ANTHROPOLOGY OF MARKETS; CARBON EMISSIONS

The Curious Case of Carbon: Organization and Materiality in the Making of Carbon Emissions Reduction aka. Carbon Credits

A R&R research article originally written for the journal American Anthropologist but never published before.

Non-statutory but a healthy, friendly warning: This is a research article. It means, it is the outcome of academic research. Like in any other profession, academic research has its own means to understand facts; it uses particular tools and terminologies. The ways of academic writing and argumentation might sound obscure to non-specialists (even for academics from a different discipline). As you know, a surgical blade and a butcher’s knife have very different sense of purpose, precision, and urgency though they may have similar effects in the hands of a child (and on me!). So, dear non-academic readers, read at your own risk. When you get lost in materiality, or a formula like ERy (t CO2e/y) = BEy — PEy — LEy, remember that I warned you. If you manage to go through, and if it expands your horizon at least a wee bit, I am happy. Read the abstract to see whether it is making sense to go ahead.

The research for this article was conducted about ten years back. So there could be some structural and economic changes around the carbon market and trading mechanisms. For example, the size of the global carbon emissions…