Wasting CO2 and the Clean Development Mechanism: The remarkable success of a climate failure

• Published in: Environment and planning. E, Nature and space (Print) Vol. 7; no. 2; pp. 654 - 680
• Main Authors: Ernstson, Henrik, Swyngedouw, Erik
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London, England SAGE Publications 01.04.2024
• Subjects: South Africa; Clean Development Mechanism; urban waste; neoliberal natures; ecological modernization
• ISSN: 2514-8486; 2514-8494
• DOI: 10.1177/25148486231196677

This paper examines how global climate mitigation policies articulate with urban political–ecological transformations. It focuses on South African waste-to-value projects as case studies, exploring how local processes of urban ecological modernization combine with global climate finance through the now largely defunct Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). Whilst it is generally recognized that waste-related CDM projects in South Africa (and elsewhere) have been an unmitigated failure in terms of climate and socio-economic benefits, we demonstrate that landfill-to-gas/energy projects have functioned effectively as geographical–discursive dispositifs through which particular knowledge systems are enrolled, specific ‘solutions’ are projected, and singular imaginaries of what is possible and desirable foregrounded, thereby crowding out alternative possibilities. This not only nurtures the commodification and marketization of non-human matter with an eye towards sustaining capital accumulation but, rather more importantly, successfully installs state-orchestrated private property relations around common resources, thereby deepening the dispossessing socio-ecological relations upon which expanded capitalist reproduction rests. We argue that whilst the formal outcome of the CDM is a failure, its success resides precisely in how it permitted local and global elites to create administrative and regulatory practices that solidify and naturalize a neoliberal market-based framework to approach the climate crisis.