ABSTRACT
The policy studies literature on carbon trading abounds. The bulk of this literature is functionalist in orientation, treating carbon trading as a policy instrument among others in the ‘toolkit’ of environmental governance and assessing its effectiveness. More recently, we have also seen an increase in research on the ‘politics’ of carbon markets focusing inter alia on the processes and actors involved in constructing carbon markets. A number of authors have asked, for example, why governments have decided to implement carbon markets at a given time and in a given jurisdiction (Cass 2005; Christiansen and Wettestad 2003; Damro and Mendez 2003) or which role business coalitions have played in the advocacy of carbon markets (Meckling 2011; Pinkse and Kolk 2007). As Stephan and Patterson (2012) point out, such studies on carbon markets politics are often informed by a rather conventional and restrictive definition of politics.
