Back to the Land? Legitimation, Carbon Offsets and Australia's Emissions Trading Scheme

Carbon offsets produced from terrestrial (land-based) emissions reduction projects are a contested frontier of carbon market expansion. Experiments in legislating for and producing terrestrial offsets that come under the title REDD have met heated opposition. However, a political consensus about the desirability and feasibility of carbon offsets from avoided deforestation and various land-management practices has slowly emerged. How do terrestrial carbon offsets gain legitimacy in the face of contestation and compelling evidence that creating carbon commodities from land ecosystems is an elusive commodity fiction? It seems that a quiet compromise is emerging over the (re-)commodification of land through carbon trading vis-à-vis the broader process of legitimating marketized climate policy. This paper offers a political-economic analysis of state-led efforts to legitimate a market for land carbon sinks in Australia and the Asia-Pacific region. The dynamics of legitimation and contestation play out as an iterative ‘double movement’