Environmental Politics, 2014 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09644016.2014.893120 The political duality of scale-making in environmental markets1 Arno Simonsa*, Aleksandra Lisb and Ingmar Lippertc a Department of Sociology, Technische Universität Berlin, Germany; bInstitute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland; c Technologies in Practice, IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark New markets are key in debates concerning environmental regimes. Critics and proponents share a discourse that characterises environmental markets in terms of scale; many discuss how to scale environmental markets ‘the right way’. Building on previous work in human geography, actor–network theory, and governmentality studies, we unpack the dual but always interwoven politics of scale-making in doing environmental policies, which consists of material-semiotic practices of producing and using scales as ontologically real ordering devices. Drawing from the results of three studies conducted independently by the authors, we analyse material-semiotic scale-making practices in different ways of enacting environmental markets. By revealing the dual politics of scale production and use in environmental markets, our analysis contributes to the study of developing and implementing environmental governance. Keywords: scale; environmental markets; carbon markets; practice; material semiotics; governmentality 5 10 15 20 Introduction We introduce the ontological turn to the study of scales in environmental politics and unpack the dual but always interwoven politics of scale-making in doing environmental policies. The political duality of scale-making consists of material-semiotic practices of producing and using scales as ontologically real ordering devices. We investigate this duality by analysing material-semiotic scalemaking practices in different ways of enacting environmental markets, the latter of which we identify both as a hegemonic order of environmental governance (Robertson 2006, Stephan and Paterson 2012, Voß 2007) and as an intellectual opportunity to reflect upon the emergence of such orders in and through scalemaking. For more than three decades, markets for ‘carbon’, ‘biodiversity’, or other ‘environmental services’ have been on the rise. Correspondingly, the challenge of scaling such environmental markets (EMs) ‘the right way’ (up or down) has *Corresponding author. Email: arno.simons@posteo.de © 2014 Taylor & Francis 25 30 2 A. Simons et al. occupied policymakers and academics alike – asking which scales are relevant and investigating their interaction and manageability. To illustrate: Many institutions are optimistic that ‘scaling up’ EMs will lead to sustainability, where environmental and social concerns are translated into questions of allocation of ‘goods’ and ‘services’ (European Commission 2013, OECD 2004, CBD 2010, TEEB 2011). Others discuss the interconnectedness of different scales – such as ‘ecological’, ‘regulatory’, or ‘economic’ scales – and the need to avoid ‘scaling mismatches’ in environmental policymaking (Cumming et al. 2006, Mann and Absher 2014, Adger et al. 2005, Paloniemi et al. 2012). In many such debates, scales tend to be taken for granted. ‘Ecological’, ‘regulatory’, or ‘economic’ scales appear as separately given orders, one has to accept and can only move, manage, or muddle through more or less appropriately. Scales are treated as orders or spaces that assign different objects their place (on the scale) – e.g. ‘global environmental threats’ or ‘flows’, ‘international politics’, ‘local economies’. This is an imagination of scales in abstract and absolute terms, similar to the conception of Euclidean space as ‘timeless and placeless spaces’. Approaches following this imagination miss engaging with scales as phenomena that materially semiotically occupy a time or place inside the worlds they order and thereby sidestep scrutinising the making of scales together with the politics involved in making and using scales. Even the more constructivist literature on EMs and politics tends to reproduce simplistic accounts of scales. Apart from a few notable exceptions (Blok 2010, Bulkeley 2005, Demeritt 2001, McCarthy 2005), scales are not fully problematized in this literature. While it is often acknowledged that environmental policy actors operate across scales or engage in ‘politics of scales’ by mobilising different scales, the status of such scales is unclear, and there is rarely a focus on the scalar politics of bringing such scales about in the first place. This concerns Callon (2009), who discusses ‘in vitro/laboratory’ vs. ‘in vivo/realscale’ markets without spelling out how scales are enacted, as much as Newell (2008), Newell et al. (2012), Bridge (2011), or Bumpus and Liverman (2008), who in their analyses of political economies of environmental governance mention different scales without questioning their material-semiotic emergence. Also, the authors contributing to the recent special issue in this journal on ‘The politics of carbon markets’ (Stephan and Paterson 2012) bypass problematizing scales. Lederer (2012), for example, mentions ‘international’ and ‘sub-national’ scales without employing his practice-based approach to analysing the enactment of such scales. Likewise, Bullock (2012), Descheneau (2012), and Paterson and Stripple (2012) only marginally account for scaling. Interestingly, Lane (2012, p. 583) analyses the translation of an early US emissions trading regulation ‘into a seemingly universal economic narrative’, yet fails to identify this translation as ongoing scalar practice and its politics. Thus, we identify the study of the enactment and politics of scales as a gap in existing EM literature. To close this gap, we focus on scale-making as a materialsemiotic and political practice of scale production and use. Building on scale 35 40 45 50 55 60 65 70 75 Environmental Politics 3 analytics in human geography, actor–network theory (ANT), and governmentality studies, we develop the notion of the political duality of scale-making, and 80 analyse this duality in three independently conducted studies: the first on performing EMs as a dichotomy of theory and practice (Arno Simons), the second on scaling up the European Emissions Trading Scheme (EU-ETS; Aleksandra Lis), and the third on corporate carbon accounting (Ingmar Lippert). The studies open the ‘black boxes’ of scales, explicate the politics of closing these boxes and 85 of the political effects of thence stabilised scales. Critical voices also point to political effects of scaling EMs. As some scholars warn, scaling up EMs, while not automatically leading to more environmental protection, empowers financial interests at the cost of disregarding the interests of other actors (Lohmann 2010, MacNeil and Paterson 2012, Robertson 90 2006, Spash 2010, Stephan 2012). We would like to see our work as a contribution to these accounts on the politics of Ems, but analytically we move one step further to examine both the politics of scale production and the politics of scale use as a socio-material practice. With this, we push forward critical debates about EMs and strengthen studying environmental politics more generally. 95 In what follows, we draw out precisely how we approach studying scales and the duality of scale-making. Subsequently, we substantiate this approach with the three empirical studies. We are aware that our proposed shift in perspective on scales is itself a (re)scaling exercise. Our theoretical notions result from ‘rescaling’ different sets of literature (human geography, ANT, governmentality 100 studies), and our empirical analysis relies on ‘rescaling’ our studies to make a theoretical argument. This is by no means an innocent practice. In the concluding considerations, we attend reflexively to the corresponding difficulties. Studying scales and the political duality of scale-making Many authors before us have treated scale from a constructivist perspective (for overviews, see Howitt 2007 and Moore 2008). Constructivist authors highlight the constructedness, fluidity, and contestedness of scalar realities. Particularly, Bulkeley (2005), McCarthy (2005), and Blok (2010) have brought this perspective to the study of environmental politics. A common denominator of constructivist approaches seems to be ‘the rejection of scale as an ontologically given category’ (Marston 2000, p. 220). Marston et al. (2005, p. 416) note that after 20 years of theorising scale anew, there still is ‘no agreement on what is meant by the term or how it should be operationalised’. Their radical proposal ‘to eliminate scale as a concept in human geography’ (p. 416) has been criticised as a ‘return to naturalized, taken-forgranted categories of analysis’ (Kaiser and Nikiforova 2008, p. 538) and ‘a misguided case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater’ (Moore 2008, p. 213). Denying the ontological reality of scales, of course, does not imply ‘that they are merely inconsequential heuristics in the minds of geographers’ (p. 213). But in conceptualising scale as ‘an epistemological, rather than ontological, 105 110 115 120 4 A. Simons et al. reality’ (p. 213) and contending that this reality can never be ‘completely reduced to, or adequately explained by, the actions of various entities’ (p. 221), Moore does not open up scales and their consequences. As actor–network theorists and Foucauldians argue, we need to study scales as ‘relational effects’ of actor–networks and thus as continuously enacted ontologies, enacted in parallel or against other realities – without having to ascribe essential characteristics (an a priori ontology) to them (Blok 2010, Collinge 2006, Kaiser and Nikiforova, 2008, Law 2009, Mol 2002). This means we can ‘localise’ not only the effects of scales but scales themselves – that is in material-semiotic practices of making and unmaking relations between numerous heterogeneous actors, both human and nonhuman (cf. Strathern 2004). Let us take this just one step further and acknowledge that these socio-material practices are exactly the ‘stuff’ scales are made of. As a reaction to this debate, we suggest studying and conceptualising scale as epistemology (Jones 1998) as part of scale as ontology. The former is an effect of the latter – for what is enacted as scales (ontologically) are sociomaterial ordering devices framing cognition and interaction (epistemically). We further suggest treating geographical scales as one particular version of scales (Strathern 2004) and thereby going against the widespread tendency of conflating scales with geographical space in the scale-making literature (Blok 2010, Collinge 2006, Kaiser and Nikiforova 2008, Marston et al. 2005). Human geographers themselves have already accepted a much broader notion of space, including but not limited to geographical space, in the context of other debates (Thrift 2003). Therefore a broader notion of scales as ordering devices of geographical and other relations seems apt. Strathern (2004: p. xiv) identifies two general ‘orders of perspectives’ in Western scale-making practices: (1) domaining as the ‘facility to move between discrete and/or overlapping domains or systems’ and (2) magnification as ‘the facility to alter the magnitude of phenomena’ (cf. Jimenez 2005). We mobilise this distinction in our empirical studies and discuss its usefulness in the conclusion. Inspired by Strathern (2004) and Lippert (2013) we suggest reconceptualising scales as materially-semiotically enacted ordering devices – systems of marks that ‘domain’ and ‘magnify’ worlds by means of spanning and ordering social, geographic, or conceptual spaces. On the one hand, scales with their different ontologies are performative epistemological infrastructures for action, which help actors to order the world around them, to perform ‘choices’ and ‘decisions’, to exclude and include things and people into their actions, to account for or disregard elements of their environment. Thus, scales as ordering devices do not only have a materiality of their own but also material/political consequences. We should attend to the ways in which actors employ scales as ordering devices to make a difference in the world. This is what we call the politics of scale use, one effect of which can be to create social boundaries, hierarchies, and governmental tactics (Feindt and Oels 2005, Kaiser and Nikiforova 2008, McCarthy 2005). Beyond that, even actors themselves and the agency they exert can partly result from their enrolment of scales, especially when these scales appear as given realities. 125 130 135 140 145 150 155 160 Environmental Politics 5 On the other hand, next to politics of scale use, we can identify politics of scale production. The latter can be defined as the inscription of values, norms, interests, and working conditions (production site politics) by actors into scales, and the material-semiotic production of scales as real (cf. Blok 2010). Politics of scale production therefore concern controversies on how to produce scales, what to domain, and what to magnify (and just how much). However, since the practices of producing scales are always already related to anticipated ways of using scales, (the politics of) scale production and scale use go together in scale-making. Both are inseparable and indispensable to scaling practices. We call this the political duality of scale-making. Generally speaking, the enactment of scales is political because it is neither ‘natural’ nor ‘neutral’. Scalar realities could always, at least in principle, be enacted differently. Also, scalar realities create winners and losers, and while some actors may have the means and interests to reproduce particular scales, others may be forced to take part in the enactment of a scale from which they gain nothing. The notion of political duality captures the fact that scales are both products and producers of political practices. In ANT jargon, one could say that scales are translations that translate. Turning to EMs, we use this understanding to ask how specific scales used to order EMs come into existence, what they do and how. Doing scales politically 165 170 175 180 185 Study 1: Constituting ‘theory’ and its ‘implementations’ Existing or planned EMs tend to be portrayed as concrete ‘implementations’ of abstract environmental market ‘principles’. Thus, it seems perfectly natural to say the EU-ETS ‘works on the “cap and trade” principle’ (European Commission 2013, p. 2) or that one examines ‘the potential use of habitat banking in the EU as an economic instrument for biodiversity protection’ (Eftec 2010, p. 1). Here, we exemplify instances in the evolution of two types of EMs, emissions trading and biodiversity banking2 to argue that the relation and order between EMs as ‘principles’ and as ‘practices’ should not be viewed ‘natural’, but rather as a contingently assembled scale with particular political effects. The US emissions trading program (US-ETP), developed in the 1970s and 1980s, is typically construed as ‘the first real world implementation’ of the ‘economic theory of emission markets’. However, this link was not obvious but the result of politics of scale production, which we investigate here. Historically, the US-ETP was not initially intended to be an implementation of this theory, and it did not look much like the markets imagined in the abstract models. We show that it required discursive intervention on the side of analysts to ‘capture’ this program as a test case for the theory (cf. Lane 2012, Simons and Voß, forthcoming, Voß 2007). Materially, such capturing took place mainly in a series of producing and relating to each other of heterogeneous documents, 190 195 200 205 6 A. Simons et al. academic articles and books, think tank reports, but also policy papers. These efforts produced a scale of theory and practice of EMs along which actors can do politics of ‘designing’ and ‘implementing’ EMs. Tietenberg’s (1985) book Emissions Trading, an exercise in reforming pollution policy, which is widely considered as the most comprehensive evaluation of the US-ETP, provides a straightforward example. Looking for ‘some notion of an optimal mechanism for allocating control responsibility’, which he could use as a ‘benchmark against which the existing system can be measured’, Tietenberg argues it was ‘well known in the economics literature’ that ‘the mechanism that is most closely related to the emissions trading program is the transferable discharge permit … market’ (p. 14). From this, he concludes, ‘the large amount of analysis which has been directed toward the former [the literature] can be used profitably to understand, evaluate, and create an agenda for reform of the latter [the market]’ (p. 14). While the creation of this link was surely not self-evident, it had political effects. Lane (2012, p. 597), for example, argues that it allowed ‘the validation of the programme on efficiency grounds, in spite of its apparent inefficiency in comparison to theoretical expectations’. And Voß points out how through making this link ‘a proof-of-principle became established for the working of emission markets, even [though] actual performance of the initial configuration remained behind expectations’ (2007, p. 333). Creating initial links between principles and practice is just the beginning. To work such links must be re-articulated over and over again. They gain strength in the process of assembling whole collections, or ‘archives’, of ‘implementation cases’, which can then be evaluated and sorted according to criteria such as success and failure or the different lessons to be learned from each case. The second edition of Tietenberg’s book is called Emissions Trading. Principles and Practice. The author stresses ‘the culmination of more than 30 years of study about the role of tradable permit systems in environmental policy’ (Tietenberg 2006, p. ix) and lists and compares thirteen ‘real-world implementations’ of the (meanwhile improved) emissions trading ‘principles’. However, as in other cases, it is always a matter of choice what to compare with what, making this inevitably a matter of politics of scale production. When some comparisons appear to be more straightforward than others, this is not a matter of the inherent and natural comparability of the things but an expression of the degree to which efforts to make them comparable were successful and managed to stabilise a scale on which the comparison is performed. We identify this especially in the case of biodiversity banking, in which analysts have only recently began to capture and compare a number of policy programmes, which developed largely independently of each other in different places around the world (Simons 2014, 2011). A publicly funded German study, for example, tried to ‘identify and compare compensation approaches taken with respect to impacts on biological diversity in selected countries from four different continents’ (Darbi et al. 2009, p. 16). Evoking questions of national interest, the study highlights the German approach to nature and landscape protection as a shining 210 215 220 225 230 235 240 245 Environmental Politics 7 exemplar of how comprehensive and effective compensation can look like. Note that this study puts the focus on compensation, not on EMs, as the organising principle of case comparison. The study mentions the possibility of regulating compensation through EMs only as one possibility among others, listing US Wetland Banking and a number of smaller Australian schemes, but not the German mitigation approach, as existing market exemplars. We find almost the opposite framing in a recent overview report by a leading US platform concerned with spreading commercial biodiversity markets (Madsen et al. 2010). While the main title of this report is State of Biodiversity Markets, its subtitle reads Offset and Compensation Programs Worldwide, suggesting that offset and compensation programmes are subcategories of biodiversity markets. In the methods section, the reader is told that ‘[m]any programs, products, and activities have been categorised under the term “biodiversity markets”, admittedly stretching “markets” beyond the economic definition’ (p. 1). This allows the authors of this study to lists all sorts of policy programmes from around the world as exemplars of biodiversity markets, including the German approach. Though the authors emphasise that the latter is ‘[a]t present … not a fully functioning market’, the reader is assured that ‘reforms, and the recent involvement of private agents in the compensation pools process, suggest that biodiversity compensation practices in Germany may develop into more market-based systems in the near future’ (p. 39). We argue that to understand how ‘theories’ and ‘empirical cases’ of markets exist as two different but interconnected domains, we need to study the politics of scale production that establish these domains. The analysis further shows how the material-semiotic practices that bring ‘principles’ and ‘practices’ into domaining scalar relations establish magnitudinal linkages between distant (and maybe otherwise unconnected) policymaking sites. This allows actors to engage in politics of scales use. Policy programmes and abstract principle, such as ‘efficient environmental markets’, are related to each other in ongoing policymaking processes to advocate the implementation of certain designs against others and to explain the success or failure of their implementation. This orders options available to policymakers as well as their past choices. The ways in which ‘principles’ and ‘practices’ are brought into relation have an impact on the environmental policy toolkit and on how actors come to think about policy tools (Simons 2014). Experts tend to represent these processes as purely technical, almost logical, operation, and thus contribute to the depoliticisation of policy instruments (Lascoumes and LeGales 2007). We show the contrary; these processes are political as they lead to inclusion and exclusion of policy options. Moreover, the production of scales along which policy tools are ordered in relation to ‘principles’ and ‘practices’ is a precondition for mobilising policy (Simons 2014). However, the possibilities and limits of establishing relations in policymaking processes is a problem of magnitude (e.g. how ‘far’ can models travel?) and remains an empirical question for future research. 250 255 260 265 270 275 280 285 290 8 A. Simons et al. Ordering EMs as described above thus configures environmental action. Scales are first produced, involving politics of scale production, and second 295 employed by actors in politics of scales use, to either ‘zoom out’ into the abstract ‘principles’ of EMs or ‘zoom in’ on various pasts, ongoing, or planned ‘practices’ or ‘implementations’ of these principles. This particular way of scaling EMs, both in terms of domaining and magnitude, makes it possible, inter alia, to relate distant policymaking sites to the same prescriptions for orienting political 300 practice. Consequently, this allows for the enactment of policies as ‘experiments’ or as tested models, as locally specific or universal policy solutions and to coordinate them at greater distances. Our approach to scale-making and its attention to the material-semiotic practices (documents, citations, etc.) employed to perform such scales is thus useful in analysing the politics through which 305 policies spread and complements existing literature on this issue (Simons and Voß, forthcoming, Peck and Theodore 2010, Voß 2007). Study 2: Performing ‘regions’ In our second study, we attend to the politics of performing ‘regions’ that were involved in ‘scaling up’ the EU-ETS in 2008. We focus on a controversy that developed around two competing scales of Europe, one pushed by the EU Commission and its experts, the other by the Polish government and its experts. Both parties in this controversy tried to support their claims by enrolling econometric models, and the ways in which they mutually attacked each other’s models reveal both the materiality of scale-making as well as the politics of production and use. At first sight, this study concerns a classical conflict of interest. On one side, the EU Commission, seeing itself as global innovator for climate-change mitigation policies, wanted to improve the working of its key policy tool, the EU-ETS. During the first trading period (2005–2007), in which the allocation of carbon allowances was in the hands of member states, a massive over-allocation had led to collapse of allowance prices, triggering fierce debates about EU-ETS’s functionality. As a reaction, in 2008, the Commission proposed an EU-wide cap for carbon allowances and an auction-based allocation mechanism for the power sector. On the other side of the conflict, Polish government and industry actors strongly opposed the proposal. Poland had the highest share of coal in electricity generation of all new member states; they therefore feared an increase in production costs and an explosion of energy prices under the proposed rules. However, more than a conflict of interest is at stake here. The different parties engaged in politics of both scale production and use, backed up by and inscribed in econometric models. The EU Commission based its proposal on an official Impact Assessment conducted by experts at the E3MLab at the National Technical University in Athens (European Commission 2008). Using PRIMES – an econometric model to simulate EU energy markets – E3MLab experts stated in the assessment report that ‘the average increase in electricity prices’ for all 310 315 320 325 330 335 Environmental Politics 9 European Union member states, consequence of the proposed regulation, would be around 22%. Polish actors questioned the point of producing such a figure and became interested in the rationale behind it. Their reaction was fuelled by fear that the ‘average increase in electricity prices’ concealed the extreme impact of the new 340 ETS on electricity prices in Poland, which they assumed would be much higher. They also inquired into the scalar assumptions on which production of this figure’s production relied. The initial inquiry led them to the PRIMES model, which in their view rested on the unrealistic assumption of magnifying electricity markets as interconnected across the whole the EU to conceal much of the EU’s 345 economic and infrastructural diversity. Interviewed, a representative of the Polish industries explained this rather ‘technical’ issue: All would be fine and we could speak of an ‘average EU’ if a European electricity market existed. But there is no EU-wide electricity market. It doesn’t exist at the least because of the lack of technical solutions that would allow transfer of green electricity throughout the EU. I don’t even want to mention the price of such electricity. In September 2008, Polish experts from the EnergSys consultancy produced their own study of the impact of the new EU-ETS rules on the Polish economy, titled Raport 2030 (PKEE and EnergSys 2008). By producing a detailed analysis of the ETS impact on the national economy, they interfered with the scalar assumption of the Impact Assessment. In Report 2030, the scale of economic calculations was not the EU as a connected market but each national economy as a fairly isolated electricity market. In other words, the report proposed to domain electricity markets and thus also the impact assessment of the new EU-ETS within national borders. The EnergSys experts calculated the energy price increases for Poland; this revealed the ‘extreme figure’ concealed under the ‘average figure’ (60% increase in electricity prices for Poland and 22% average increase in electricity prices in the whole EU). Yet the Polish experts wanted to make a further point. They did not only want to ‘reveal’ what was hidden behind the statistic operation of ‘taking the average’; they also wanted to challenge the assumption that such an average had any grounding in the reality of the European electricity market. They argued this market would still be fairly disconnected and technologically diverse, and it still made sense to analyse this diversity on national scales. And if this all were true, contended the Polish experts, then the ‘up-scaling’ ETS to the European level – the proposal of having the same allocation rules for all power producers in the EU – would result in diverse economic consequences across national economies, and thus was ‘unfair’ in terms of European ‘solidarity’ and ‘levelling’ chances. Arguably, the Polish counter expertise was not fully reviewed. After a series of exchanges between the Polish experts and the Commission, the latter simply opted out of the alternative scalar reality presented in Report 2030 by defining 350 355 360 365 370 375 10 A. Simons et al. the PRIMES results as better facts. During a meeting in September 2009, where the Polish experts presented their analysis to Matthias Ruete, then General Director of DG TREN, the latter concluded the Polish results were ‘shocking’ 380 and promised an immediate review (Green Effort Group 2008, p. 1). But instead of doing so, Ruete closed the debate with a general defence of PRIMES and an indirect attack on the appropriateness of the Polish model. In an email exchange with the Polish experts, which followed the September meeting, Ruete wrote: Complex modelling usually brings some variations in prognosis. The Commission is however convinced about the appropriateness of the PRIMES model for its policy proposals and scenarios. The model has been tested and improved over the last years, which gave very good results. Member States’ experts took part in making prognosis with the PRIMES model by providing the Commission with feedback about the assumptions and results of the model, especially with regard to particular Member States. Such comments were included in the consequent usage of the model while at the same time a harmonized approach was ensured for modelling at the EU level, such as coherent assumptions. (Ruete, in Żmijewski 2008, our translation). 385 Rather than discussing the concrete problematization by the Polish actors of PRIMES and its scalar assumptions, this email defends PRIMES on general grounds. It refers to the past successes of the PRIMES model to legitimate its present and future use. We may read this email as a scalar political threat: ‘Look at our actor–network and how stable it is! You have no chance in attacking it!’ This way, the EU refused to participate in the actor–network and scalar reality of Report 2030, in a sense by banning it to another domain of ‘local’, and thus not universally useful science. By not relating to this report, the Commission refused to participate in the production of the report’s ontic status as a European piece of expertise. The report remained ‘Polish’, and thus ‘local’, a victim of scalar politics of depoliticisation. Eventually, the new EU-ETS Directive was revised to account for different impacts on different European economies. Yet this has been achieved in a complex process of lobbying and political negotiations (Lis 2012). Analytically, we stress that with the PRIMES model – as a powerful inscription device – the Commission achieved magnification of electricity markets as ‘European’. This rendered the new proposal of the EU-ETS Directive amenable at the European scale. Eventually, the EU-ETS could be ‘scaled up’, but this move involved the enactment of the European scale itself, and its stabilisation in an actor–network around the PRIMES model. Further, this move involved the bracketing out of alternative scalar realities, such as that offered in the report of the Polish experts. ‘Up-scaling’ of the EU-ETS can therefore be understood as political, controversial, and mediated by devices, which become powerful through practiced relations amongst actors. Investigating this case, we identify significant and contested shifts in the politics of scale production and scale use. Politics of 395 390 400 405 410 415 420 Environmental Politics 11 scale production involved practices of magnification of electricity markets as interconnected across the EU (Impact Assessment with the use of the PRIMES model) versus domaining electricity markets within national borders (Report 2030). Politics of scale use involved negotiations of different scales for the reform of the EU-ETS, inclusion of the EU scales over the national scale, and 425 bracketing out the debate of economic effects of the new EU-ETS on national economies. Study 3: Interweaving scales of emissions with authority and accountability Finally, we investigate carbon accounting in a Fortune 50 company, proposing multiple scale-making practices to be interwoven. More precisely, carbon accounting practices relate to and effect collateral organisational and social orders. Carbon markets depend on the availability of emissions; emitters need to enable themselves to provide markets with emissions, usually by means of some form of carbon accounting. Prescriptive texts on how carbon accounting supposedly remain silent on how organisations practically scale up their carbon accounting systems to include a ‘complete’ organisation (Burritt et al. 2011). Using ethnographic observations from a company, GFQ (pseudonymous), we show how the practical work of determining the scale of emissions matters (cf. Lippert 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011). Key for carbon accountants is performing carbon emissions as readable. They do this usually by using proxies. Unfortunately, proxies are often not available to cover the entire organisation. In GFQ, this meant when the company wanted to know, for example, the corporation’s electricity consumption, subsidiaries were to deliver their consumption ‘facts’. Resulting numbers would ideally be multiplied with emission conversion factors resulting in emission facts. Yet the complete multinational organisation was structured too complicated to encompass all the subsidiaries. Therefore, GFQ defined: including the largest subsidiaries would suffice. Extrapolations were carried out to cover those emissions not included in the data-collection system. For the company as well as for its stakeholders, assessing the scale of the emissions fact’s quality was, therefore, very much linked to the scale of coverage: how much of the organisation’s emissions were covered by the result? The organisation had defined a coverage target (85%).3 However, the multinational did not rely only on one material that they linked to emissions but many: for example, GFQ accountants attempted to make readable those emissions related to travel or to energy usage. Data for these indicators were made available by means of problematic translation and classification techniques (Lippert 2012), resulting in differently covered indicators. Consequently, GFQ was practically handling not one coverage fact but several. Within each subsidiary, several environmental indicators were attended to. The engagement with the availability of specific coverage facts linked to each ‘key performance indicator’ illustrates our argument. Consider three 430 435 440 445 450 455 460 12 A. Simons et al. interrelated meetings. First, chief carbon accountant, Frederik, was discussing coverage facts with GFQ’s head of sustainability affairs, Victoria. This related accountability to technical questions. Second, they sought to develop an answer 465 to these questions, unsuccessfully so. Finally, we follow the environmental managers into a meeting with Bill who was working for GFQ’s data strategy unit, DataOffice, and supported in ‘innovating’ carbon accounting. [1] Frederik said the individual key performance indicators’ coverages are different: in the account ‘Travel’, we got 76.5%, in ‘Energy’ 63%. Often, they are highest for ‘Travel’. Victoria asked how he deals with this. Frederik: he uses the single highest coverage number reported by a subsidiary as the coverage number of the total subsidiary. Victoria enquired: is this clarified in the environmental accounting standard? Frederik: no. Victoria: then this is Frederik ‘out of control’. I will talk to Frank, our auditor and DataOffice. After that, we will form an opinion. She also briefly considered involving their partner NGO, a global environmental conversation player, yet swiftly concluded: we will skip the NGO. [2] Frederik named two options to calculate relative figures: 84% coverage employees when extrapolated, 77% are reported. He then added information about the numbers. The 84% figure is related to 11,430 employees, the total headcount of the subsidiaries, which are part of the environmental management system. The 77% figure refers to the reference figures, adding up to 9800 employees. He explained: the target was 85% in fall 2008. Victoria: we really cannot suggest that we have an increase of 10%. Frederik replied: we are always talking about different things ... One has to know where to draw the line. [3] Victoria: What does DataOffice think about Frederik having a maximum coverage of 77%? Bill: What does maximum performance indicator mean? Frederik repeated his earlier account. Bill: So we have calculated too euphemistically because we did not use the average performance indicator. Victoria: the auditor did not complain; we can come up with 84% or 77%. Victoria and Frederik suggested staying with the 77%. Bill replied: this is a psychological effect too; we could say we reach 84% with the new project. 470 475 480 485 490 Interpreting this sequence, we identify three ways of how scales are contingently brought into reality, illustrating politics of scale production and use. First, we saw that despite sophisticated accounting techniques, data could only be brought 495 onto the accounting table to a limited and uncertain degree (76.5% vs. 63%). This can be understood as a practical effect of what actors call ‘collecting’ data (Lippert 2012). Within a subsidiary, bookkeepers would not always read off, say, electricity consumption data from meters ‘directly’. Sometimes there was no access to meters, for example in offices GFQ rented out at a flat rate. Then the 500 degree to which data covered electricity consumption was low. In comparison, data on travel distances were often gathered more centrally because subsidiaries used central digital booking systems covering travel. Thus, the materiality of data co-configured how the accounting system could be scaled up. As GFQ consisted of hundreds of subsidiaries, coverages varied. Frederik’s solution to this was 505 to employ the highest coverage fact(s) among the five coverages related to GFQ’s five environmental key performance indicators for a subsidiary as a Environmental Politics 13 representative of the complete coverage. Materially, this meant he copied the maximum coverage fact from the accounting fact sheets to a report on the coverage of the accounting system. Shortly after, Frederik explained how he could define quite different singular coverage facts (77% vs. 84%) for the complete multinational, depending on different assumptions. Both assumptions were acceptable, yet only one could win. Calculation wise, this constitutes a complicated reality of the scale of coverage. Victoria contested Frederik’s approach to reduce the complications of this scale. Considering further actors to legitimise or oppose Frederik’s approach constituted politics of scale production. She related to some of the key stakeholders and experts on how acceptable specific carbon accounting techniques would be: Frank (a PR specialist working closely with them), an auditing firm, GFQ’s data strategists, as well as GFQ’s NGO partner. Victoria, imagining all these actors, did not treat them equally but organised them by way of bringing into presence yet another scale: she differentiated the position of the NGO from others actors’ positions and concluded that it would be better if the NGO were not involved. Here, then, increasing coverage facts is interwoven with producing a scale of actors’ authority. Some actors’ perspectives were welcomed to inform scaling up of GFQ’s carbon accounting; other actors’ perspectives were excluded. Later, Frederik and Bill arrived at considerations that informed them about how acceptable specific algorithms of constructing coverage facts would be. Frederik framed the conclusion to his considerations with ‘one has to know where to draw the line’ and Bill with ‘this is a psychological effect as well. We could say that we reach the 84% with the new project’. Both related to audiences who would judge their practices. Subsequently, Bill signalled the willingness to accept the outcome of their practices could be made more likely by way of linking achievements of higher coverage facts with a cover story, a project to innovate carbon accounting. Both, thus, related to and therewith enacted scales of accountability. The scaling up of carbon accounting is clearly interwoven with strategic considerations of whether, vis-à-vis whom, carbon accounts could be justified. We find, in doing carbon emissions in the corporation, its actors had to operate at the intersection of multiple scales, which they imagined, produced, and brought actively into meetings for use. Carefully, they considered how to weave carbon to ‘improve’ carbon, enacting several scales to navigate uncertainties and complexities of carbon facts. Weaving the entities to be traded on EMs requires tinkering at a material level, calibrating, working with measurement devices, and working around those entities that elude being measured. To measure carbon, and magnify emission measurement, members interwove various kinds of scales (both domaining and magnifying), situated in the very moments in which carbon were imagined and discussed. The political effect of this particular configuration of interweaving scaling practices was that GFQ successfully produced an account of emissions that signalled that GFQ knew 510 515 520 525 530 535 540 545 550 14 A. Simons et al. its carbon emissions well. Yet, this depoliticisation of carbon lays in mundane weaving practices in offices, involving the presences and absences of measuring devices, and creative engagement with copying and changing data. In whatever way ‘market forces’ are to shape GFQ’s emission practices, the ontology of 555 emissions depends on these interwoven practices, which effect and presuppose not only so-called emissions but also collateral scales of authority and accountability. Conclusion and discussion We have approached scales as materially semiotically enacted ordering devices – systems of ordered distinctions, indexed by scaling marks – and investigated the political duality of scale-making in EMs in three studies. Producing scales in EMs is a political act of relating material-semiotic things: documents to policy instruments, policy instruments to governments, governments to simulation models, simulation models to companies, companies to emissions, emissions back to documents. The existence of scales presupposes their material production and use – with voice, documents, databases, and more. Thus, the marks that make up scales are not simply ‘ideational’. It is the interwoven enactment with and of material forms that shapes scales’ stability and allows scales to have effects. The particular power of our approach lies in attending to the political duality of scale-making. By engaging in politics of scale production and use, heterogeneous actors configure the worlds in which they and others perform. Scales constrain and enable particular ways of thinking and acting. In consequence, actors may take the scales for granted and stop inquiring into their specific configurations. Depending on their configuration, scales produce taken-forgranted orders populated by winners and losers. This is not only an important aspect for further research but also raises concerns of legitimacy. Who should have a say in scaling processes and how? In identifying the political duality of scale-making as an ongoing material-semiotic practice of scale production and use, our approach adds to and complements critical reflections of EMs and environmental politics. Future studies can utilise this approach to investigate, for example, the production of political economies or hegemonic orders as a result of the political duality of scale-making. The political duality of scale-making is about a distribution of socio-material capabilities. One of the consequences of scale-making, as paradoxical as it may sound, is the depoliticisation of scales. As Kaiser and Nikiforova (2008) and others note, the naturalisation and sedimentation of scalar norms is a common tactic of governmentality. Scalar realities can be depoliticised in two ways, either by hiding their status as enacted reality altogether or by rendering their enactment as a necessity to act without alternatives. Focussing on scale-making as a political practice thus helps to make visible some of the invisible – hence depoliticised – dimensions of environmental politics. 560 565 570 575 580 585 590 Environmental Politics 15 With Strathern (2004), we distinguished between scales as domaining and scales as magnification. This distinction was helpful in showing that different types of scales do different types of things. While scales of magnitude help to introduce quantitative relations among actants, as in emission rates (Study 3) or geopolitics distances (Study 2), scales as domaining help to juxtapose, include, or exclude actants, as in domains of ‘theory’ vs. ‘practice (Study 1) or in domains of authority (Study 2 and 3). Another implication is that ‘geographical’ scales are just one of many types of scales. We encountered geographical scales most clearly in the politics of scaling Europe in ways that make Europe amendable to particular ways of thinking and doing a carbon market (Study 2). In the other two studies, we encountered primarily non-geographical types of scales. The scalar infrastructure of ‘principles’ and ‘practices’ (Study 1), as well as the emission data coverage, accountability and authority scales (Study 3), order conceptual and social spaces as well as environmental entities themselves. However, while Strathern’s distinction is partially generative, we also need to offer a caveat. Any distinction also always constrains the analytical apparatus. Of course, the analysis offered above, quite evidently, performs (analytical and political) scales in and through the methods deployed. Besides (potentially over-)scaling the notion of scale itself, we measured up different theoretical approaches or schools against each other, and the three studies depend on keeping the term of comparison – the notion of ‘environmental markets’ – steady and proportional. One could question, for example, whether biodiversity banking schemes (Study 1) have anything to do with electricity markets (Study 2) or corporate carbon accounting (Study 3). Yet, such scale-making seems inevitable in always partial comparison, and it opens space for analytical and political rescaling. For changing scales amounts to ‘switching from one perspective on a phenomenon to another’ and for ‘the relativising effect of knowing other perspectives exist gives the observer a constant sense that anyone approach is only ever partial’ (Strathern 2004: p. xiv), transparency about scaling practices offers the possibility for rescaling by others. 595 600 605 610 615 620 Notes 1. 2. 3. This article was authored collaboratively. Intellectually, all authors contributed 625 equally. Alternative terms for ‘biodiversity’ banking/trading are ‘mitigation’, ‘compensation’, or ‘conservation’ banking/trading. Numbers are modified to ensure GFQ’s anonymity. References AQ1 Adger, W.N., Arnell N.W., and Tompkins E.L., 2005. Successful adaptation to climate change across scales. Global Environmental Change, 15 (2), 77–86. doi:10.1016/j. gloenvcha.2004.12.005 630 16 AQ3 AQ2 AQ4 AQ5 AQ6 AQ7 AQ8 A. Simons et al. Asdal, K., 2012. Contexts in action–and the future of the past in STS. 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