Governing growth in the greenhouse: a postcolonial critique of sustainable development through carbon markets

Abstract

As climate change has come to the fore as one of the most pressing issues for contemporary global politics much debate has arisen over appropriate policies and practices to mitigate and adapt to this problem. Current mainstream debates surrounding climate change mitigation revolve around the questions of: who is responsible for past emissions and how to quantify this; how to fairly allow for future emissions—particularly for the so-called ‘developing world’; and how to most efficiently reduce emissions. Such debates are fundamentally tied to Global North-South relations and issues of development. Climate governance policies such as the Kyoto Protocol’s flexibility mechanism, the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), and the burgeoning voluntary carbon market have sought to traverse these divisions by embedding carbon offsetting practices within a broader discourse of sustainable development in the Global South, resulting in an intersection between climate and development governance. Mainstream debate and policy decisions around the emerging climate-development policy interface give little attention to issues of historical and contemporary power inequalities; the cause and history of ‘underdevelopment’ and the neutrality of carbon offsetting are often assumed rather than critically questioned. Postcolonial theory has much to contribute to a critical study of carbon trading for sustainable development. Postcolonialism's emphasis on investigating the disparity in power relations between the Global South and North as a result of colonial processes helps to reveal embedded inequalities in dominant discourses and attempts to subvert them to make room for alternative and marginalised voices. This thesis uses postcolonial insights to critically examine the discourse of sustainable development that is supporting and sustaining carbon offsetting projects in the Global South. It does this by grounding an analysis of global climate-development governance practices in a series of case studies in Honduras and Mexico. A critical discourse analysis of the policies of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (World Bank) and a series of voluntary and compliance market carbon trading projects reveals that the global development-climate governance nexus assembles together actors, institutions and policies that uphold neoliberal principles supportive of the idea of development as economically and monetarily determined and of the ability of people to earn an income through access to free markets. Similarly, the discourse of sustainable development in carbon offsetting projects foregrounds and privileges a Eurocentric understanding of the environment that serves to manufacture legitimacy for carbon offsetting practices.