Emissions Trading Schemes: Markets, States and Law

Description

Over the last four decades emissions trading has enjoyed a high profile in environmental law scholarship and in environmental law and policy. Much of the discussion is promotional, preferring emissions trading above other regulatory strategies without, however, engaging with legal complexities embedded in conceptualising, scrutinising and managing emissions trading regimes. The combined effect of these debates is to create a perception that emissions trading is a straightforward regulatory strategy, imposable across various jurisdictions and environmental settings. This book shows that this view is problematic for at least two reasons. First, emissions trading responds to distinct environmental and non-environmental goals, including creating profit-centres, substituting bureaucratic control of resources, and ensuring regulatory compliance. This is important, as the particular purpose entrusted to a given emissions trading regime has, as its corollary, a particular governance structure, according to which the regime may be constructed and managed, and which trusts the emissions market, the state and rights in emissions allowances with distinct roles. Second, the governance structures of emissions trading regimes are culture-specific, which is a significant reminder of the importance of law in understanding not only how emissions trading schemes function but also what meaning is given to them as regulatory strategies. This is shown by deconstructing emissions trading discourses: that is, by inquiring into the assumptions about emissions trading, as featuring in emissions trading scholarship and in debates involving law and policymakers and the judiciary at the EU level. Ultimately, this book makes a strong argument for reconfiguring the common understanding of emissions trading schemes as regulatory strategies, and sets out a framework for analysis to sustain that reconfiguration.

Sanja Bogojevic is a Lecturer in Law at Lund University, Sweden

...a most convincing contribution to the field of climate and environmental law. The discourse theory-based conceptual framework it proposes to analyse emissions trading offers a much needed new perspective to the discipline. This contribution to the conceptualisation of emissions trading is not only useful for academics and students of climate law, but also for practitioners including policy-and law-makers. -- Anatole Boute * Cambridge Law Journal, Volume 73 * The relative brevity of this well-written book belies the impressive intellectual feat it contains...Bogojevic discusses a very dense and technically complex body of jurisprudence [with] refinement and clarity...it is to be hoped that law scholars in other fields will follow Dr Bogojevic's example and more attention will be paid to the implicit, and typically unquestioned, assumptions that often underlie legal scholarship. -- Josephine van Zeben, University of Oxford * European Law Review * Ultimately this book seems to represent a warning (seen in other contexts but here the colours are nailed to the mast of emissions trading discourse) against importing reductionist techniques into this notably complex area of law and policy...Indeed, as environmental lawyers, and especially in light of the EU experience thus far of emissions trading, we may usefully see this as a call to us to clamber out of our self-built disciplinary silos and to engage more effectively in matching regulatory rationales to regulatory utputs. -- Mark Stallworthy * Journal of Environmental Law *