Carbon Markets: Resource Governance and Sustainable Valuation

Carbon markets open several important avenues of inquiry into resource governance designed to address problems like climate change. The discipline of economic geography is well situated to add insight. This chapter examines the underlying assumptions behind market-based governance, particularly the emphasis on controlling greenhouse gases through pricing. The pricing of externalities alone does not guarantee the material changes in energy use now in the future that are required to combat climate change. A new framework for consideration of the spatial and temporal dynamics of value is proposed. A renewed focus on use value and its spatial characteristics could lend considerable insight to the understanding of industry, market creation, and resource governance. For example, entraining the temporal production of instruments of exchange to their sources of production and creating property rights to manage natural resources as service stocks rather than commodities could better generate external value.