پویایی فضایی و زمانی ارزش در مالی گرایی: تجزیه و تحلیل زیرساخت های بازار کربن

Countries around the world are developing carbon emissions markets as a governance mechanism to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Drawing on relational economic geography this article maps the infrastructure and social networks of the markets to evaluate the nature and function of these systems. Carbon markets are representative of a growing emphasis on managing social and environmental problems through market mechanisms and must be understood from the standpoint of financialization. This article extends the critical literature on carbon markets by considering market financialization as a form of time–space compression. I argue financialization divorces the use value of resources from the exchange value of financial instruments. The separation of exchange value from its objective material context allows for the creation of distortions and heightens the demand for accelerated rates of resource production. I analyze how the infrastructure (including processes and agents) of the emissions markets operates with respect to space and time under three mechanisms of financialization: ownership, commensuration and mobilization. Since carbon markets are intended to be demonstration markets that will eventually be extended for the management of other environmental systems, the problems of financialization inherent within these markets suggest adverse consequences for other environmental markets. While social and economics systems can adjust to the demands of accelerated production, the function of environmental systems is deeply embedded in space and time and cannot readily withstand time–space compression.

The increasing economic and political importance of finance generates an opportunity and imperative to move finance into the heart of economic geographic analysis and to clarify the connections between entangled geographies—economic, social, cultural and political (Clark and Wojcik, 2007 and Dixon, 2011). Of particular significance is the growing predominance of market-based mechanisms directed at addressing climate change (Goodland et al., 2009 and Newell and Paterson, 2010). Since the Kyoto Protocol came into force in 2004, a number of regulated and voluntary carbon management systems have been setup around the world aiming to achieve CO2 emissions reductions, largely through cap and trade mechanisms (Michaelowa and Michaelowa, 2007). Carbon markets embody a new form of climate capitalism as well as a new era of environmental finance—the spread of finance to other environmental asset classes including forestry and biodiversity (Balch, 2009, Knight, 2011 and Newell and Paterson, 2010). Orthodox economics frames carbon emissions markets as a basic practice of pricing externalities (Pezzey, 2003). However, analysis of carbon markets also lends itself to a broader understanding of the function and development of modern financial markets (Ellerman et al., 2003 and Knight, 2011). Carbon credits are artificial commodities in the sense that they are constructed from the absence of emissions, rather than the existence of something (Knox-Hayes, 2010 and Bumpus, 2011). Yet, since carbon credits mirror the function of other financial commodities, they enable an investigation into the nature of value transfer in financialization, particularly as it relates to space and time. I investigate how the financialization of emissions credits converts use value to exchange value thereby compressing the representation of the space and time of the underlying commodities. Financial markets are designed to accelerate the rate of capital turnover. The application of these markets to the management of environmental systems may suggest adverse consequences for environmental systems by undervaluing the rate at which environmental systems operate and reproduce themselves. In analyzing carbon markets from the perspective of time–space analysis, the article explores the unique framing of spatiality and temporality that economic geography can offer to environmental finance and to economic models more generally. After exploring the nature of value, I argue that financialization creates real world distortions in the representation of financial value and in the application of that value to manage natural resources. In particular, by removing value from its objective spatial and temporal connotation, financialization introduces a disjuncture between the representation of value and the production of value by environmental processes. This disjuncture in turn means that policies intended to preserve natural resources are ineffective or potentially counterproductive, in that they lead to pressure for accelerated rates of production. Ironically, the emissions markets and the environmental markets that will follow from them are intended to grant value to undervalued services, but through financialization they diminish environmental value. At the analytical heart of this article is relational economic geography, an approach that analyzes complex economic action and its localized consequences by focusing on the people, firms, institutions and other organizations involved in and subject to the consequences of economic decision-making (Bathelt and Glückler, 2003 and Boggs, 2003). Financial centers can be used to gain a broader perspective on market function, because they represent spaces of concentrated financial activity (Peck and Theodore, 2007, Sayer, 2009 and Wójcik, 2011). By mapping the networks and functions of developing climate finance regimes, I situate carbon markets as systems of environmental financialization and demonstrate that markets divorce financial products from the material contexts they purport to represent. To counter criticisms that relational economic geography overemphasizes macro-processes—ignoring nodes and agents (Hall, 2011)—I emphasize the institutional structure of the markets, including economic relations among agents and their practices, in nodes of power such as London and New York.

Real world events, notably the recent financial crisis, exemplify the importance of efforts within economic geography to understand capitalism’s institutions (Clark and Wojcik, 2007 and Yarbrough and Yarbrough, 2009). One of the key concerns for this article and economic geography more broadly is the evolution of the institutions designed to address environmental problems. Through the case of carbon markets, I evaluate the ways that financialization disconnects the use value of material resources from the exchange value of financial instruments. The theoretical contribution of this article is to suggest that value has spatial and temporal dynamics. The issue of finance therefore becomes not one of just risk management, but also one of spatial and temporal proximity between financial instruments and the resources they represent. Such distortions can lead to a range of implications from the acceleration of social connections and economic processes to misrepresentations of value leading to crises. Initial studies on the materiality of other financial systems imply that the processes under investigation in carbon markets pervade financial and other social and economic systems (Orlikowski, 1992). Carbon markets are a representation of the logic of financialization. They are designed to mitigate the physical impacts of anthropogenic climate change by coordinating the global reduction of greenhouse gas production. To do this they must build an extensive network with the aim of changing collective behavior. By transforming the material problem of greenhouse gas emissions into financial instruments, the markets can communicate value to disparate places. Carbon emission reduction in Europe can be linked to clean energy production in China. Such a connection could have the potential to reduce global emissions' impact as well as to communicate and share the philosophical as well as exchange value of reducing emissions across national boundaries. Indeed, despite the multiple shortcomings of the markets, they have arguably had an impact on raising awareness for the need and potential value of reducing emissions. However, to share value across geographic boundaries the markets rely on financialization; they transform the physical process of reducing emissions into compressed financial representations. The exchange value of the credits becomes disconnected from the process or reducing emissions. There is considerable doubt whether emissions markets produce material use value, because it is uncertain as to whether or not emissions reductions are achieved through the construction of the credits (Ellerman et al., 2003, Lohmann, 2005 and Lohmann, 2009). The markets are producing exchange value that can be represented in financial capital; recent estimates suggest the markets were worth $144 billion in 2009 (Boykoff et al., 2009), but the question remains are they really producing use value by reducing emissions? If the value of carbon markets is representative primarily of intermediary financial services and derivatives trading, the emissions markets arguably are not producing real use value. To be meaningful value must be useful; it must be connected to material impact, which is inevitably embedded in space and time. As I argue here, there is reason to be skeptical that managing environmental processes by removing them from their spatial and temporal contexts by way of financialization can be successful. Furthermore, distortions of space and time in the representation of value may lead to the mismanagement of resources and ultimately can produce financial crises. The construction of financial markets to serve as systems of governance challenges environmental processes, which are embedded in physical materiality (Daly, 1992 and O’Neill, 2007). While the productivity of economic systems (the rate of good and service production for example) and social systems (the rate and scale of communication for example) can be accelerated through the operation of digital networks, environmental systems cannot withstand the pressures to accelerate their rate of productivity in line with financialization. Overconsumption of these systems will lead to collapse. Markets to conserve forests can trade the exchange value of the trees around the globe instantaneously, but the trees still require decades if not centuries to reproduce themselves. Their use value, if not their intrinsic value, is deeply embedded in space and time. In divorcing the spatial and temporal scale of use value from exchange value, financial markets are unlikely to address the very real and material demands our society places on the natural environment. Climate change is a multifaceted problem that signals the dangers of current economic activities and of the increasing disconnect between socio-economic and environmental productivity (Newell and Paterson, 2010). The purported solution—markets that communicate financial instruments devoid of spatial and temporal context through global digital networks—accomplishes many things. It accelerates the evolution of information governance, creates a digital monitoring network that permeates space and time, and communicates the potential value of emissions reductions around the globe, but in so doing it fails to address the underlying problem. Carbon markets generate exchange value, but do not necessarily achieve the desired impact of reducing emissions. Moreover, carbon markets do not address the underlying problem of anthropogenic climate change; human systems have become over-productive, undermining the spatial and temporal regenerative requirements of environmental systems.