Carbon bordering: The new logic of carbon governance?

Next Wednesday, the Sustainability Governance Group at MSC welcomes John Murray, Associate professor of Organizational Studies at Lund University. John will present his work-in-progress on carbon governance and, more specifically, carbon bordering. 

Previous research has shown how the management and measurement of emissions has been territorialized within nationally defined monitoring, reporting and verification regimes, largely established through international regulatory and techno-scientific negotiations. We argue that carbon emissions are in the midst of a new wave of bordering, a multifaceted and in many ways contradictory process of negotiating the relationship between the flow of emissions and the place of nation-states. The concept of “bordering” draws attention to the active and ongoing construction of territorial boundaries, including processes that erode territorial boundaries (debordering) or reinscribe them (rebordering). We argue that an emergent phenomenon that we term “carbon bordering”, exemplified by the EU carbon border adjustment mechanism, represents a shift in the logic of emissions reductions from treaty negotiations to market access through the use of customs and trade administrations to measure and commensurate the emissions embedded in imports. Second, this shift represents a de-territorialization of carbon regulation as rules in one jurisdiction increasingly take effect beyond borders.