CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2012
| Author | Lis, Aleksandra |
|---|---|
| Title | Making a Market: The Problem of Polish Carbon in EU Climate Policies |
| Summary | This thesis analyzes the formation of emissions trade regulation in the European Union (Emissions Trading Scheme, or ETS) both as a new tool of environmental governance and as a new market structure. Emission trade takes place as long as the supply of emission allowances is administratively lowered. Exchange of emission allowances stops when the supply of emission allowances equals companies’ demand for it. ETS faced this situation in 2007 due to a generous allocation of emission allowances to companies by national governments. Prices of emission allowances fell to 1 Euro and companies stopped trading emission allowances. As a tool of environmental governance, emission trade serves a specific purpose of lowering GHG emissions. Ideally, if emission targets were achieved, ETS would become redundant and disappeared. Conjunction of these two characteristics – of ETS being a governance tool and a market structure – makes it peculiar among existing markets. The thesis provides a historical account of how and why the ETS was established at the beginning of the 2000s and studies its reorganization proposed by the European Commission in January 2008. The 2008 proposal of a new ETS Directive was perceived as deeply interfering with ‘business as usual’ of industries and power sectors, and thus resulted in massive lobbying activities in the EU. Expert debates and political negotiations of the new ETS rules are subject of this research project. It is observed that ETS rules are neither neutral nor innocent as they perform relations of domination on European markets. They are also not neutral and innocent because they are produced within networks of actors from various fields – markets and policy fields – which are structures of domination. Negotiations of ETS are political because expertise is never apolitical, and they are political because they are embedded in politics taking place within fields and within networks spanning those fields. They are also structured by institutions of decision-making in the EU. Therefore, the dissertation emphasizes that expertise is not the only thing emission trade is embedded in. Emission trade is also embedded in politics and cultures of markets covered by ETS, and national and European policy fields. The thesis brings together the performativity approach to economy and markets with a theory of fields to show that embeddedness of emission trade is complex and its organization cannot be explained solely by studying expertise as political and performing reality of emission reductions in the EU, but also by studying politics of expertise production, dissemination, transformation and a political process of ETS negotiations. These processes are examined by focusing on the Polish negotiation of the amendments to the ETS Directive in 2008. The interest of the Polish case for a study of the “integration” in European environmental policy resides in the peculiar place of the energy sector in the Polish economy. More particularly, large shares of coal in electricity production (93%) within a fairly isolated, mostly state-owned and aging electricity sector made any reform of coal production and cuts on coal use immensely costly to Poland, especially when compared to other EU Member States. This generated fierce resistance to the EU’s ETS plans and set in motion a complex process of interest mobilization and formation within Poland with significant impact on final outcomes. Negotiation resulted in a gradual inclusion of the Polish power sector into the system of full CO2 emission allowances auctions within the EU ETS (70% of free emission allowances in 2013), exclusion of free emission allowances for the Polish power sector from the emission trading scheme, a revision clause: a possibility to prolong free emission allocation for the Polish power sector in 2018 and a larger share in the EU CO2 emission allowances for Poland. The thesis also shows that Europeanization is far from being a top-down process but it takes place within networks of communication between businesses, experts, governments and European officials. The thesis shows that the complex embedding of emission trade in various policy fields and interests made it difficult for Polish actors to come up with a clear framing of their interests. Actors experimented with various ways of framing their issues and objectives as national, European, global, regional, sectoral, based on common historical identities, experience, or on their fossil fuel identities. They referred to the issues of fairness, economic efficiency, moral obligations, to various development urgencies and State projects. The stakes of negotiations also involved boundaries between politics and economy in the EU, relations between national governments and the European Commission and their sovereignty in shaping conditions for the national economic growth. ETS formation seen through the lenses of the problematic Polish involvement therefore offers a characteristic case of a strategic organization of a market. Economic sociologists oppose the view that markets are ‘quasi-natural realities’ and studies them as structures actively constructed by actors. The performativity approach with its thesis that “economies are embedded in economics”, which provides this study’s main frame of analysis, is refined in this dissertation by showing the embeddedness of expertise in networks of communication that are heterogeneous, at least partly political and span various fields of actions, which are structured by relations of domination. The performativity approach also sheds light on the fact that the value of carbon dioxide, rather than being “discovered” on the market through processes of market exchange is produced through complex technologies of calculation that have to be elaborated and negotiated in the first place. Carbon dioxide valuation became a pragmatic enterprise in which actors tried to inscribe a locally calculated value of carbon dioxide into allocation devices and justify their projects. The existence of alternative propositions for organizing allocation of emission allowances shows its political character and the contingency of carbon’s value on locally defined space, time and various development priorities. For the Polish parties, a ton of Polish carbon dioxide was not commensurable with a ton of carbon dioxide produced in Western Europe. Polish government and businesses demanded ways to account for fuel composition in various European regions, for different levels of economic development and for levels of energy security granted by given schemes. Through the analysis of ETS negotiations, the thesis contributes to understanding the place of emission trade within a broader economic landscape. ETS is a tool for carrying out a transition project to a low carbon economy in the EU where companies producing low carbon products would become dominant on European markets. It is a market for a new commodity (emission allowance), which came to govern production and exchange of commodities in already existing markets, like electricity, steel, cement, glass, or aluminum. Therefore stakes related to ETS for companies operating in those markets were in fact about maintaining or advancing their competitiveness on markets for goods they previously produced. New ETS rules posed threats to the position of European industries within global markets as compared to industries operating outside of ETS. Fuel-based power producers, on the other hand, fought for preserving their dominant position within domestic electricity, against producers of renewable energies and nuclear power. In order to maintain their dominant position within those markets, companies sought to enroll national governments to protect them and engaged experts to produce expertise on ETS to contribute to organization of ETS. This dissertation contributes to economic sociology by studying the formation of a new commodity – emission allowance – as a process embedded in politics. It offers an actor-network-theory inspired empirical contribution to economic sociology. The project also contributes to sociology of markets by refining the performativity thesis and by showing that expertise is not the thing in which organization of ETS is embedded in last resort. Organization of ETS is embedded in networks of actors producing and exchanging knowledge, which come from various fields of action. Organization of ETS is also embedded in institutional arrangements of decision-making in the EU. The work also contributes to general social theory through a reflection on the relation between networks, technical devices and fields by showing how while negotiating the allocation method, actors engaged in defining and re-defining boundaries between politics and economy. They tried to justify their own proposals for emission allowances allocations by, e.g. pointing to the fact that the competing allocation methods would contaminate economy will politics. Methods for emission allowances allocation inscribed limits for political intervention and negotiations on ETS. |
| Supervisor | Kowalski, Alexandra; Vedres, Balazs |
| Department | Sociology PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2012/lis_aleksandra.pdf |
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