Be skeptical of their impact calculation---it’s framed in such a way to prop up developmental regime and the neoliberal governmentality

In this paper, I analyze the cost–benefit calculations of this project in order to examine why and how these “failed articulations” between the universal demands of capital and locally complex socio-natures occur. I do so by examining the relation between discourse and value in the production of a carbon offset commodity, where I treat the cost–benefit calculations of this project as discursive statements that enable the creation of value. Doing so, I make two central arguments. First, I argue that these calculations are situated within a wider discursive formation concerning indigenous bodies and their relation to agriculture, where indigenous agriculture can and should be improved in particular ways. This discursive formation allowed for the carbon offset project to emerge as a solution framed by a specific socio-spatial problematic, where the “problem” of indigenous agriculture is posed in ways that call forth the production of commodified agricultural spaces as the rational solution. I posit that carbon offsets emerged within a discursive formation where the “indigenous land manager” and “indigenous agriculture” are spoken about in ways where the two should be aligned in ways that maximize the economic efficiency of the former through the spatial optimization of the latter. This way of speaking about agriculture and indigenous peoples, in turn, gives rise to commodified spaces, such as carbon offsets, as the most desirable way to make such an alignment occur.

Second, I draw on Marxian value theory to understand why these calculations, as discursive statements, were able to open up some spaces (rastrojos) for commodified carbon while foreclosing on others (cacao agroforestry). I argue that due to the global climate regime within which this particular carbon offset is situated (ie the Kyoto Protocol), these calculations were necessary to establish an offset's use value. In this case, the usefulness of a spatially bound, carbon forestry offset ultimately derives from its ability to contribute to a globally coordinated management of the world's carbon cycle. This means that a carbon offset's use value is not found in its qualitative characteristics, but instead, is found in the quantitative representations of its spaces. Thus, the project's shift to rastrojos did not derive from calculations needed to make these spaces commensurable for exchange, but rather, the project's final form resulted from calculations that were needed for these spaces to achieve commensurability with a globally conceived carbon cycle. This is a discursive transformation that is necessary for offsets to become useful as commodities within the framework of the Kyoto Protocol. In short, I seek to explain this project's origins and trajectory through the relation between the local discursive formation that allows for these calculations about indigenous agriculture to be understood and taken seriously, and the global orientation of this commodity that required a process of valuation that ultimately altered the specific spaces that were available to be commodified.

My arguments in this paper are meant to help work through a problem that Noel Castree recently identified in geographic scholarship on neoliberalism and nature, where he points out the difficulty of drawing out generalizable principles from the specific case studies of the ongoing “neoliberalization” of the nonhuman world (see Castree 2008a:137–141). Castree himself tries to overcome this difficulty by relating this process to any number of “environmental fixes”—efforts by capital or the state to resolve fiscal, political, or accumulation contradictions through the implementation of market-based forms of environmental governance (Castree 2008a, 2008b). Doing so, Castree theorizes the proliferation of “neoliberal natures” as a global-scale phenomenon, where he seeks to answer the question: “Why are human interactions with the nonhuman world being ‘neoliberalised’across the globe?” (Castree 2008a:131, italics mine). In contrast, I inquire into how a neoliberal project comes to be desirable at a specific site, and point to the universal logics of capitalist value in order to explain the final form that a project ultimately takes.

Doing so, I draw on a wealth of critical research from development studies that has identified the emergence of “development” as a discursive and material project whose contours are constituted, in part, by the process of capital accumulation (eg Ferguson 1990; Gidwani 2008; Wainwright 2008). This is an ongoing process that is productive of development subjects, where “development” becomes a naturalized, and desired, goal for the diverse subjects that fall within the purview of liberal capitalism (Gidwani 2008). This critical approach has been broadly taken up by a number of scholars toward understanding “green development” projects as well, where they have shown how subjectivities become linked with the environment to produce environmental subjects whose interests concerning natural resource management become closely aligned with those of the state (eg Agrawal 2005; Birkenholtz 2009). Under this process not only are the subjects of development produced, but their insertion within processes of capital accumulation and the governance goals of the state means that an ongoing supply of various objects and sites of development are continually produced.

In this paper, I take the commodification of carbon to be a discursive process of development in which specific sites and objects enter into a field of intelligibility in a manner that allows for some ways of understanding them while foreclosing on others. Specifically, this is a process by which value is produced in the spaces of indigenous agriculture through its discursive attachment to carbon. While I broadly agree with the idea that the commodification of carbon can be read as a type of environmental fix, as Castree might suggest (Castree 2008a; see also Bumpus and Liverman 2008), I resist the idea that these spaces have come to be desirable as commodified spaces because of the extension of global-scale capitalist processes to local sites. Instead, I ground my analysis in discursive formations of development, and show how nature's continued commodification is a process by which specific spaces, natures, and bodies come to be represented in ways that allow for neoliberal projects to emerge as the logical solution to longstanding development problems, with their final form ultimately conditioned by the requirements of capitalist value.

The paper proceeds as follows. In the next section I first explain the CDM's requirement of “additionality”, and how the project's cost–benefit calculations help establish the additionality of a carbon offset. Then, I explore the discursive formation within which these calculations are situated by providing a history of development interventions in the Talamanca region, and the emergence of three discursive objects: the indigenous land manager, indigenous agriculture, and cacao agroforestry. I argue that the rules of formation around how these objects are spoken about have opened a specific socio-spatial problematic of development that carbon is positioned to solve. In the following section I analyze the cost–benefit calculations that underpinned this specific CDM carbon project in Talamanca, and how project managers came to treat rastrojos as atomized spaces of carbon-value potential. In the penultimate section I elaborate on what it means for additionality calculations to be discursive statements that enable value by placing these calculations within a Marxian understanding of value. Specifically, I draw on Kojin Karatani's (2003) interpretation of Marx in order to argue that these calculations can be understood as discursive statements intended to establish an offset's use value. I follow this argument with a discussion of why a carbon offset's position as a local space within a global regime of climatic management ultimately led to the conflation of additionality calculations with this commodity's use value. I conclude by highlighting the analytic benefits to understanding the relation of discourse and value to carbon's commodification.

Development Discourse: The Problem of Agriculture and the Solution of Carbon

The cost–benefit calculations I described at the beginning of this paper were done in order to comply with the CDM requirement of “additionality”, a term that encompasses a broad range of evaluative approaches that are designed to ensure that carbon financing will produce a project does not subsidize status quo forms of land use (Michaelowa 2005). These calculations were performed in order to show that the project is financially additional, which means that carbon finance is needed for a project to occur (Bumpus and Liverman 2008). To meet CDM approval, project managers needed to demonstrate that certain types of land use changes were not possible under current market conditions, but would be possible with the influx of carbon financing. Thus, project managers needed to compare the current rates of profitability of different forms of land use with their levels of potential carbon sequestration in order to show what potential types of land use “switching” would require carbon financing. In this way, the cost–benefit calculations served to quantify an imagined future where carbon finance could potentially change the future decision making of indigenous farmers.

Rather than evaluate these calculations in terms of their claims to truth, I instead broadly follow Foucault's archaeological method (Foucault 1972) and treat these calculations as statements that occur within a discursive formation, where speaking about indigenous agriculture in terms of quantified cost–benefit tradeoffs is an intelligible way of speaking to the diverse subjects that help bring a carbon offset into being: scientists, CDM and state bureaucrats, offset consumers, and indigenous leaders. In other words, I ask about the conditions that allow for such calculations to be taken seriously among these diverse subjects, and the effects that such a way of speaking can have. While additionality calculations are necessary to meet the requirements of the CDM, the calculations themselves occur within a discursive formation that is, in part, grounded in a local history of development interventions in the region. Thus, I analyze these calculations as discursive statements in order to understand how indigenous agriculture came to be considered as a site of carbon storage at all.