Verification as Justification: Private Standard-Setting and Regulation in the Global Carbon Market.

Private regulation is a central part of global environmental governance. Ample studies have pointed at the marketization of environmental policy and the contemporary reliance on private actors to deliver environmental improvements. Through voluntary codes of conduct, corporations increasingly order nature-society relations in areas where governments do not. In this paper we examine private verification of greenhouse gas emission reductions as a political practice in global climate governance. Although the standard-setting practices of independent auditing companies shape the organisation of the global carbon market, they have been subject to surprisingly little scholarly attention. Our paper examines the role of third-party verification and validation in the regulated CDM market, where authority is delegated from states to private auditors through an accreditation process supervised by the CDM Executive Board. We contrast these state authorized practices with verification in the voluntary carbon market where, in the absence of state regulation, private actors produce the rules (codes and standards) for “good climate performance”. While there are clear differences between mandatory and voluntary verification, we argue that both types of practices epitomize “governing at a distance” and the prominence of private auditing firms as bearers of governmentality. The overall significance of verification in the global carbon market is the transformation of emission reductions (relative to a baseline) into credits that can be bought and sold. Hence, practices of verification enable both state regulated and voluntary “carbon offsetting” that justifies current emission levels in the industrialized world. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]