Outsourcing Emissions: Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) as Ecological Modernisation - Implementing Environmental and Resource Management - page 264

sation process (Mol 1995). As a whole, the proponents argue that EM is ultimately
a political-sociological perspective and, an advanced theory of EM
“must ultimately (be) a theory of politics and the state- that is, a theory of the changes in
the state and political practices (and a theory of the antecedents of these changes) which
tend to give rise to private eco-efficiencies and overall environmental reforms” (Buttel
2000, p. 58).
This article examines Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) of the United Na-
tions Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) as a prescriptive il-
lustration of EM perspective and argues that the increasing counterpoints raised
against CDM, both as systemic flaws and as potholes of implementation, are in-
herent to EM framework. This article, set within the backdrop of calls for explicit
environmental governance, discusses the formulation of CDM in conjunction with
the basic tenets of EM before looking in to the criticisms pitted against the CDM.
Subsequently, it elaborates how certain fundamental presumptions of EM can pro-
duce such outcomes.
21.1.1 CDM in Global Environmental Governance
Environmental Governance, defined broadly as attempts by governing bodies or
combinations thereof to alleviate recognised environmental dilemmas (Davidson
and Frickel 2004), varies drastically in the formulation of the issues, organisation
of governing bodies and prescription of solutions at different scales, particularly in
geopolitical frames. A very significant trend in the late 20th-century environ-
mental governance, according to Davidson and Frickel (2004), is the framing of
environmental problems and solutions in the global context. The prominent fea-
tures of this emergent shift include, but are not restricted to, a) new forms of insti-
tutionalising the environment, b) the emergence of transnational institutions, c) the
legitimation of science and expertise in environmental discourse, and, d) the polar-
ity between north and south in articulating environmental problems and devising
solutions. These often mutually inclusive features permeated through multivalent
forms of interplay between diverse actors on different platforms constitute the dis-
cursive terrain of present-day global environmental governance.
21.1.2 Emergent Global Environmental Governance
The first feature of global environmental governance is the perforation of scales.
The emergent practices of institutionalising environment began to appear with the
perforation of erstwhile (predominantly national) scales leading to new forms of
scalar configurations and scalar politics (Amin 2002; Bulkeley 2005). At one
level, this led to reframing the 'moral- technocratic construction of global envi-
ronmental change' (Taylor and Buttel 1992) by prioritising the focal attention on
specific environmental issues. At a different level, it altered the ways of how insti-
tutionalising is done. The market based environmental regulatory instruments in