The hidden costs of carbon commodification: emissions trading, political legitimacy and procedural justice

Abstract

A growing body of academic literature is devoted to the normative evaluation of rival governance architectures and policy mechanisms designed to mitigate the risks associated with global climate change. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) of 1992, the Kyoto Protocol to the UNFCCC of 1997 and the Copenhagen Accord ‘noted’ by the UNFCCC of 2009, have all been the subject of intense analysis in this literature. Typically, the emphasis of normative analyses of climate governance have focused on the environmental effectiveness, economic efficiency, and global distributive consequences of alternative climate architectures and policy mechanisms. A neglected line of evaluation, however, has been the performance of these climate architectures, and the policies they systematize, in terms of normative ideals whose meaning and significance cannot be fully captured in terms of the goal to improve environmental quality at least economic cost and with minimal worsening of existing global inequalities. Two such ideals are those of political legitimacy and procedural justice. This study explores the various ways in which one particularly important component of the emerging global climate architecture, greenhouse gas emissions trading, raises significant questions of political legitimacy and procedural justice. It argues that the well understood cost efficiency and environmental quality benefits conferred by emissions trading schemes come at the price of potentially corrosive effects for procedural justice and political legitimacy. The tensions that arise have special relevance to democratic theory and practice by virtue of the close association that political legitimacy and procedural justice have to the ideal of democracy. However, considerations of political legitimacy and procedural justice also raise questions of citizen and civil society participation, accountability and transparency that go far beyond their key role in discussions of democratic legitimacy or democratization.