Abstract
Consumption-based accounting frameworks explain environmental impacts as arising from the consumption, rather than production, of products. This chapter examines consumption-based environmental accounting as a form of governmental power that is simultaneously edifying of state power and diffuses responsibility out to individuals. Three types of environmental accounting frameworks - ecological footprints, water footprints and carbon accounts - illustrate how these accounting frameworks had the geopolitical effect of moving the locus of environmental responsibility both from state-led environmental regulation to individual consumption, and from the global south to the global north. Shifting from structural to individual responsibility would appear to point away from state-centrism in environmental governance. Yet the logics of consumption-based environmental accounting ultimately reify state power insofar as both the technical calculations of consumption-based accounting and the forms of visibility that bring these calculations to life are based on forms of knowledge about production and consumption created at the scale of states.
Original language | English (US) |
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Title of host publication | Handbook on the Changing Geographies of the State |
Subtitle of host publication | New Spaces of Geopolitics |
Publisher | Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd. |
Pages | 240-250 |
Number of pages | 11 |
ISBN (Electronic) | 9781788978057 |
ISBN (Print) | 9781788978040 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Jan 1 2020 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© Sami Moisio, Natalie Koch, Andrew E.G. Jonas, Christopher Lizotte and Juho Luukkonen 2020. All rights reserved.