Carbon accounting

In the global climate debate, science and governance are intimately connected and co-produced. One way in which this is done is through carbon accounting. Practices of carbon accounting are not just technical and will have considerable governance implications as they are used to assess the performance of climate mitigation projects. This chapter outlines a theoretical perspective for analyzing carbon accounting as a technology of global climate governance. We use the example of forest carbon accounting for REDD+ to argue that carbon accounting creates a specific field of visibility that not only represents carbon but also functions as a site of political action. As such, we focus the attention on the productive forms of power involved in carbon accounting and the way these technologies simultaneously highlight and obscure specific forms of knowledge and connect and disconnect actors on multiple scales.