Emitting, Trading, Scheming: A Stor(e)y of Climate Change Mitigation in New Zealand

Abstract

Market solutions to climate change typify the way in which the phenomenon has been framed by powerful actors within the post-political neoliberal capitalist paradigm; that is, as a technical challenge to be expertly solved via schemes and mechanisms that incentivise emissions reductions. With one of the first nation-wide, all-sector and all-greenhouse gases emissions trading schemes, and as a well-known forerunner in the uptake of neoliberal reforms during the 1980s, New Zealand (NZ) presents an ideal case study for inquiry into market environmentalism. Work within a growing area of scholarship has also observed that persistent, if not increasing intervention by the NZ State, despite claims to ‘less state’ and ‘depoliticisation’, renders NZ an emerging example of authoritarian neoliberal governance. This research has therefore sought to determine how NZ’s Emissions Trading Scheme, as both market and state instrument, comprises a series of moments of experimentation and state intervention. Of particular importance is where these moments can be seen to narrow the spaces for democracy. Drawing on critical insights from scholarship spanning both geography and sociology, this research has been underpinned by the notion that markets are enacted through ongoing and inextricable performances of marketisation, scientisation and politicisation. Furthermore, discourses, or stories, constitute key moments in which the political is performed, or storeyed. Foucauldian critical discourse analysis has therefore been applied to over a decade of NZ Parliamentary Debates on climate governance to trace a genealogy of emergence of the Emissions Trading Scheme with the aim to tease out the moments and legitimation of state intervention. Notable moments identified include: the passing of significant legislation under urgency in the name of efficiency; selective deferral to expertise, variously privileging and silencing certain knowledges; and the use of discursive tactics to frame the State’s agenda as ‘common sense’, thereby shutting down in-House debate and foreclosing engagement from constituents. Naming democratically-worrying moments of intervention as states of exception, and identifying markets not as fixed and monolithic entities but as enacted through, oftentimes, messy, contradictory and unruly on-the-ground assemblages, allows critical analysis to challenge and contest, rather than to normalise, or indeed ignore or overlook, ‘postpolitical authoritarianism’.