Governmentality and the global geopolitics of consumption-based environmental accounting

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.