Sunday, May 4, 2014

Carbon Commoditization

I am reading a paper that describes my perspective on carbon disclosure and accounting.  Usually I struggle with articulating the implications and difficulties of measuring and reporting corporate emissions so I'm pretty excited to have found something that will help me communicate my interests.  In other words, I found some relevant google key words and jargon!  

Crucially, the institutionalization of carbon reporting as a form of governance relies on a successful project of ‘commensuration’, defined by Levin and Espeland (2002, p. 121) as ‘the transformation of qualitative relations into quantities on a common metric.’
The carbon market is not a naturally existing entity; the commodification of carbon is a political and institutional project, requiring an extensive legal and bureaucratic infrastructure to define and measure carbon units for various activities and gases, allocate and adjudicate property rights, and to establish rules for trading across national boundaries and different carbon jurisdictions.

Kolk, Ans, David Levy, and Jonatan Pinkse. 2008. “Corporate Responses in an Emerging Climate Regime: The Institutionalization and Commensuration of Carbon Disclosure.” European Accounting Review 17 (4): 719–45. doi:10.1080/09638180802489121.

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