of agency and of the power to intervene.