Outsourcing Emissions: Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) as Ecological Modernisation - Implementing Environmental and Resource Management - page 270

The Kyoto instruments are the quintessence of a prescriptive assimilation of EM
ideals, with its emphasis on commodified nature and technological mediation in
environmental relations, where the linkage of economic rationale and non-
environmental goals are synchronised (Glover 1999). As an essential feature of the
ongoing transformation in environmental governance, the increased role of mar-
ket-based regulatory instruments is argued to facilitate an interplay of market ac-
tors and political institutions that allows environmental considerations, require-
ments and interests to become increasingly institutionalised in the economic
domain (Sonnenfeld and Mol 2002).

Method of Problem Identification and Conceptualisation

As indicated in section 21.2 of this article, the identification and problematisation
of climate change as part of the UNFCCC regime is very much a rigorous scien-
tific project. While the exercises of negotiating different knowledge claims can it-
self be a highly contested process with diverse representations (Boehmer-
Christiansen 2003; Ninan 2008), it is on the basis of certain specific scientific un-
derstanding that instruments like CDM emerge. The scientific and institutional
emergence of CDM does not specifically contradict with the framework of EM ei-
ther in terms of knowledge claims or methods of problem identification. Both EM
as a framework and CDM as an instrument are mediated through the special rela-
tionship between environmental science and politics, as Taylor and Buttel (1992)
argue, whereby a certain course of action is facilitated over others in the problems
chosen, categories used, relationships investigated and confirming evidence re-
quired. As they further maintain, politics, in climate change as in any other global
environmental problems, is not merely simulated by scientific findings, but woven
into science.

Technological Optimism

While the proponents of EM reiterate that it does not represent a 'technomaniac
attitude', the reliance on technology and emphasis on technological advancement
is one of the essential theses of EM (Huber 2008; Jänicke 2008; Murphy 2000) 5 .
EM is understood as a
“readaptation of industrial society within the global geo and biosphere by modern
means such as scientific knowledge base and advanced technology in order to upgrade
the earth's carrying capacity and make development more sustainable” (Huber 2008, p.
360).

5

Though York and Rosa (2003) tend to suggest that technological optimism of EM has
become more subtle as time passed by, even the very recent literature from the major ex-
ponents demonstrate that they still throw their weight behind technological optimism
while recognising that technological practice as a socially embedded process (Huber
2008).