Title:

Wasting CO2: The Remarkable Success of Climate Failure

Abstract:

In the presentation, we examine the articulation between urban political-ecological transformations on the one hand and processes of global climate mitigation on the other. More specifically, we use the case of South-African waste-to-value projects as combined results of local processes of urban ecological modernization on the one hand and the mobilization of global climate finance through the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) on the other. Our focus is on exploring the antinomies of climate-related projects as currently constituted and on examining the implications and contradictions of the current climate mitigation architecture. While it is generally recognized that waste-related CDM projects in South Africa have been an unmitigated failure in terms of both the anticipated climate and 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 and more socio-ecologically just trajectories of climate mitigation. This re-enforces what Sarah Bracking called the “antipolitics of climate finance”. While the formal outcome of the CDM is a failure, its success resides in the process by which global elites have invented and created a complex set of administrative, regulatory, and technological devices articulated around solidifying and naturalizing a commoditizing neoliberal market-based approach to solve the global environmental crisis.

Socioeconomics Research Seminar WS 2019/20