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The global development project faces newly evident challenges in the combination of energy, climate and food crises. Their interrelationships create a powerful moment in world history in which analysts and practitioners grope for solutions, limited by the narrow market episteme. This contribution argues that official development, in advocating green market solutions, recycles the problem as solution—a problem rooted in the geopolitics of an unsustainable global ‘metabolic rift’ and a discourse of global ecology reinforcing international power relations through monetary valuation, and deepening the North’s ‘ecological debt’. The ‘development climate’ is a market product, in so many ways. The earth’s atmosphere is heating up as a consequence of a global market infrastructure based on fossil fuel consumption. Since the market has become synonymous with development, the response is to frame solutions to climate change in market terms. This leads to commodification of the ecological commons through green market solutions such as carbon trading, emissions offsets and biofuels, to sustain, rather than question, current trajectories of accumulation and consumption. Because the world is finite, deeply unequal, and already warming at rates faster than the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) conservative estimates predict, the notion of ‘green accumulation’ is an oxymoron. From the ‘development’ perspective current market ontology includes a politics of Northern security, first expressed as a ‘global ecology’ at the 1992 Earth Summit. Global ecology appropriates and/or manages environmental knowledge to protect planetary carbon sinks and natural resources for a global development project. The USA’s participation in this conference included a telling caveat, namely that it did not ‘change its long-standing opposition to the so-called ‘‘right to development’’. Development is not a Philip McMichael is in the Department of Sociology, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA. Email: [email protected]. Third World Quarterly, Vol. 30, No. 1, 2009, pp 247–262 ISSN 0143-6597 print/ISSN 1360-2241 online/09/010247–16 ! 2009 Third World Quarterly DOI: 10.1080/01436590802622987 247 D o w n l o a d e d A t : 1 2 : 3 7 8 J u n e 2 0 1 0 right. On the contrary, development is a goal.’ The goal of the global development project has been to sustain energy, capital and commodity flows for purposes of military and political security, as ‘the environmental consequences of worldwide industrialization threaten[ed] to destabilize the Northern way of life.’ It has deepened the global ‘ecological footprint’ of the North through the ‘export of sustainability’ from the South, and its consequences are now represented phenomenally as a huge ‘carbon debt’, whereby the North accounts for about 80% percent of CO2 build-up in the atmosphere. Thus, for example, ‘in just 11 days, the average UK citizen will generate as much CO2 as the average person in Bangladesh will during a whole year’, and it has been calculated that a single British power station in West Yorkshire ‘emits more CO2 annually than the 139 million people in Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Malawi, Zambia, and Mozambique combined.’ The ‘development climate’, then, combines an ecological footprint that defines North–South relations with a market trajectory that exploits those relations in the name of ‘green accumulation’. Known as ‘market environmentalism’, this project has so far had the effect of generating further greenhouse gases (GHG), which, given naturalistic conceptions of the market, legitimises new cycles of green accumulation. The consequences are a rise in carbon emissions and a deepening of human displacement, which, in turn, renews the legitimacy of the project of global development and its market crusade at the expense of alternative pathways to sustainability. In short, the recycling of the neoliberal market truth, as a convenience for the development establishment and its corporate partners, represents a deeply inconvenient truth for humankind and its ecological foundations. Development’s climate In the haze of promises of market prosperity the impact of development on the climate has taken a long time to be taken seriously, let alone to be recognised for the catastrophe that it already is, and will remain so long as market solutions prevail. The 2007/2008Human Development Report declares ‘Climate change is the defining human development issue of our generation’, and the development literature is only now catching up to this issue. At the eighth Conference of Parties (COP8) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Delhi a threshold report on ‘Poverty and Climate Change’ declared that ‘climate change is a serious risk to poverty reduction and threatens to undo decades of development efforts’. Within the practitioner and policy community the response is to incorporate ‘climate proofing’ into development programmes, as key to adaptation. While important to address vulnerabilities (water access, disease patterns, natural disasters), climate proofing deepens tendencies to override local knowledge and solutions. The World Bank’s Global Environmental Facility finances only projects that focus on adaptation, generating National Adaptation Programs of Action (NAPAs) analogous to the (structural adjustment) Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers, in which market solutions remain paramount, encouraging disaster relief business, and reproducing PHILIP MCMICHAEL 248 D o w n l o a d e d A t : 1 2 : 3 7 8 J u n e 2 0 1 0 neo-colonial initiatives. The North–South asymmetry is a significant source of stalemate in climate negotiations, represented in such rebukes as Argentinian President Kirchner’s charge that the North should meet its ‘environmental debts’ just as it demands the South meet its ‘financial debts’. In fact, Akhil Gupta traces such asymmetry back to the 1992 Earth Summit: ‘of the two themes that the conference was trying to bring together, environment and development, the North focused on the former while ignoring the latter, whereas the South focused on the interrelationship between the two’, given exploitation of the South’s raw materials ‘as essential inputs into goods manufactured, and largely consumed, in the North’. Roberts and Parks argue that climate policy will not succeed without proceeding from the fact of North–South inequality. Their thesis is as follows: When powerful states disregard weaker states’ position in the international division of labor in areas where they possess structural power, they run a high risk of weaker states ‘reciprocating’ in policy areas where they possess more bargaining leverage. The issue of global climate change—which itself is characterized by tremendous inequality in vulnerability, responsibility, and mitigation—can therefore not be viewed, analyzed, or responded to in isolation from the larger crisis of global inequality. The strength of this perspective is that it identifies the asymmetries of the state system as a major stumbling block to climate policy, whose ‘resolution will most likely require unconventional, perhaps even heterodox, policy interventions’. The authors argue that a climate of mistrust derives from three widely held perceptions: 1) climate change is the result of ‘profligate Northern consumption’; 2) national capacity for environmental reform is a function of a state’s position in the international division of labour; and 3) the North’s approach to environmental issues thwarts Southern economic development. From Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad’s charge of ‘environmental colonialism’ at the 1992 Earth Summit, to Brazilian President Lula’s comment in February 2007 that the ‘wealthy countries are very smart, approving protocols, holding big speeches on the need to avoid deforestation, but they already deforested everything’, the standoff has continued, even as it is expressed in terms that invoke uneven development. Roberts and Parks observe that the South perceives ‘that the rules are continually being rewritten unilaterally by the rich, industrialized countries in order to enrich themselves at the expense of the South, and that the structure of the world system is largely to blame for their grinding poverty and chronic vulnerability’. In addition to the ideological flourish of the last clause, it is the case that material-intensive production has shifted from North to South, as the former has moved towards a post-industrial, service economy. However, importing material-intensive goods to sustain Northern lifestyles is ‘clearly no less materialist and no more sustainable’ than when manufacturing concentrated in the North’. Further, recent studies suggest that manufacturing unit values are declining, and so the export of manufacturing GEOPOLITICS, GLOBAL ECOLOGY AND THE ‘DEVELOPMENT CLIMATE’ 249 D o w n l o a d e d A t : 1 2 : 3 7 8 J u n e 2 0 1 0 will only intensify in the South, rather than follow the post-industrial development trajectory of Northern countries. The point here is that the state system is premised on competitive accumulation—as a function of government legitimacy, military security and maintaining national currency stability through mechanisms such as trade, debt financing and debt repayment, and liberalisation of economic laws. In addition to the structural inequalities overlaying export intensification, and converting the South into a ‘world factory’ and a ‘world farm’, normalising the (neoclassical economic) impulse to ‘export or die’ endangers the planet. Roberts and Parks’ message is that the climate issue is so profoundly rooted in the North–South asymmetries that ‘strict rationalist and institutionalist ideas that climate change can be addressed solely by designing better treaties, giving aid more strategically, or building capacity in poor nations’ will fall short. Yet these remain the dominant perspectives—because of a deeply embedded episteme that is unable to think of the world in other than statecentred and Eurocentric terms. Thus John Rapley claims: first-world countries will probably have to bear the expense of environmental adjustment. If they do not, then poor countries will continue to exploit the advantages of cheap but polluting technologies, with deleterious effects on the global environment . . . The rich countries therefore find themselves between a rock and a hard place: either bear the economic cost of third-world development or bear the political—greater instability—and environmental costs of third-world underdevelopment. The choice is not easy, but it probably has to be made. This conclusion contains significant assumptions about the development climate: first, conceptualising it as one between countries, omitting the role of TNCs in exploiting ‘the advantages of cheap but polluting technologies’ located in the ‘poor countries’, enabled by the Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM); second, locating ‘deleterious effects on the global environment’ in the global South; third, implying that political instability is an attribute alone of underdevelopment; fourth, implying that choices about environmental adjustment will be made by the first world; fifth, implying that the first world can act responsibly; and sixth, framing the solution in ‘adjustment’ (adaptation) terms—rather than reformulating the paradigm of development itself. Such assumptions reappear in various guises, reaffirming the development paradigm even as they attempt to ‘green’ it. A recent report for the UN Committee for Development Policy, entitled ‘Climate change and sustainable development’, by Tariq Banuri and Hans Opschoor, is an exemplar. The report’s focus on the de-carbonisation of economic development leads beyond the Kyoto Protocol to advocacy for a massive, globally funded public investment programme, like the Manhattan Project, to deploy renewable energy technologies in developing countries. The argument is that Kyoto separated climate policy and development, focusing on the global North, leaving the global South unimpeded by emission targets. In addition, the authors note that the climate debate has hitherto been dominated by climate scientists, despite its serious implications PHILIP MCMICHAEL 250 D o w n l o a d e d A t : 1 2 : 3 7 8 J u n e 2 0 1 0 for development, declaring: ‘any successful solution to the climate problem will have to come from within the development process; it will need to begin, rather than end, with developing countries, and be based on a deep understanding of how development occurs’. It quotes the UNFCC principle that ‘economic development is essential for adopting measures to address climate change’. The authors focus on the ‘developing countries’ because they ‘now contribute roughly half and the most rapidly rising component of global emissions’. They argue that: [higher] growth rates in developing countries (especially in Asia) . . . offer the genuine hope of narrowing the gap between rich and poor countries. As such, a serious threat to this momentum could also constitute a threat to global stability and mutual trust . . . as the text of the UNFCCC bears witness, the economic growth of developing countries has increasingly come to be viewed as a global responsibility—because it is the only mechanism the world has found thus far to address the vast inequality in incomes, wealth, and access to basic needs, human rights, and political participation. They note that Kyoto’s CDM established ‘a minimal link between climate and development’ by encouraging Northern countries to meet emission reduction targets by investing in cost-effective solutions in the South, arguing that the CDM, in enabling Northern access to cheap options of emissions reductions in the South, pre-empts future Southern options to ‘undertake emissions reducing activities themselves’. In combining climate change and development, Banuri and Opschoor use an analogy with the debt crisis, namely that overspending leading to internal budgetary imbalances in indebted countries is analogous to overuse of fossil fuel resources, which ‘has also insinuated itself into economic behaviour and institutions’. A structural adjustment programme with respect to carbon emissions is therefore necessary. But the analogy, in locating responsibility at the point of ‘arrival’, where crisis is manifest, reproduces the heavyhandedness of the debt regime, which individualised the problem of debt, leaving its structural roots and outcomes unaddressed, and reproducing growing inequalities. This directional prescription is then repeated in an analogy with the Green Revolution, recalled as a successful mechanism of technology transfer to avert a catastrophe of hunger in the 1950s. Claiming that ‘the world already has the technical knowledge to reduce emissions and shift to superior technologies’, the authors reproduce a technological pathdependence that ignores alternatives, invoking a technology that magnified emissions, and inequalities by exporting chemical-dependent agribusiness to the South. In short, an attempt to integrate development into a climate perspective by targeting the South as the most cost-effective, and future-relevant, region of economic growth, for global public investment in de-carbonisation, seeks to reverse ‘the current order of prioritization of action’ by de-carbonising a developing South, facilitating ‘technological learning that would reduce the costs of renewable technologies for the North’. While the content of the proposal rests on the deployment of green technologies, the form of GEOPOLITICS, GLOBAL ECOLOGY AND THE ‘DEVELOPMENT CLIMATE’ 251 D o w n l o a d e d A t : 1 2 : 3 7 8 J u n e 2 0 1 0 the proposal reproduces the development episteme. That is, it privileges Northern technological intervention, ignoring the possibility, indeed necessity, of technological learning from sustainable low-carbon livelihood methods in the South. In so doing, despite the attempt to legitimise public investment, the authors do not fundamentally challenge the ontology of the global development project. In a more recent paper, a 2008 policy brief for the Commission on Climate Change and Development, Banuri and fellow authors note that adaptation, deemed a necessary and ‘moral responsibility’ by the North towards the South, is ‘often similar to, and sometimes indistinguishable from, development’. From this perspective adaptation (insurance schemes, crop-rotations, irrigation systems, drought-resistant seeds, sea defences) reproduces development practice: ‘development agencies and NGOs can use their decades of experience in poverty alleviation and sustainable development to assist the poorest countries to meet the adaptation challenge’, adapting, rather than reconfiguring. Thus ‘mainstreaming adaptation’ ‘includes ‘‘climate proofing,’’ ie the protection of existing ODA projects and programs’ and ensuring ‘that future development plans and programs are actively designed to reduce the vulnerability to climate change’. Climate proofing is a new profit frontier, and agrochemical and biotechnology firms like BASF, Monsanto, Bayer, Syngenta, and Dupont have filed over 500 patent documents on so-called ‘climate ready’ genes. At a time when flexible seed selection by farming women in West Africa, for example, has managed recurring drought, gene patents threaten farmer sovereignty, and shift resources away from farmer-based strategies for climate change survival and adaptation: ‘After decades of seed industry mergers and acquisitions, accompanied by a steady decline in public sector plant breeding, the top 10 seed companies control 57% of the global seed market. As climate crisis deepens, there is a danger that governments will require farmers to adopt prescribed biotech traits that are deemed essential adaptation measures’, rather than support documented local initiatives based on adaptive practices, largely by women. A spokesperson for Monsanto, in a strategic alliance with BASF and the Gates Foundation to develop drought-resistant corn, declared: ‘I think everyone recognizes that the old traditional ways just aren’t able to address these new challenges. The problems in Africa are pretty severe.’ In general the multilateral agencies are geared up to ‘marketise’ development adaptation. And so the Commission on Climate Change and Development notes that the UNFCCC’s 2001 Adaptation Fund ‘is the first example of the use of market-based options to generate substantial financial resources to address climate change. The carbon market . . . has the potential to move huge financial flows to developing countries for mitigation and adaptation’. Unsurprisingly, however, ‘initial flows suggest that the money is narrowly targeting emission reductions in big countries like China and Brazil’, as predicted by the Stern Review. Even so, a Stanford University study found that the UN’s offset fund has been ‘routinely abused by chemical, wind, gas and hydro companies who are claiming emission PHILIP MCMICHAEL 252 D o w n l o a d e d A t : 1 2 : 3 7 8 J u n e 2 0 1 0 reduction credits for [clean energy] projects that should not qualify’, because they were scheduled for construction anyway, resulting in no change in emissions. Marketing development is embedded in the pores of the development agencies. While organisations like the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and the UN Development Programme (UNDP) represent popular constituencies, they view them through the market lens, where poverty is both naturalised and considered a liability. The UNDP claims that ‘poverty and low levels of human development limit the capacity of poor households to manage climate risks’. This may be so, but ‘poverty’ has several faces, whether frugality (subsistence), destitution (frugality deprived of its material base) or scarcity (modernised poverty in a cash economy)—and, unlike the Monsanto assumption above, subsistence may include local knowledge about managing the effects of climate change; for this reason it cannot simply be discounted through the lens of modernised poverty. The UNDP may qualify market environmentalism, claiming that the ‘development of regulatory systems and public–private partnerships for a low-carbon transition are also priorities’ and that social justice and human rights ‘demand stronger commitment on adaptation’, yet it argues that carbon markets ‘are a necessary condition for the transition to a low-carbon economy’, offering potential incentives to conserve forests and grasslands, and it proposes integrating adaptation into the Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers framework. Even with regulation markets have a way of serving capital, sustaining inequality and reducing democracy, and disembedding social and ecological relationships.