Technically political: The post-politics(?) of the New Zealand Emissions Trading Scheme

Abstract

Globally, the creation and implementation of climate change policies continues to be contested amongst politicians, international institutions, and civil society. Carbon markets, designed to incentivize greenhouse gas emission reductions, are one of the main climate mitigation approaches worldwide. Existing scholarship highlights how carbon markets provide fertile ground for research into the changing nature of environmental governance and political contestation. Swyngedouw locates carbon markets as part of broader “post-political” changes, which reduce alternative pathways through “depoliticisation”. MacKenzie, in contrast, argues that carbon markets are a form of “techno-politics” that provide new avenues for politically designed markets. This paper engages with and contributes to these scholarly debates by exploring the creation and operations of the New Zealand Emissions Trading Scheme between 2003 and 2016. We demonstrate how New Zealand policy-makers employed various discursive constructs that emphasized uncertainties (in climate science, in international climate policies, in markets) as a means to justify “urgent” and “exceptional” state interventions into the emissions trading scheme. These interventions emphasized the role of experts and the experimental nature of New Zealand's carbon market, and employed parliamentary processes that limited public participation. Such moments of state intervention in a nation with a strong history of neoliberal governance both reinforces and complicates existing scholarship about the “depoliticisation” of climate change and the role of the state in post-political neoliberal governance. It highlights the ways in which rendering climate change a technical challenge can translate into democratically-worrying moments of state-initiated but expert-led approaches to environmental governance.