Governing Mobilities, Mobilising Carbon

This paper explores the governing of climate change via the lens of mobilities. It argues that the central dynamic of the relationship between these two phenomena is that while the logic of governing climate change entails the management, shaping and ultimately reduction of a whole range of physical mobilities, climate change politics has been precisely organised around the generation of newly mobile objects – specifically the rights to generate carbon emissions, as mobilised via carbon markets. This reinforces the importance of cultural political economy to mobilities research. Mobile subjects and objects are to be understood thus as effects of power, mobilised in the pursuit of the reproduction of certain sorts of social order, and for the purposes of capital accumulation.