*Infrastructures of climate governance* Call for papers, Association of American Geographers 2017 Meeting, Boston, MA, April 5-9, 2017
*Session Organizers:* Tyler Harlan (UCLA) and Sophie Webber (University of Sydney) *Sponsored by: *Cultural and Political Ecology Specialty Group, Energy and Environment Specialty Group, Economic Geography Specialty Group Market-based mechanisms for climate governance have predominantly failed to deliver on expectations of large-scale emission reductions, social benefits, or financial returns. From the Clean Development Mechanism, the EU Trading Scheme, to REDD+, carbon markets and offset programs have been stymied by the over-allocation of emissions permits, falling prices for carbon credits, problems of additionality and leakage, and swings in political moods. Carbon offsets, in particular, have been unable to bring about promised environmental and social outcomes, and have been unrewarding for credit suppliers and investors. Thus, what has been called the ‘new carbon economy’ (Boyd, Boykoff, and Newell 2011) has lost some of its mainstream appeal, and is better seen as lurching and faltering rather than rapidly expanding as proponents might wish. For geographers, this validates a large body of critical work on climate governance, which has highlighted the incompatibility of market-based policies with managing climate and environmental changes. These studies have found that market mechanisms have limited ability to constrain emissions, arguing that they can exacerbate social and economic inequality and reduce resource access for local communities (e.g. Heynen et al. 2007; Bond 2012; Beymer-Farris and Bassett 2012). Such critiques of the failures of the new carbon economy have now reached the mainstream, with financial flows migrating to other kinds of climate investments. Given this, a continued focus on the market mechanisms of climate governance risks overlooking other, equally important, policy choices and investment flows. Following recent studies that demand we ‘follow the money’ (Christophers 2011; Dempsey and Suarez 2016) in environmental and climate politics, this session seeks to open up and connect scholarship on the ‘real assets’, or infrastructures, of climate governance. We take climate infrastructure to mean infrastructure up and down the carbon commodity chain (Bridge 2011) – from the mitigation investments of energy installations and green buildings, to adaptation through upgraded utilities, seawalls and levees. In focusing on the infrastructures of climate governance, we examine how and why such investments are designed, financed, and constructed, paying attention to the connected logics of state, regulation, and markets. In doing so, we aim to build conceptual insights into how these logics reproduce a dominant mode of climate change governance, as well as produce landscapes of climate infrastructure with political, social and environmental effects. Moreover, by focusing on both mitigation and adaptation, our goal is to highlight the connections and disconnections between energy, emission reductions, and adaptation, and their associated policies, investments and infrastructure. In this session, we invite papers that analyze sites of investment in climate infrastructure – including how and why investments are made, how they reconfigure relations between institutions and places, and the physical spaces they help produce. We especially seek papers that situate infrastructure investments – in energy, adaptation, or otherwise – in the context of climate governance more broadly. Potential topics include attempts to retool market mechanisms and their influence over infrastructure investments; the diverse financial tools that are used to fund climate infrastructure, including public-private partnerships and securities; politics of infrastructure investment and maintenance, and the politics of naming climate change adaptation and mitigation investments; and the political and environmental effects of marketization rhetoric, even where profit-making appears limited. *Please send paper titles and abstracts (250 words) to Tyler Harlan (* *trhar...@ucla.edu* <trhar...@ucla.edu>*) and Sophie Webber (* *srweb...@ucla.edu* <srweb...@ucla.edu>*) by October 14th. We will notify participants by October 19th.* References Beymer-Farris, B, and TJ Bassett. 2012. “The REDD Menace: Resurgent Protectionism in Tanzania’s Mangrove Forests.” *Global Environmental Change* 22: 332–41. Bond, P. 2012. “Emissions Trading, New Enclosures, and Eco-Social Contestation.” *Antipode* 44 (3): 684–701. Boyd, E, M Boykoff, and P Newell. 2011. “The ‘New’ Carbon Economy: What’s New?.” *Antipode* 43 (3): 601–11. Bridge, G. 2011. “Resource Geographies 1: Making Carbon Economies Old and New.” *Progress in Human Geography* 35 (6): 820–34. Christophers, B. 2011. “Follow the Thing: Money.” *Environment and Planning D: Society and Space* 29: 1068–84. Dempsey, J, and DC Suarez. 2016. “Arrested Development? The Promises and Paradoxes of ‘Selling Nature to Save It.’” *Annals of the Association of American Geographers* 106 (3): 653–71. Heynen, N, J McCarthy, S Prudham, and P Robbins, eds. 2007. *Neoliberal Environments: False Promises and Unnatural Consequences*. New York: Routledge. -- Sophie Webber Department of Geography UCLA
