Paper short abstract:

I present ethnographic vignettes of carbon accounting practices in which members categorised some of the environmental evidence as erroneous. I analyse the enactment of erroneously evidence in terms of ontological/ontic politics, wondering how these politics shaped abilities to account and respond.

Paper long abstract:

Drawing on fieldwork in and around a transnational Fortune 50 company's "corporate social responsibility" unit, this paper opens up a range of situations that took part in enacting the company's evidence of its impact on global warming. This evidence was implicated in at least two significant modes of accountability: first, the company was performing itself as a socially and environmentally accountable and responsible "corporate citizen"; second, the company was inhabiting a discourse of evidence-based decision-making, requiring the evidence to be produced accountably. I analyse a limited set of ethnographic vignettes of situated work practice that (con)figured the company's accounting for their carbon emissions. Common to all these situations was that the environmental realities enacted have been categorised by some members as erroneous or as not good enough. In this paper I am interested, thence, in the enactment of such erroneous environmental evidence by and in heterogeneous collectives. To explore these enactments I experiment with contrasting analyses of these practices as ontological (Mol) or ontic (Verran) politics whilst focusing on how these politics shape and distribute the (im)possibilities for particular modes of relating to, responding to and accounting for the various actants involved in the work, including to/for the discursively imagined "real" carbon.