Outsourcing Emissions: Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) as Ecological Modernisation - Implementing Environmental and Resource Management - page 273

taches to the national endeavours of environmental standards setting and spear-
heading innovation policies. The next section delves into a critical review of CDM
in the light of EM to probe whether these issues of contention can be defined ex-
clusively within the operational limitations of the transnational regimes.
21.3 A Critical Review of CDM
This section looks into a few of the contentions raised about the systemic and
functional aspects of CDM to find how these issues are located within the larger
setting of the emergent form of environmental governance in general and EM in
particular. Though mostly articulated either as systemic limitations or operational
flaws, in a closer analysis it can be found that these issues are not as clearly dis-
tinguishable as they are often made out to be, particularly because the process of
noncompliance (in the case of operational flaws) itself is very much ingrained in
the system. Most of these issues ranging from the potential and real outcomes of
CDM, questions about the categories and definitions, emphasis on production
processes, issues around incremental change and pollution to technification of
politics, began to crop up simultaneously with the emergence of the CDM regime
and remained with varying hues as CDM evolved.
21.3.1 Outcomes of CDM
The CDM, as an instrument in the climate change regime is, politically and eco-
nomically, a significant mechanism beyond its immediate functions of creating
carbon credits and facilitating sustainable development. Wara (2007) and Werks-
man (2002), for instance, consider that engaging developing nations in the climate
regime was one of the major political stumbling blocks in the initial phase of cli-
mate negotiations and that CDM has become an effective means of engaging the
global South into the process. However, the same process is not uniformly under-
stood unilaterally as it is also viewed as a relationship between unequal parties
even to the extent that it is denoted as 'carbon colonialism' (Agarwal and Narain
1995; Bachram 2004). At the same time, on a more concrete level, the twin objec-
tives of the exchange of carbon credits and facilitation of sustainable development
themselves have generated diverse reactions.
CDM as a Market Instrument
The suitability CDM as a market instrument is challenged on conceptual and op-
erational grounds. Primarily, as Wara (2007) points out, despite being one of the
major vehicles of emission reduction, CDM is considered to be highly inadequate
to deal with the scientifically projected amounts of emission reduction. It is indi-
cated that the Kyoto mechanism as a whole is performing below its own targets
(Christoff 2006). The estimated annual emission reduction through the CDM pro-