Atmospheric Police: Delegated Authority in the Clean Development Mechanism
Atmospheric Police: Delegated Authority in the Clean Development Mechanism
This chapter examines why states decided to delegate key monitoring tasks to private actors in the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) of the Kyoto Protocol. It first provides an overview of the origins of the CDM before discussing the involvement of the Global Environment Facility, the World Bank, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change Secretariat, and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) in the CDM. It also presents three reasons behind delegated authority in the CDM, and specifically why private actors were selected to serve as the “atmospheric police” of the CDM. First, the private sector had relatively long-standing experience in the intricacies of measuring carbon offsets. Second, powerful states agreed that this market mechanism should be part of the Protocol, and that a third-party verifier was needed to monitor the quality of offset projects. Finally, there was a focal institution, the CDM Executive Board, to screen and oversee agents.
Keywords: delegated authority, monitoring, private actors, Clean Development Mechanism, Kyoto Protocol, Global Environment Facility, World Bank, UN Framework Convention on Climate Change Secretariat, International Organization for Standardization, carbon offsets
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