Outsourcing Emissions: Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) as Ecological Modernisation - Implementing Environmental and Resource Management - page 279

abatement conceptually emanates from within the discursive boundaries of the EM
framework on the basis of its roots in liberal capitalism and technological opti-
mism. This is beside the identical methods of problem conceptualization and the
orientation towards politics and regulatory issues. In this context, the following
part indicates how most of the aspersions made on CDM are inherent to the EM
perspective itself, with both systemic and operational aspects intertwined within.
While the commodification of atmosphere has far reaching implications; from
the very initial analyses onwards, CDM is observed to be subverting its sustain-
ability objectives by its role as a market instrument. Similarly, EM's preoccupa-
tion with production practices as a main domain of operation enables mechanisms
like CDM to quarantine themselves from other potential effects that the processes
can have on other points in the product cycle or in another industry. At the same
time, the overwhelming reliance on incremental change, and negation of radical
solutions, may result in more environmentally disastrous outcomes in the long run.
On the other hand, CDM's analytical categories and problem-definitions, both on
functional and theoretical postulates, entail systematic methods of inclusion and
exclusion, whereas it explicitly upholds the 'level playing ground' of market and
'objectivity' of science.
Externalising emissions, as similar to other capitalist production or consump-
tion processes, from its location of generation is one the fundamental features of
GHG abatement efforts of the climate change regime. This process of outsourcing
pollution is mostly formulated through technoscientific mechanisms and opera-
tionlised through transterritorial market instruments like CDM. The complexities
involved in the politics of market and science make the process of outsourcing
pollution a locus of multiple negotiations and appropriations of diverse interests.
In this process, as noted in the previous sections, EM and its operational manifes-
tations like CDM are inherently predisposed to certain specific ways of dealing
with environmental problems, which may ingrain socio-political values antitheti-
cal to equity and justice on different geographical and political scales.
Acknowledgments
The comments and suggestions made by both Ingmar Lippert and Rosmin Mathew
were immensely valuable and I am thankful to them. However, the responsibility
for the possible shortcomings in the paper is strictly mine.
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