ABSTRACT
This chapter examines two distinct aspects of climate mitigation through the lens of environmental justice, with a focus on the politics of scale employed in environmental justice claims. First, the author critically examines the South’s ‘right to development’ argument, demonstrating a politics of scale that is exercised when advancing such a claim as an articulation of climate justice, drawing on research among Indian officials. Development is discussed as a ‘floating signifier’ with attempts made to fix their meaning in climate justice claims. The second half draws on the author’s field work in Nepal to critically examine a climate mitigation solution that emerged from the Kyoto Protocol, called the Clean Development Mechanism, that promises global climate mitigation and locally relevant sustainable development. An alternative energy innovation called biogas is examined in this context through interviews with Kathmandu-based policy-makers as well as rural households who have adopted biogas. This analysis is informed by work in political ecology that problematizes the commodification of nature as a feature of neoliberalism, which entails the process of ‘accumulation by dispossession’. The author suggests that dispossession in this context constitutes the process of incorporating ordinary households into a world of carbon trade without their fully informed consent.
