Ingmar Lippert CHAPTER 6: Corporate Carbon Footprinting as Techno-political Practice1 Attempting to tackle climate change with market solutions hinges on the existence of emissions. We know much about the politics of undoing emissions – via offsets (e.g. Böhm and Dabhi 2009). But where do emissions come from? How are they done? Carbon footprinting seems to be the simple answer. Is this merely a ‘technical’ matter? I explore how emissions come into being; carbon accounting emerges as techno-political practice, fraught with non-transparency. This chapter argues that ‘successful’ corporate carbon accounting practices efficiently and skilfully ignore significant political implications of the company's practical relation to climate change. ‘Successful’ in this case signifies what matters for the company to compete well in capitalist markets. By examining voluntary carbon accounting at a financial services corporation, I invite an engagement with how the technicality and politics of carbon interrelate in accounting. I ground my analysis in ethnographic fieldwork across 20 months in the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) unit at one of the 50 largest companies globally.2 Over this period, I supported the CSR unit’s management of their sustainability data, in exchange for overt and explicit research access to the CSR unit’s activities. Why does carbon accounting matter? Many governments are wedded to the idea that economic growth is the presupposition of any pragmatic policy. Recognising that modern economy causes environmental problems, the policy programme of ecological modernisation suggests greening capitalism as a way out. This policy advocates the establishment of markets in which environmental goods are to be traded. Fitting this general theory, carbon markets allow trading emission offsets; the theory suggests such offsets are effective in reducing emitters’ emissions: e.g. 5 tons CO2e – 1 ton CO2e offsets = 4 tons CO2e. Carbon accounting supposedly provides the foundation to make this theory work: this class of environmental accounting produces carbon Page 1 to be published in ISBN 9781611323337 Ingmar Lippert footprints. That is, carbon accounting renders emissions organisationally, economically and politically present. Examining voluntary carbon accounting is crucial to shedding light on the practical realities of environmental markets. To study carbon markets as neoliberal politics, we need to also understand how carbon accounting works in practice where the nation-state is least involved. Thus, I do not engage with the attempts by governments to command-control accounting; rather, the chapter studies how carbon accounting is played out in a voluntary setting. Yet, voluntary carbon accounting does not happen in isolation from society. The company engages with several actors and environmental accounting standards in its accounting; below we encounter, e.g., the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD). Precisely because of the company’s active relations to other organisations, the findings presented here are applicable beyond the particular case (see Lippert 2014). The practices analysed below are co-constituting global carbon reports; the practices involve interactions with multiple actors, including, e.g., the company’s peers, standards-setting organisations and brokers, who accept or ignore the company’s practices. Here is an analytical distinction crucial for this chapter: I differentiate between formal realities (in which standards are seen as implementable and effectively implemented) and situated realities (the practical goings-on of humans, their organisations, their technologies – which may involve and relate to, but are never determined by, formal realities). So, situated realities involve formal realities; but formal realities are characterised by an unobtainable imaginary. Formal realities (like a standard) are thought of as capable to determine other realities (e.g. emissions and reports thereof). The following three analytical stories show different types of undesired realities Page 2 to be published in ISBN 9781611323337 Ingmar Lippert and how they have been marginalised, deleted, or ignored within the situated practices of the carbon accounting apparatus. The first story attends to practices that report the company’s emissions to global carbon markets via a voluntary emissions disclosure ranking. The next traces the optimisation of the company’s accounting apparatus to reduce some of the technocratic tension, allowing us to see the re-alignment of accounting practices to ‘better’ exclude undesired relations. Finally, the third story delves into the globally extended voluntary carbon market (VCM), examining the shifting presence of the VCM Gold Standard for carbon offsets in the company’s offsetting discourse and practice, pointing to significant flaws in this market. [H1]An Analytic Distinction: Formal and Situated Realities This section contrasts two ways of studying organisational practice – one, by attending to formal realities and the other, by scrutinising situated realities and reality-making. To illustrate this contrast, I draw out a variety of practical social and political concerns in the midst of carbon accounting. I argue we need to raise questions about the who and the what that is included in carbon accounting and that which is excluded, about what counts. In an analytics that focuses on formal realities, one should ask how the company’s carbon accounting is defined. Along with my work contract for the company, I received additional documents, formally defining the company. Consider their ‘code of conduct’: this document linked the company to the hegemonic discourse of sustainable development and global institutions. ‘Through our initiatives for the UN Global Compact programme and the acknowledgement of the OECD Guidelines for multinational corporations we integrate sustainability and social responsibility into our business.’ This quote specifies what ‘sustainability’ and ‘social responsibility’ are for the company. The company considers its support for the UN framework and its references to the OECD as a practice that works to bring the vague terms ‘sustainability’ and ‘social Page 3 to be published in ISBN 9781611323337 Ingmar Lippert responsibility’ into corporate practices. This statement narrows down what the terms mean, i.e. some form of offering support by discursively linking the company to the UN and the OECD. Such a study of formal reality is quite limited; we are positioned in the hermeneutics of mere statements. More interestingly, on my first day of work, the company’s global sustainability manager pointed me to a document that specified the company’s environmental management system. Part of this specification was citing the code of conduct; at the same time this management document translated environmental management into carbon accounting; and this carbon accounting was presented as a standardised activity. (I) Formally, according to these specifications, the company conducted environmental management using the International Standardisation Organisation’s standard ISO 14001. This standard specifies so-called environmental management systems (and critical organisation studies problematise such systems as rational myths, Boiral 2007). (II) The company simultaneously claimed its carbon accounting to be standardised according to a voluntary environmental accounting standard, originally emerging in German multinational finance networks under the name VfU3. VfU provides, for instance, specific carbon conversion factors. The latter are needed to translate environmental data, e.g. consumption facts, into carbon emission equivalents (CO2e). To be at all reliable, these factors need to be clearly documented and stable. Here is the practical messiness that is interwoven with such formal reality. While publicly the company committed to VfU, less visibly it also mentioned the GHG Protocol, developed by the WBCSD that employs lower conversion factors, effectively reducing the company’s emissions on paper.4 (III) In addition, the company employed the Global Reporting Initiative’s methodologies for carbon accounting. These three standards did not completely cohere, prompting accountants to apply ‘pragmatic’ solutions. These standards were to define what to measure. Clear definitions were demanded. This Page 4 to be published in ISBN 9781611323337 Ingmar Lippert demands explicitness from the company about what it included in its measurements and what it excluded. It defined its emissions as caused by office operations (its consumption of electricity and other forms of energy, of water and paper; its business travelling and production of waste). Formally, therefore, all emissions that the company’s financial services enabled beyond just office operations did not matter. The company’s accounts, for example, neither identified the emissions enabled by financing of fossil fuel business nor did they recognise social problems and conflicts often related to fossil fuels. To assure shareholders and publics that the company’s carbon accounting was rigorous and environmentally legitimate, the company engaged in a partnership with two organisations, each amongst the biggest in their respective sectors: One partner was one of the world’s four biggest accounting firms. The other partner was one of the world’s top 5 environmental conservation NGOs (see Jepson 2005). For several million USD, the NGO got a seat at the corporate table while their well-known logo re-appeared in the company’s public relations materials. Studying formal realities shows that the company discursively engaged with climate change, reported emissions and was committed to various publics. Such engagements were societally translated and shifted through institutions and standards, generating output for rankings and indices that conjured up transparent carbon markets. Studying formal relations as practice yields a grounded understanding of how the company ignores concerns about practical and political realities. If we do not focus on the formal relations and engagements but on how carbon accountants work, how their accounts take shape and how they are transported and presented, then we move into an analytic space addressing a more ambivalent and situated politics of the ‘technical’. To sensitise the reader to this ambiguous form of the political co-constitution of carbon emissions I Page 5 to be published in ISBN 9781611323337 Ingmar Lippert offer stories from the margins of what is normally seen as mattering for carbon accounting. Let’s join one of the omnipresent ‘team meetings.’ We are presented with facts – appearing on slides, projected onto the wall using PowerPoint. Within the CSR department it was considered self-evident that one can separate content from design. This allowed the CSR experts, including the managers of emission facts, to organise their work by using a division of labour. The experts developed the contents for the slides and others would bring the content into shape. ‘Bringing into shape’ work was outsourced to a company called India Graphics. India Graphics allowed CSR staff positioned in the Global North to develop content all day and get Southern cheap labour to produce neatly designed slides overnight. Doing carbon accounting now needs to be considered as interwoven with uncertainties about the economic and labour realities that are co-constitutive of emission reports. At one occasion, one of the CSR workers actually questioned whether India Graphics had been checked in terms of ‘child labour.’ This issue was soon translated into the less threatening and workable category of ‘reputational risk.’ The risk was managed by asking India Graphics to formally declare that they did not employ child labour. For such ambivalent economic realities we do not have to shift from the headquarters (HQ) in the North to the South. Consider outdated and useless paper copies. We find them in the trash. Performing neatly the scripted role of a nameless, often smiling and always friendly office cleaner, it were nearly always female migrant workers who entered the offices of the CSR unit every morning and got rid of the waste that the white-collar workers produced. The production and reproduction of social and economic inequality is not merely found by looking at realities in the South but also in the North’s centers. If we engage with the neat offices that produce ‘orderly’ emissions then we identify the labour relations that sustain the firmness of capitalism. To sum up, the second analytical category indicates an ambivalent and situated politics: the Page 6 to be published in ISBN 9781611323337 Ingmar Lippert every-day doing of emissions and its implicated engagements with political-economic realities and imaginaries revolving around carbon. I sketched political concerns (externalities, transparency concerns, outsourcing, gender, migration) that are considered in simplistic accounts of accounting as merely ‘technical matter’. Studying situated politics allows rendering present how particular societal realities matter, even though they are not typically assumed to shape carbon. Differentiating formal relations from situated realities of practical action is helpful to analyse corporate carbon accounting’s own logics. In its own theorising, accounting is a matter of implementing management and accounting standards correctly. To govern emissions and assure stakeholders that emissions are correctly accounted for, the company formally engages with rating agencies, auditors and NGOs. The logic of organisational practice, however, is situated in the midst of societal and political relations. Thus, I identify politics as co-constituting emissions. For any accounting step, we can raise questions about in- and exclusion. [H1]Reporting Emissions Once the company’s carbon accountants had brought together all the environmental data – of energy, water paper consumption, of travel and waste services – from across the globally distributed subsidiaries, they were able to assemble that data and extrapolate it, resulting in the global carbon footprint. Elsewhere, I detailed the work processes and politics of assembling carbon ‘data’ (see note 2). Here, I retrace how the company’s carbon footprint was reported to one of the world’s largest carbon ranking organisations. I illustrate the quality of political, tactical and moral decision-making involved in the translation from a spreadsheet into a reporting form for the ranking. I argue that reporting is not a transparent and neutral activity. Let me introduce Frederik (a pseudonym). He was the company’s top carbon accountant. Page 7 to be published in ISBN 9781611323337 Ingmar Lippert As part of my work, I assisted him in putting together the response to the questionnaire from the ranking. Frederik made clear that copying answers from the company’s previous year’s response was an apt approach to fill out the current questionnaire, because the previous answer had already been authorised. Based on the prior formulations, he could simply check for mostly quantitative changes. This constituted a strategy of not having to consider new emissions categories. On the categories themselves, he explained that he liked to inscribe the same categories as those in the VfU standard (see first section) into the company’s response. By this, he explained, he can produce ‘coherency’. This is significant for carbon reports: That they cohere with other organisations’ reports and standards is not simply given by nature, but rather means that coherence is achieved and brought into existence, serving a strategy to not irritate audiences. Another type of data practice is related to the precision of numbers. By shaping how and whether numbers appeared, Frederik managed to guide the reader’s attention. Here are two interesting moments. He mentioned he liked omitting decimal numbers. For him these constituted nonsense: ‘Decimal numbers evoke accuracy. This we do not possess.’ Here he related to some numbers in a draft of the response, which were the product of calculations resulting in numbers with decimals. While the decimals may have been technically correct, he decided that the company should not claim to be accurate in its measurements. Particular to this moment, he wanted to steer how the response would be interpreted. If the audience had the impression that the company produces accurate data, then this would set the standard by which its accounting would be measured. And he did not want to allow publics to set such a standard. On a different occasion he questioned whether the company should offer a number at all. This concerned the company’s own quantification of the quality of its environmental data. According to the company’s data quality review, much of the environmental data was guessed or Page 8 to be published in ISBN 9781611323337 Ingmar Lippert produced through some form of calculation (based on contingent assumptions) that resulted in a (low) data quality score number. Frederik did not want to have the number published. Instead, he made clear that all the problems of data quality should be understood as resulting from some individuals’ incompetence, while the overall carbon accounting system worked fine. When I talked with the company’s liaison person at the ranking agency, I learned the latter were pleased with the data they got from companies; most of the data worked for them. At the same they did not ‘verify’ whether the data submitted was correct. They accepted companies’ data as it came in. He also shared that in cases of mistakes, they are ‘quick’ to get companies to correct the data. I asked how often corrections took place. He replied: there is lots of checking before companies press ‘submit’ and about 2-3% of the data needed to be corrected. This section illustrates the relevance of even the smallest judgements and assumptions in carbon accounting. Carbon accounts are not facts of nature but it is people who produce them. Translating data matters because it constitutes the interpretation and transformation of data into forms, which are accessible to larger audiences. Such practices – tactically conjuring up coherency, managing audiences’ impressions of accuracy, invoking naïve trust in companies’ data – do partially redistribute responsibilities amongst the involved actors and audiences as well as partially impossibilise actors to responsibly engage with emissions (e.g. if data quality issues are hidden and defined away). And no form or configuration of such translation can be neutral. The human is always part of it. The relevant question is then how, rather than whether, social, political, economic and organisational tactics shape the emissions. Asking how emissions are shaped, I move on to a significant recognition by the company. They noted that their accounting apparatus was not working optimally; it had to be improved. [H1]Optimising Accounting Page 9 to be published in ISBN 9781611323337 Ingmar Lippert Thus, the company approached ‘optimising’ their carbon accounting. Why? The top sustainability managers of the company had gotten the impression that too much of their resources were spent on engaging with technicalities of carbon accounting. In consequence, they initiated a process to ‘optimise’ ‘data collection’: a) rendering it more ‘certain’ and b) ‘trimming’ it (i.e. streamlining data gathering and analyses processes). I briefly review four tensions the company experienced before I turn to their ‘solution’. The four tensions map onto the ideal(ised) world of carbon accountants: environmental information about consumption of services and resources are readily available, allowing 1) skilled bookkeepers to 2) ‘collect’ this data, and 3) enter it into a central database, where it would be multiplied with appropriate conversion factors and 4) summed up in resulting emissions and, voilà, the carbon footprint would appear. First, the environmental bookkeeping role was assigned to whoever was somehow seen as available (such as facility managers). This meant that whoever acted as bookkeeper asked the others (e.g. in the financial accounting department or the subsidiary’s travel experts) for the invoices on, say, energy consumption or for reports on how many miles or kilometres have been crossed in the prior year. Second, however, in the practical work of subsidiaries’ staff problems abounded. Problems included the absence of data and invoices. Consider countries where offices are rented at a flat rate, thus not documenting consumption as such. Or consider places where waste management is firmly in the hands of an informal economy, no invoices. Another class of problems revolved around cases in which bookkeepers could access invoices but could not identify sufficient environmental data (printed onto the invoice). So, financial information was provided but no environmental data. ‘Data collection’ emerges as data enactment (Lippert, 2015). Some of this enactPage 10 to be published in ISBN 9781611323337 Ingmar Lippert ment was standardised; but no standard could ever foresee all eventualities. Finally, there were always people involved in copying data. ‘Copy and paste’, in practice, is not straightforward. Sometimes figures are missing, the decimal point is wrongly set, the unit or the category failed. This, third, resulted in difficulties with submitting data: bookkeepers entered all kinds of ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’ data. People at the company head quarters (HQ) were aware of many of the complexities of ‘sourcing’ ‘data’. Yet, HQ staff could not directly solve the problems. They checked subsidiaries’ data; when large deviations (compared to the prior year) were found, HQ people demanded that the subsidiary staff explain. HQ staff developed draft environmental balance sheets, indicating the carbon footprint resulting from the data entered by the subsidiary. Fourth, these drafts were offered to the subsidiary, making visible the results of the data subsidiary bookkeepers had entered. Thus, data was checked, improved, corrected, often in several rounds of loops, back and forth between HQ and subsidiary. As a result, many circulating versions of footprints existed. Today’s footprint result was tomorrow’s footprint version’s draft. It was not rare that even data entered years back were found to be ‘wrong’. Consequently the carbon footprint was shifting and changing. Even baseline data was ‘corrected’, achieving much more favourable emission reductions: if baseline emissions are increased while current emissions stay stable, then current emissions are relatively less high (Lippert 2013, 227–30). Eventually, the company assembled a project team to review and ‘optimise’ carbon accounting. A key artefact of their work was a business process model that reconstructed core intricacies of environmental data work. Their model spanned many pages of paper; thus, the model-as-document was unwieldy. They then approached accounting by targeting both the sourcing of data and the processes by which data was processed, working with the process model and streamlining it in two ways. First, they planned to exclude the diverse bookkeepers, to substitute Page 11 to be published in ISBN 9781611323337 Ingmar Lippert their data sourcing with one clear moment: whenever a financial clerk would enter data on the costs for, say, energy consumption, into the financial accounting system, then the system should prompt them to also enter the corresponding environmental data (e.g. kWh). This understanding of direct data entry allowed the team to presume that loops of data review and corrections would cease. The second difference was that this made them simplify the prospective data flows. In effect, the new data flows and practices were fit into a new business process model that was clearly defined, reducing complexity to two pages of paper. Here, then, was the solution: a streamlined carbon accounting plan. This description of the ‘solution’ misses out much of the optimisation team’s work. A key achievement was to a) review the details in the ‘old’ processes and b) imagine a simplification. The latter achieved identifying data practices they could all agree on as promising to work well. In parallel they identified how some of their key assumptions were unlikely to hold. They recognised that their ‘solution’ would not work for all the cases where environmental data (for whatever reason) was simply not available. They also noted that the financial clerks could not be expected to care about the environmental data, to check whether the invoices provided realistic environmental data or whether they entered it correctly. Instead, entering environmental data would simply be an additional task for the clerks. This did not promise high quality environmental data. If we recognise that the team members’ voices pointed to the built-in problems of the ‘solution’ we can recast the collective silencing and ignorance of these voices as a significant organisational achievement. I propose their achievement as precisely performing ‘good’ management, data and, hence, environmental governance. The notion ‘good’, here, points to making the performance of ‘management’ possible. For if the team members had actually engaged with the complexities then they would have risked not coming up with the solution, a clear-cut and effiPage 12 to be published in ISBN 9781611323337 Ingmar Lippert cient carbon accounting apparatus. [H1]Golden Offsets The presentation of the politics, certainties and uncertainties that co-constitute emissions enables us to take a next step and enquire into the textual politics of how the voluntary carbon market reduces emissions. The company was pressed by their NGO partner to only use emission offsets that are certified by the Gold Standard – which is a voluntary standard, described as offering carbon offsets of ‘premium value’ at a ‘premium price’ (Bumpus and Liverman 2008, 146). When I first encountered a Gold Standard credit certificate that the company had bought for offsetting, I got excited. I would leave the HQ office and trace how the company’s footprint connected to an offsetting project in the Global South. I would study how ‘my’ company was related to offsets. Alas, this quest failed. And this failure offers an informative moment, resulting in three puzzlements I use to question the workings of voluntary standards and markets. A first moment of puzzlement occurred when I attended to the certificate’s precise formulation. The certificate was formulated to uniquely fit the purpose of offsetting a particular component of corporate emissions – the emissions of several subsidiaries’ car fleets. Here is an anonymous, translated transcript of the certificate’s key formulation. It [ext]guarantees that all the [emissions of greenhouse gases] caused by the [car fleet] in the year 2008, summing up to 1,550 tonnes CO2-equivalents, have been offset by means of additional investment in the high quality Gold Standard climate change project Wind power plant in Maharashtra in India. (Lippert 2013, 526; emphasis in original certificate)[end ext] The closing component of the main clause makes several claims. It says emissions have been offset. It details where the offset took place (in a wind power plant in Maharashtra) and qualifies the offsetting project as certified by the Gold Standard. My first puzzlement focuses on Page 13 to be published in ISBN 9781611323337 Ingmar Lippert the means of offsetting. The statement says that the offset was realised ‘by means of additional investment.’ This (re)specified the claim to assert that the offset was achieved by channelling some investment into the project. The quality or quantity of this investment was not explicated. Taking this formulation seriously means that maybe the monetary investment was limited (even just one cent would qualify), but it would also allow for a non-monetary investment. Being well puzzled and not having been able to identify any documents that would answer my questions, I started to contact people. I sent inquiries to the carbon broker as well as to the Gold Standard HQ. Neither replied. However, a change occurred. Both broker and the company I studied requalified their claim. They now stopped claiming that the project was a Gold Standard project, instead claiming a certificate ‘in accordance’ with the standard. Once in 2014 I briefly got hold of a Gold Standard representative and asked him (in person and by email) to update me on this case. A pattern emerged: (still, in 2015) nobody has written to me to explain this case, and none of the organisations officially replied to me. An informal link between me and another Gold Standard informant, however, clarified: they did not officially know about any such project. Interestingly, the certificate did not contain a carbon registry number. I wonder: What does it mean if VCM players are not ready to explain their methods? Leaving the field, I pursued some of these questions with a former HQ carbon accountant. She redirected my analysis. I had shared with her the analytical distinction between formal and situated realities. What she told me is simple and straightforward. She explained the puzzlement by calling the project ‘money laundering’. According to her, the carbon credits were simply bought from ‘our’ company’s carbon traders. Thus, in her story, the carbon accountants achieved offsetting by buying emission credits from a broker who, respectively, bought the credits from the financial services company itself—constituting a circular relation. I have no means to ascerPage 14 to be published in ISBN 9781611323337 Ingmar Lippert tain the ‘truth’ of her explanation (I see no reason to doubt her story). What are we left with? The credits are conjured up out of vague ‘investments’ in an unspecified (if at all existing) wind power project, without a registry number and in a business relation that stifles traceability. The story helps to foreground the significance of engaging with the situated realities of carbon, both of emissions and their alleged offsets. Such situated realities can involve (more or less successfully) staging formal realities. Opening up the puzzlements in this section links the carbon practices within the company to the textual and economic dynamics of carbon markets. Emission trading is not merely about the projects in the Global South. It is also about databases and certificates that are circulated in the North, even if they do not link to actual projects in the South. Performing the VCM may work well enough for players in the North without the necessity for them to stabilise a ‘highquality’ link to projects in the South. In the company, emission trading, and thus the VCM, is practiced as just another set of organisational and textual possibilities. Markets and the political are interwoven. [H1]Conclusion For a post-carbon economy to work, carbon needs to be ‘known.’ This does not only refer to carbon offsets but also to emissions themselves. This chapter engaged with the voluntary carbon accounting practices of a major multinational company, troubling how accounting knows emissions. I retraced how the company’s carbon accounting apparatus works to produce a reality of climate change in which political realities do not disturb carbon knowledge and, thus, the company. Given that the company was positioned as a major player in the international finance sector, with ties to other major financial players, such as the biggest accountancy firms, I conceptualise the corporate practices as well-aligned to profit-making, thus, capitalism. Three ethnoPage 15 to be published in ISBN 9781611323337 Ingmar Lippert graphic stories show how emissions are enacted such that accounting works more smoothly and more efficiently, thereby decreasing the involvement of disturbing realities. Reading these stories together helps to understand how capitalism performs carbon accounting while not engaging with related political problems at any level. With the case ‘reporting emissions’ I showed carbon information is produced to increase the appearance of coherent and good data practices while uncertainties are hidden. I propose that the enactment of such data helps the market to perform more smoothly, while disconnecting the market from the entities it supposedly represents. The case ‘optimising accounting’ shows how the accounting apparatus was reorganised to better exclude distributed actors who would care about environments and data practices. At the same time the optimisation results in systematically not engaging with data gaps and quality problems. These disconnects help the company to stage its carbon accounting as clear-cut, rendering carbon footprinting more efficient. The case ‘golden offsets’ shows how the presence of voluntary standards cannot ensure high quality emission realities. Carbon accounting is key to enabling carbon markets. To study carbon markets it is appropriate to scrutinise their socio-technical constitution, i.e. technocratic emission realities. This chapter finds corporate practices are (re)organised to render carbon accounting less disturbing, thus, aligning accounts of environmental impact to perform well in capitalism. [H1]References Böhm, Steffen and Siddhartha Dabhi, eds. 2009. Upsetting the Offset: The Political Economy of Carbon Markets. London: MayFly. Boiral, Olivier. 2007. Corporate Greening Through ISO 14001: A Rational Myth? Organization Science 18, 1:127–46. doi/10/d2t3tq Bumpus, Adam G. and Diana M. Liverman. 2008. Accumulation by Decarbonization and the Page 16 to be published in ISBN 9781611323337 Ingmar Lippert Governance of Carbon Offsets. Economic Geography 84, 2:127–55. doi/10/d76ws6 Jepson, Paul. 2005. Governance and accountability of environmental NGOs. Environmental Science & Policy, 8, 5:515–524. doi/10/cjznf3 Lippert, Ingmar. 2012. Carbon Classified? Unpacking Heterogeneous Relations Inscribed Into Corporate Carbon Emissions. Ephemera 12, 1/2:138–61. http://www.ephemeraweb.org/journal/12-1/12-1lippert.pdf. .--- 2013. Enacting Environments: An Ethnography of the Digitalisation and Naturalisation of Emissions. PhD thesis, Augsburg University. doi/10/6vh .--- 2014. Studying Reconfigurations of Discourse: Tracing the Stability and Materiality of ‘Sustainability/Carbon’. Journal for Discourse Studies 2, 1:32–54. .--- 2015. Environment as Datascape: Enacting Emission Realities in Corporate Carbon Accounting. Geoforum 66:126–35. doi/10/wx8 [H1] Endnotes Page 17 to be published in ISBN 9781611323337 1 I thank the informants in the company I studied, the editors of this book, Lydia Stiebitz and Rachel Douglas-Jones for critiques on drafts of the chapter. 2 This chapter partially re-analyses results of a study published elsewhere (Lippert 2013). The core of this analysis is positioned at an intersection of ethnomethodology and actor-network theory (Lippert 2014) and includes a systematic reconstruction of situated, material-semiotic data practices at corporate carbon accountants’ workplaces. Ethnographic observation resulted in fieldnotes of about 300 pages that guided an inductive qualitative analysis. The material re-analysed in this chapter sketches the relevant observations for the chapter’s argument. Complementary analyses have been conducted, e.g. problematising categorisation and classification practices (Lippert 2012) and reconceptualising environments as datascapes (Lippert 2015). The identity of the company is confidential. 3 VfU is the German abbreviation for the Association for Environmental Management and Sustainability in Financial Institutions. 4 To illustrate, consider a subsidiary reporting they conducted business travel with long-haul flights, crossing a distance of 365,387 km. With the WBCSD’s factor, this distance is translated into ≈65.8 t CO 2e; with VfU’s factor ≈119.2 t would have resulted. For a more detailed account, see Lippert (2013, 88–107).