Abstract

"Corporate Carbon Pricing in the History of Carbon Markets"

Raphaël Olivier, Paris-Dauphine University (raphael.olivier@dauphine.eu)

Climate change has gradually emerged as a strategic emergency, to which companies have responded differently by implementing management dispositives, e.g. climate strategies, and management tools. Through the interactions between these corporate management dispositives and those of other organizations such as public authorities or NGOs, carbon markets have developed. Although there is already a relatively abundant literature on the recent history of these markets, it has not yet given enough attention to the role of one particular management tool: corporate carbon pricing. Consequently, in this paper, I question the role of corporate carbon pricing in the history of carbon markets. The conceptual framework used combines the contributions of actor-network theory and the perspective of governmentality. Inherited from Foucault's analysis, the methodology is genealogical in that it aims to reconstitute the historical performative network of carbon pricing mechanisms in different companies. Specifically, three case studies are proposed to illustrate the interactions between corporate carbon pricing and carbon markets. These case studies concern the following performative networks (first associating a corporate carbon price with a regulatory or political dispositive), in chronological order: (a) in the late 1980s - mid 1990s, the carbon offsetting system internal to AES Corp. and the Kyoto Protocol, (b) in the late 1990s - mid 2000s, the emissions trading system internal to Eurelectric and the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme, and (c) since 2015, the proliferation of shadow carbon prices in many companies and COP21 via Article 6 of the Paris Agreement. These cases mainly include secondary sources, e.g. private and public archives.