From externality in economics to leakage in carbon markets: An anthropological approach to market making

Abstract

AbstractThis article aims to demonstrate how anthropological studies may contribute to the economic experimentation toward a “good” market, that is, a market always open to uncertainty and contestation by different stakeholders. Taking up the recent call to study “marketization,” this is an ethnographic study of on‐the‐ground practices in experimenting with the REDD+ carbon trading scheme and institutionalizing the REDD+ carbon markets. Focusing on a pilot REDD+ project in the Brazilian Amazon, this article engages the formulation of the technical concept of leakage both in the economic theories of externalities and in the challenging practice of monitoring and calculating leakage. In the economic conceptualization of externalities, leakages are but the new externalities generated by the process of making new markets to internalize the externalities of previous markets. Whereas current debates about carbon leakages are predominantly concerned with the limited capacity of existing technologies for leakage monitoring and calculation, I suggest rethinking the leakage issue in a different rationale: Insufficient leakage accounting is an inevitable result of a forever imperfect process of framing in marketization. This article is focused on leakages in carbon markets not only as the subject of my ethnographic inquiry but also as an entry point for my theoretical extrapolation, because leakages have the advantage of making visible the social–technological assemblages for marketization, exposing the unequal power relations between the various stakeholders and thus opening onto new modalities of market framing and economic theorization.