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Abstract

Meeting on the second anniversary of the Paris Agreement signing, the United Nations Climate Change Secretariat founded the Climate Chain Coalition (CCC) in 2017. Backed by a number of multi-stakeholder groups like the Blockchain for Climate Foundation, the Ottawa-based CCC promotes the use of this emergent technology as a pathway to achieving the goals of the Paris Agreement. What kind of ‘cooler’ world are blockchain-based climate projects conjuring? This article scrutinizes the shared visions materializing in particular across climate finance experiments, locating them as extensions of existing imaginaries of how financial markets can address planetary concerns. The imaginaries identified underpin these ‘cool’ technological feats yet provide only incremental improvements to existing modes of market-led climate governance that are far from the scale required to actually conjure a cooler planet.

Keywords

Climate governance blockchain technology finance

Introduction: Repositioning financial technology as climate technology?

The governance of our planet’s climate is in trouble. Decision-making by leading countries has ‘marketized’ greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction targets, leaving the bulk of activity to be largely carried by firms (Gray, 2017; Newell, 2008). Growth in green markets have, however, led to missed goals including the increasingly unachievable objective of preventing a two degree Celsius rise in global temperature set out in the 2015 Paris Agreement.¹

Shortcomings with both the input into decision-making and output in ultimate GHG reductions have generated a search for solutions to improve the overall governance of climate change. As part of a wider ‘technological turn’ in global sustainability governance, digital information communication technologies (ICTs) have become a central focus (Bernards et al., 2020). This article scrutinizes globally dispersed yet coordinated efforts to improve market-based climate governance through the re-purposing of one set of financial technologies (fintech), blockchains, as a sustainability technology (sustech).

‘The blockchain’ is a shapeshifter par excellence. Generally, blockchains consist of ‘blocks’ of peer verified digital transactions that are sequentially added together to form a ‘chain’ or ledger. Blockchains offer databases of digital transactions undertaken, verified and published in quasi-anonymous networks of users. The novelty of this set of technologies lies in their ability to draw together geographically dispersed individuals into networks enable the secure undertaking, recording and accounting for digital transactions through cryptographic and time-stamping technologies.

Blockchain applications have been widely positioned as able to improve a wide array of global problems. The intention of initial ‘cryptocurrency’, Bitcoin, was to reform global financial governance after the 2007-8 global financial crisis. More recently, efforts have been made to re-purpose the original carbon-intensive² Bitcoin blockchain application to address the problematic input and output of climate governance.

Blockchain has been most prominently positioned as a technological ‘fix’ for decision-making into and output of market-based climate by the Climate Chain Coalition (CCC). Backed by a number of multi-stakeholder groups like the Climate Ledger Initiative and the Blockchain for Climate Foundation, the Ottawa-based CCC promotes the use of this emergent technology as a pathway to achieving the goals of the 2015 Paris Agreement. Since its founding in 2017 at the United Nations Climate Change Secretariat, the CCC has coordinated experiments with blockchains amongst both large multinational corporations and start-up technology firms. In partnership and associations with one another as well as with universities, governments, and international organizations, a range of trials and ‘live’ applications of this technology in and across agricultural, energy, forestry and other industries seek to improve various aspects of climate governance. Through sub-groups focusing on ‘use cases’ in particular areas, CCC members share progress reports in order “to cooperatively support the application of distributed ledger technology (‘DLT’, including ‘the blockchain’) and related digital solutions to addressing climate change” (Climate Chain Coalition, 2020).

What kind of ‘cooler’ world do blockchain-based climate governance projects conjure? This article interrogates the ‘cooler’ world emanating from White Papers³ of CCC members and emerging⁴ across blockchain-based climate finance experiments. Financial projects are selected for analysis due to blockchain origins as a fintech. While their ultimate impacts remain uncertain, analyzing unfolding blockchain-based climate finance projects reveal both the possibilities as well as limits stemming from its origins as a financial technology. The objective is less to appraise ultimate results than to understand how efforts to repurpose this fintech as sustech are being undertaken to improve the input and output shortcomings of existing market-based climate governance arrangements. The central intention is thus to generate insights not only for those interested in blockchains, but also for researchers and practitioners to gleam whether this particular set of technological ‘silver bullet’ solution can address problems of participation in decision-making and effectiveness in meeting GHG reductions goals.

Blockchain-based climate finance solutions, this article argues, provide incremental improvements to existing forms of market-led climate governance. They afford enhanced individual participation into, and output effectiveness of, financial markets oriented towards GHG emissions reductions, primarily carbon offsets but also green bonds. Yet, these technological solutions ultimately reflect and confine the scale of such improvements within existing forms of climate governance. The imaginaries of blockchain-based climate finance projects do not materialize greater input into decision-making and output of GHG emissions at any scale sufficient to tackle an urgent planetary crisis. Blockchain-based climate finance imaginaries at best pull off the ‘cool’ feat of re-purposing this fintech as ‘sustech’, offering incremental possibilities for improving market-based climate governance. At worst, ‘cool’ blockchain-based technological solutionis distract from various alternative responses to cool the planet by overcoming the limits of existing market-based climate governance.⁵

This article elaborates these arguments across five sections. A first section outlines the concept of imaginaries drawn upon from Science and Technology Studies (STS). Two subsequent sections trace the imaginaries that have informed climate governance and blockchain applications. Their combination in geographically dispersed efforts to reposition this fintech as sustech are then critically interrogated in a fourth section. A final section concludes by calling for further research assessing whether potential pathways for alternative imaginaries of blockchain-based climate governance exist beyond the finance-centered applications examined here.

Imaginaries: Social, technical, political

Imaginaries ‘render concrete’ visions generated by individuals. This occurs in two ways: first, by being shared amongst collections of individuals; second, by materializing as technical artefacts. The socio-technical nature of imaginaries emphasised in STS (McNeil et al., 2017) involves a ‘grounding’ of individual visions in (1) the social and (2) the material. The socio-technical emphasis of imaginaries in STS in turn enables a broader analysis of the political nature of the particular visions that inform seemingly depoliticized projects, such as for climate governance explored in this article.

The social grounding of imaginaries involves individual vision becoming shared between collection of individuals. Imaginaries are profoundly social: they provide “links which stakeholders can use to communicate with one other to come to agree on standards and shared practices… [imaginaries] have a social purpose of enhancing communication within large-scale collaborations” (Kow and Lustig, 2018). Imaginaries translate individual visions into socially intelligible forms. Interrogating which individual vision becomes shared amongst groups can reveal political stakes in processes that may otherwise seem depoliticized. Asking how particular imaginaries become dominant in the case of climate action, attunes analysis to the “considerable contestation” over visions that “are closely linked to the ways in which institutions and economic activity are organized and structured, and the ways people think they ought to be organized and structured” (Levy and Spicer, 2013: 660). The social nature of imaginaries, in short, points to crucial exercises of power. The dominance of certain visions amongst leads alternative visions to remain just that: visions that are not widely rendered concrete. Beyond abstract machinations of individual psychologies then the social focus of imaginaries alerts us to the politics of which visions are shared and in what manners.

The technical grounding of imaginaries, meanwhile, involves a focus on their materiality. Imaginaries are rendered concrete not only through the social sharing of particular visions, but through what Jasanoff and Kim (2009, 120) emphasize as the “design and fulfilment of nation-specific scientific and/or technological projects”. Specific visions of an ‘ozone hole’ shared amongst scientific communities materialized through satellite images (Grevsmühl, 2014). New technologies not only ground collectively shared visions, but influence which visions gain social currency and are shared amongst individuals in the first place. Technologies also influence the shared visions materializing in climate governance, such as emergent “speculative technologies” (Bear, 2020) that render concrete “preliminary processes of speculation” and “future financial/technological outcomes” (Faustino, 2019: 478). Tracing particular visions and the manners in which they are shared amongst particular groups of actors injects “a more sustained empirical basis to the suggestions that technological development mobilizes dreams, imagination, visions, narratives and, sometimes, some sort of counterpower” (ibid).

Together, the social and technical nature of imaginaries emphasized in STS enables an analysis of politics and possibilities in two main ways. First and foremost, socio-technical imaginaries help locate which visions, amongst a plurality, are shared amongst the diverse members of transnational groupings, such as the CCC. Second, socio-technical imaginaries focus analytical attention on how shared visions of climate governance materialize, or fail to do so. Teasing out the ways in which some individual visions are rendered concrete and come to stand “in tension or in a productive dialectical relationship” (Jasanoff, 2015: 4) with others helps consider the kinds of patterns of continuity and change that the next section turns to in focusing on climate governance.

Imaginaries of climate governance

Visions are necessary but insufficient conditions for the formation of imaginaries. A vision remains an individual affair if not shared with others as well as materially embedded in policy documents, technologies and other concrete artifacts. An STS-informed understanding of imaginaries draws attention to the politics of visions informing climate governance materializing at varying scales and extents over the past half century as market-centered vision of “entrepreneurial” and “bottom-up experimental climate action” (Sengers et al., 2020) materialized in green financial markets.

Encouraged by leading states over decades, today “venture capital and carbon markets allocates a primary role to the private sector in addressing climate change” (Levy and Spicer, 2013: 664). The “common strategy” in contemporary environmental governance, as Katz-Rosene and Paterson (2018: 50) succinctly describe it, “has been to create financial markets in environmental services as (purportedly) a means to address the problem at hand”, such as climate change. This decentering of climate governance from state to financial market activity has however been guided by a vision that neither states nor the “market alone can generate an equitable distribution of resources or halt environmental degradation” (Bäckstrand and Lövbrand, 2006: 56). Market-based climate governance has been enabled by “cross-sectoral cooperation between market, state and civil society” (ibid) and has materialized via public-private partnerships and multi-stakeholder arrangements loosely coordinated by the Group of 20, United Nations, World Economic Forum, and a number of international organizations (Skovgaard, 2021). Partnerships between leading states and firms in such ‘multi-stakeholderism’ worked to generate market-centered governance rather than state-led ‘Green Deals’ and forms of ‘Green Keynesianism’. Like markets more widely, climate markets did not magically spring up. They were driven by inter-state agreements since the 1992 Kyoto Protocol that worked in practice to subordinate state-centered visions of climate governance to market-centered visions. The latter materialized activities geared towards achieving reductions of GHG emissions via a “large-scale – albeit uneven – retraction of state responsibility for economic life” (Christophers et al., 2020: 93).

Market-centered climate governance nevertheless remained limited in both the range of input participation facilitated and output reductions in GHG emissions generated. On the input side, decision-making has largely remained dominated by large multinational firms and states. On the output side, aggregate global GHG emissions have steadily risen outside of recessions, including during the Covid-19 crisis (Stoddard et al., 2021; Bhanumati et al., 2022). This constrained input and output has generated patchwork climate markets segregated by national jurisdictions that have been described in these pages as “fragmented, and decentralized, operating without central coordination” (Abbott 2012: 571). Myriad climate markets have overlaps in some places, but for the most lack interoperability both within and across national borders.

Illustrating the fractured nature market-based climate governance imaginaries are carbon credits. Carbon offset markets emerged from the prompting of states and international organizations like the United Nation’s UNFCCC that verify and register certified emissions reductions (CERs). Both primary and secondary markets for trading registered emissions offsets, as well as related markets in derivatives and securitized carbon products like futures and forward contracts, evolved in parallel with (inter-)state financial regulation. Yet (inter-)state carbon market regulation has quite consistently reflected the preferences of financial firm interests yielded through the International Emissions Trading Association (IETA) and other industry bodies (Helleiner and Thistlethwaite, 2013). The patchwork of national and regional carbon markets across the European Union, with its Emission Trading Scheme, as well as North America where the Western Climate Initiative spans US states and Canadian provinces nevertheless have what Knox-Hayes (2009) argues is a “command center” in the leading global financial centers of London and Manhattan. Market concentration along with the vast complexity of markets seemingly “designed not to be understood by ordinary people” (Lohmann and Böhm, 2012) have long fostered critiques that their rampant manipulation and output are geared more towards fuelling financial speculation and which at best foster unclear, and at worst negative, impacts on carbon emissions reductions (Pearse and Böhm, 2014; Spash, 2010).

In attempting to ameliorate the now well recognized output and input limits of market-based climate governance, technologies generally and fintechs in particular have been widely envisioned as playing key improvement roles. This ‘turn to (fin)tech’ is prominently illustrated by the 2015 Paris Agreement call for overcoming the patchwork of markets in carbon trading through market-based technological solutions. Assumptions that “the acceleration of technological innovation” will limit the warming of the planet have been built into key climate models, like those of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2018). Within this wider ‘technological turn’, blockchains emerged as solutions to the various limitations of market-based climate governance in carbon credits and climate finance more generally. The hopes and expectations placed on technologies like blockchain, require urgent examination in the context of climate crisis. The next section sketches the broad visions guiding blockchain as an decentralized connector of fragmented markets that materialized initially as fintech in 2009 and as sustech a decade thereafter.

Imaginaries of blockchain governance

The main vision of blockchain governance is one of decentralized market input and output entirely detached from centralized organizations, whether states, international organizations or central banks. Blockchain developers, as critical studies of this set of technologies often note, were “originally motivated by imaginations of utopian online societies (i.e., libertarianism)” (Kow and Lustig 2018). Such libertarian visions of the “right-wing politics” (Golumbia, 2016) guided developers of the initial and still most prominent application of the technology to Bitcoin. The Bitcoin white paper infamously critiqued the state-based bailouts of large banks undertaken at the height of the 2008 global financial crisis (Nakamoto 2008). The imaginary underpinning the initial materialization of Bitcoin is one described by Herian (2018) as intended to “make self-regulation a given for many stakeholders based on the assumption that it provides the most suitable or ‘natural’ regulatory option to fit a plurality of possible contexts that often transcend formal regulatory boundaries and jurisdictions”. This imaginary of market self-regulation stands in stark contrast to climate governance imaginaries where (inter-)state organizations have served as key instigators of market-based governance. Blockchain-based market governance is instead regarded as formed and functioning independently of centralized organizations, materializing purely decentralized output out of decentralized input.

The dominant imaginary of blockchain governance informing Bitcoin and later climate finance experiments with the technology is one discounting state, central bank and other centralized third-party roles in spurring and supporting markets. The peer-to-peer output that is the first ‘cryptocurrency’ facilitating markets for monetary-like tokens emerges through decentralized input between individuals that do not know or trust one another (Faria, 2019). Bitcoin transactions are undertaken, verified and published not by any third party organizations but amongst geographically dispersed users themselves. A form of algorithmically-generated consensus called ‘proof-of-work’ enables network participants to compete for the rewards of a share of each transaction undertaken by being first to solve complex equations in the decentralized verification process. This particular form of competitive governance input offers “no need to try to cooperate” and stems merely from “trust in markets” (Swartz 2017: 93–4). In turn, the governance output of decentralized markets consists of individual network participants, not intermediary organizations. The vision conjured first in Bitcoin and subsequent cryptocurrencies is one where market governance improvements stems from both expanding input to individuals in ways that achieve more efficient outputs in the form of ‘self-regulating’ competition entirely decentered from centralized organization.

Paradoxically, the vision of decentralized governance improvement informing Bitcoin materialized highly concentrated cryptocurrency markets. Major firms and ‘pools’ of producers, and so-called ‘whales’ dominate markets through ownership concentration have been well documented (Makarov and Schoar 2021). This market concentration spawned further attempts to materialize the decentralized governance promise of blockchain. Projects like BitNation, launched in 2014, extended a vision that “intends, in theory, to sidestep governments” to “a nation that, aside from being borderless and voluntary, would be competition based” (Faria 2019: 123–124). So-called ‘decentralized automated organizations’ (DAOs) originated in 2016 with a crowdfunding platform called The DAO. Here once again, however, centralization re-appeared as glitches that led to a need for ‘great individuals’ to become ‘first among equals’ amongst a user base unable to collectively attend to technical problems and generate decentralized output through decentralized input (Campbell-Verduyn and Huetten 2019).

Dominant hyper-market blockchain governance is contrasted by more marginal experimentation with the technology seeking to materialize more “crypto-commonist” visions (Husain et al., 2020). Co-op Coin for example generates the kind of alternative to market-based governance described by Scott et al. (2017: 10) as having “a much stronger focus on collaborative solidarity” which stresses “mutual cooperation and solidarity, rather than individual competition”. Instead of the hyper-competition fostered in Bitcoin’s algorithmic consensus model, input is achieved in FairCoin through the so-called Cooperatively Validated Nodes (CVNs) of so-called ‘ecological blockchain’ design (Dallyn and Frenzel, 2021). Similar experiments with blockchains include ‘solidarity cryptocurrencies’ (Diniz et al., 2021) and ‘distributed collaborative organizations’ (DCOs) that, respectively, stand in stark contrast with Bitcoin and DAOs (Scott et al., 2017). An early environmental-related example of such alternative blockchain governance was the “DAO of whales” charity that sought to autonomously distribute funds to a user-decided scientific research group studying a specific pod of orcas in the Pacific Northwest (Dupont 2018). Further examples are found in Open Distributed Cooperatives (DisCOs). These are “are locally grounded, commons-oriented and transnationally-networked cooperatives focused on social and environmental work” in which “production is guided not by profit but by social and environmental priorities” (DisCO.coop et al.: 31–33). The visions shared across this type of blockchain project explicitly prioritize socialibility and ecological needs. Yet, despite attempts to apply the technology for humanitarian action and foreign aid projects (Reinsberg 2019; Zwitter and Boisse-Despiaux 2018), such alternative visions have not grown or ‘scaled’ beyond local and niche applications. Alternatives to the dominant imaginary of blockchain governance as materializing visions of market improvement via hyper competition are few and far between, including in climate finance applications of this technology as the next section details.

Incremental and insufficient improvements in blockchain-based climate finance

Rather than invoking and materializing alternatives to market-centered visions at any greater scale, blockchain-based climate governance projects are informed by imaginaries that are persistently limited in their attempts to connect fragmented markets by conjuring decentralized input and output. More than just visions existing solely in the minds of ambitious entrepreneurs, imaginaries inform efforts to improve the world. In the case of blockchain climate finance experiments coordinated by the CCC, particular visions of improvement guide projects that, while still emergent, have materialized in ways reflecting continuities underlying existing climate governance arrangements in unexpected ways.

This section identifies the imaginaries informing blockchain-based climate finance and its limits. It shows how forms of market-based climate governance spurred and supported by centralized organizations are extended in blockchain climate finance projects that purport to avoid centralization. As the previous section noted, blockchain climate finance projects seek to consolidate and improve the fragmented and inefficient nature of climate markets through decentralized input and output. Yet, despite the considerable hype surrounding start-up projects established harnessing blockchain, the patterns of governance here remain within existing market arrangements that have proved insufficient for addressing urgent planetary climate crisis.

In tracing the process of “collective vision formation” (Faustino, 2019) and its materialization across blockchain-based climate finance projects, this section confirms and extends the findings of a small but growing literature investigating similar experiments with this set of technologies. Beyond promotional and technical feasibility studies (e.g. Franke et al., 2020; Marke, 2018; Schletz et al., 2020; Schultz and Feist, 2021), three existing contributions point to the need for further investigation of the imaginaries informing blockchain-based climate governance more generally. First, is a theoretical assessment of climate governance projects against a liberal “normative standard […] to judge blockchain-based global governance imaginaries” (Reinsberg, 2021: 303). In surveying emerging blockchain applications across sectors, Reinsberg, (2021: 289) finds the technology to have the “potential to instantiate decentralized governance platforms that implement liberal ideals of a ‘fully-automated liberalism’ – whereby individual actors and the autonomous contracts that these actors create would work to achieve common objectives”. Second, Hull et al., (2021) compare UNFCC and World Bank blockchain conceptualizations, finding that “far from transforming current modes of governance, it [the technology] instead privileges and reinforces the currently dominant technocratic, market-friendly and procedural approach to multilateral climate governance”. Third, Schulz et al. (2020: 2) conduct an exploratory investigation of the CCC and conclude that “more critical investigation regarding the possibilities and limitations of blockchain applications to support progress on sustainable development is warranted”. Schulz et al., (2020: 2) indicate the need for further interrogation of what they identify as “cultural imaginaries”.

In advancing an emerging interdisciplinary literature, two subsections here identify and interrogate imaginaries emerging across blockchain-based climate finance experiments undertaken by and between members of the CCC that seek to address existing limits of climate governance. A first sub-section assesses efforts to improve governance input improvements by enhancing individual access to financial markets. A second subsection assesses output improvements offered by real-time accounting for carbon emissions reductions. Together, these sub-sections point to continuities in the imaginaries informing blockchain-based climate finance projects that offer incremental and ultimately insufficient improvements on the limits of market-based climate governance.

Enhancing participatory input by ‘widening access to finance block by block’

Blockchain-enabled financial systems could potentially revolutionize capital access and unlock new investment potential thanks to the possibility of open and transparent access to markets. This can sustainably raise trillions of new sources, thanks to the “token economy” (Agudelo 2019).

Broadening input into decision-making via enhanced access to, and participation in, financial markets is a first characteristic of blockchain-based climate finance imaginaries.⁶ Experiments with this technology seek to enable greater access to decision-making by promoting individual participation in green financial markets. In “opening the market to a wider investor base” (Agudelo, 2019) blockchain climate finance applications are conjured as “crowdfunding and peer-to-peer financial transactions in support of climate action” (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, 2017). Specifically, these projects seek to enable participation by decentralized networks of individuals rather than the concentrated large transnational corporations and governments that have historically dominated climate finance markets. This vision of enhanced participation materializes in two sets of blockchain applications: 1) through ‘climate tokens’ and 2) through ‘climate finance platforms’. This sub-section shows how both experiments paradoxically reinforce the very centralization and limits of climate governance they are conjured as overcoming.

Climate tokens

The vision of individual market access shared across blockchain based climate finance experiments materializes in an initial instance with so-called ‘green tokens’. These tokens are digital representations of a range of ‘green’ objects and activities. They are intended to incentivize market participation by anyone, anywhere with access to the Internet, through provisions of monetary-like rewards from trading digital tokens. The earliest such schemes appeared around 2014 seeking to spur renewable energy production, such as solar electricity with SolarCoin. Similar projects like ECOCoin and Carbon Coin incentivize tree planting by offering monetary-like rewards of new digital tokens. These and comparable tokens are traded for one another in new financial markets where climate action is said to be broadened to anyone worldwide with Internet access.

Related iterations of this first form of climate finance are ‘native network tokens’. These are digital tokens traded within specific blockchain networks geared towards improving existing climate finance products, such as carbon credits. ClimateCoin (2017) for example attempts to improve access to such markets through the ‘stapling’ of carbon credits to ‘CO2 tokens’ traded in this digital network. This ‘stapling’ involves incentivizing individuals to authenticate and trade carbon credits through the rewards of ‘Unique Fungible Tokens’ provided by the likes of the Blockchain for Climate Foundation, a Canadian-based network promoting “international collaboration on climate change by connecting the national carbon accounts of the world” (Pallant, 2018). Other such market access improvement schemes include CarbonX, another ‘native network token’ that incentivises carbon credit trading in a blockchain network co-founded by consultancy ConsenSys and Canadian technology evangelists Don and Alex Tapscott (PRNewswire, 2017). Further examples of carbon credit trading facilitated through digital token exchange in blockchain networks include the 1PLANET native network token, a “digital eco-commodity that represents reductions in CO2 emissions”, or carbon credits, and which are exchangeable in a blockchain network that ostensibly “democratizes access to global carbon markets by tokenizing carbon credits” (Climate Futures, n.d.). GEAR Tokens, native to the “Green Energy and Renewables” blockchain-based marketplace, are also conjured as democratizing individual access to carbon credits (Global Newswire, 2019).

The vision of enhanced individual participation in climate finance materialized across climate tokens is one extending to individual investors possibilities to participate in markets for climate products that have been dominated by large (non-)state organizations. They promise access to new markets for trading novel digital representations of ‘green’ activities. The shared vision of access here seeks to “lower the barrier to entry” (Green, 2018) for individuals to make decisions in markets for carbon credits along with other ‘green’ financial products and services. This vision of enhanced input in seamless, open global markets however is ultimately constrained to “opportunities” that materialize through the consumption and exchange of green tokens in certain national jurisdictions (Green, 2018). Fragmentation in climate finance markets is not significantly improved by blockchain-based projects the likes of SolarCoin, which expanded to only four jurisdictions since its inception in 2014, or by projects like United Nations Development Program-backed ‘climate cryptocurrency’ Cedar Coin that incentivizes tree planting in one country, Lebanon (Joe, 2019).⁷

There are thus continuities in the real-world limits to the scale of enhanced participation in blockchain climate tokens. These constraints are not new and have been widely recognized in business media generally as well as in blockchain studies specifically. Faustino (2019: 487 italics added) for instance notes how “[t]he futuristic worldview according to which a user can shape her organization’s governance architecture in a modular way, launch her own currency, and exert full control over her own personalized algorithms cannot be attained without the technical infrastructures that support it”. In proceeding to further explore these wider infrastructures, the analysis now turns to a second set of blockchain-based climate finance applications said to be “Widening Access to Finance Block by Block” (HSBC and Sustainable Digital Finance Alliance, 2019).

Climate finance blockchain platforms

The vision of enhanced individual access in blockchain-based climate finance also materializes across digital platforms that incrementally improve existing limits of market-based governance input. What platforms like the now bankrupt Israel-based Solar DAO facilitate is the increased participation of individuals in funds that automatically allocate investments towards green projects like solar energy production. Automated ‘Do it Yourself’ platforms seek to make accessible products that have, to date, been traded by larger institutional investors, bringing the like of carbon credits into the reach of individual investors. Singapore-based Carbon Grid Protocol (n.d.), for example, enables more “widespread adoption of carbon credits in blockchain as a valuable and readily tradeable asset class”. In “connecting carbon to life”, as another Singapore-based blockchain start-up called Poseidon sells its platform, daily individual activities are connected to climate finance enabling the average person possibilities “to personally offset” their carbon footprints (Del Castillo, 2018). While largely geared towards carbon credits, blockchain-based attempts at increasing “accessibility to issuance” also seek to expand individual access to the likes of green bonds (HSBC and Sustainable Digital Finance Alliance, 2019).

Blockchain-based platforms enable geographically dispersed individuals to not only trade but also to create new climate finance products. The platform Greeneum (n.d.), for example, permits individuals to develop Decentralized Applications (DApps) that provide “incentives to use renewable energy and reduce carbon emission”. The UK-based Fasset (n.d.) Enterprise Platform provides a “marketplace” for owners of renewable energy and other sustainable infrastructure owners to “tokenize” their assets in raising “climate capital” while allowing individual investors “to contribute to the achievement of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)”. Furthermore, Adaptation Ledger, created by the founder and co-chair of the CCC,⁸ is a platform

that creates clear incentives for developing standards (defined broadly) for climate adaptation to organize the essential tools (technologies, practice, metrics, exchange mechanisms and finance, in other words, “climate services”) required to support effective global action on climate adaptation… [by enabling users to undertake] the applied creation of a suite of tools and testbeds to better align adaptation solutions and mobilize adaptation finance (Adaption Ledger n.d.)

These blockchain-based projects do broaden individual participation in climate finance. Yet they only incrementally improve on limits to market-based governance input. Projects such as the Russia-based Integral Platform for Climate Initiatives do “help make climate finance market more inclusive”, through what are effectively live trials of complex and pre-set technical solutions. These for instance layer so-called smart contracts⁹ in “blockchainizing” voluntary international cooperation and other criteria of the Paris Agreement (DAO ICPI 2018).¹⁰ The automation provided by blockchain-based climate finance platforms, however, does not provide wider participation to the very setting the rules generated for allocating investment to green projects and the credit decisions they structure. A “veil of transparency” (Bernards et al., 2023 this issue) both enables and at the same time limits individual participation in climate finance markets. Decision-making over market structures and rules are far less transparent and accessible without a deep level of technical knowledge required to navigate these fast-moving technological projects. Beyond the insider coders and engineers that develop these projects, individual investors are rarely provided straightforward possibilities for shaping the code that structures credit decision-making. Rather, the underlying protocols typically remain controlled by concentrated cliques of ‘insider’ decision-makers, a pattern more widely apparent in blockchain-based finance generally that has been dominated by ‘whales’, first movers and other large players.

In sum, the vision of inclusion materializing in blockchain-based climate finance projects reflects much of the same limits to existing market-based forms of climate governance. The persistence of concentrated input into decision-making is linked to a second set of continuities limiting the imaginary of improvement in blockchain-based climate finance. The next section turns to scrutinize the greater output efficiencies said to materialize from decentralized visions of climate finance being coordinated by the CCC.

Enhancing climate governance output via market efficiencies

We continue moving towards a society that seeks to digitize all sorts of interactions, building a parallel digital world next to our analog reality. That is why establishing a system that can improve the efficiency of our transactions while lowering our environmental footprint is key. This is another planet: the digital one. Our planet B is Blockchain and must lead to a better one. (Agudelo, 2019, bold in original)

Imaginaries of blockchain-based climate finance are also limited in the scale of efficiency improvements provided to the main intended output of market governance: GHG emission reductions. The experiments coordinated by the CCC offer only incremental improvements in improved accounting for emissions reductions. This sub-section interrogates in a first step how ‘real-time accounting’ conjures constrained sets of output efficiencies before a second step highlights limits to such ‘decentralized’ solutions.

Real-time accounting of emissions reductions

“Trading CO2 reductions”, speculated the former Director of Climate Change at the World Bank James Close (quoted in DAO ICPI, 2018), “may be much more efficient while using distributed ledger technologies”. Echoing the imaginary of efficiency improvement through its Mining and Metals Blockchain Initiative, the World Economic Forum coordinated a number of blockchain-based trials for tracing carbon emissions between a half dozen large multinational firms (Partz 2020; see also Bernards et al., 2020 this issue). Even more ambitiously, blockchain-based climate accounting solutions provided by the Singapore-based start-up Poseidon (n.d.) are marketed as being able “for the first time in history, to precisely address the environmental cost of any transaction”. Competitor Regen Ledger also provides what it calls a “Balance Sheet for Earth” (Booman et al., 2020: 7).

Common to imaginaries of climate finance improvement surrounding blockchain’s capacity to better trace and verify market-based action are more efficient forms of impact reporting. Here global investors are said to be able to more precisely account for their ethical investments (see more widely Dimmelmeier in this themed issue). Blockchain-based climate finance is conjured as a way to better “authenticate a richer, more accurate global ledger of a company’s actual social and environmental performance, providing society with a more realistic assessment of its impact” (Stoddard, 2018). This common vision materializes two overlaps with visions of enhanced participation by both firms and individuals. In a first instance, the vision of efficiency improvement materializes via corporate partnerships between existing large multinationals and start-up firms. Small firms like Provenance and Climate Analytics provide “carbon transparency” services that measure GHG emissions of firms operating in and across global supply chains (Manivannan, 2019; see also Bernards et al., in this themed issue). Similarly, Cayman Islands-based start-up Allinfra and its partner, the Big Four accounting firm KPMG, offer a “verifiable trail of emissions and offsets records on blockchain” (PRNewswire 2020). In a second instance, visions of efficiency improvements materialize through enhanced individual participation. For instance, so-called ‘Proof of Impact’ blockchain protocols developed by South Africa-based Ixo Foundation provides its users with rewards of tokens for authenticating emissions reductions claims on its Global Impact Ledger (Braden 2019).

Automation is central to actualizing the imaginaries of efficiency improvement informing blockchain-based climate finance projects. EcoSmart-Protocol, a blockchain developed by Hong-Kong based Veridium Labs, automates calculations of corporate environmental impacts to produce what it argues is the “correct” number of carbon offsets required to achieve net carbon neutrality (Orcutt 2018). Morocco-based climate finance advisory and investment firm harnesses blockchain to “track compliance with treaties and automatically release incentives, such as tax credits, once certain targets are met” (Carter, 2018). What ‘real-time’ automation is said to offer is “the accuracy of impact measurement, efficiency of portfolio management and profitability of investments”, as Russian-based Evercity puts it (Shadrin 2020). Materializing across globally dispersed blockchain climate finance projects then is a shared vision of technological enhancement in “the ability to explicitly track the ecological impacts of our actions right alongside the financial” (Booman et al., 2020: 7). The imaginary of efficiency improvement in climate finance is one of faster and better measurement, best summarized in business magazine Forbes’ promotion of blockchain for enhancing “the entire process of accounting for a company’s carbon emission and offsetting that pollution” (Del Castillo, 2018).

Of course, improved accuracy of measurement does not automatically translate into enhanced market-based climate governance at the scale required to reduce emissions and materially improve on a poor track record of missed targets. The stress on efficiencies focuses on accounting for the trees but missed the forest in providing little-to-no consideration of the Jevons paradox, namely that efficiency gains through technologies can increase the very emmissions of GHGs and worsen outcomes of climate governance. Generating a potentially more accurate– and larger pool-of funds is far from the only output issue facing climate finance. The distribution of climate finance funds – where and how they are distributed globally-is another issue that is yet again left to the very markets that heralded inaccuracies and missed emissions reductions targets in the first instance. Such paradoxes become futher apparent in the final element of the limited imaginaries of improvement to climate governance that underpin blockchain-based sustech.

Decentralizing what, when and how?

Imaginaries of blockchain-based climate finance are limited in their main governance output (GHG emissions reductions) since they paradoxically reproduce market concentration. The stress on decentralization in Bitcoin’s initial proposal to bypass (central) banks is widely echoed across blockchain-based climate finance efforts to ‘disrupt’ existing green market intermediaries. This is where “financiers act as intermediaries between buyers and sellers of carbon allowances […], making carbon markets operate much like any standard financial market” in which further actors like auditors and accountants serve as third parties (Katz-Rosene and Paterson, 2018: 97). By contrast, blockchain climate finance platforms like Singapore-based New Era Energy seek “to open up carbon credit markets by making them more transparent and accountable, while removing the need for intermediaries such as brokers or funds” (Deign, 2018 emphasis added). Similar blockchains application seek to enhance the efficiency of climate finance by getting “beyond the self-interest of management and company-paid consultants” (Stoddard, 2018). Removing not only these centralized actors, but the very need for these and other “third-parties”, is conjured as enhancing governance output through reductions in the “costs involved in verifying transactions” (Climate Trade, n.d.). That decentralized peer verification of transactions of carbon credits, green bonds and the like are conjured as necessarily entailing reductions in GHG emissions is taken at face value. This is despite the widespread critiques noted above that such forms of climate finance fail to meaningfully reduce GHG emissions generally and carbon emission specifically.

Whether blockchain-based climate finance actually reduces GHG emissions is shrouded in the complexity. Many White Papers of CCC members contain a high degree of murkiness surrounding basic questions of ‘who acts’ and exactly how. Many blockchain climate finance projects echo the wider paradox that attempts to ‘distribute’ governance through this set of technologies end up simply constructing new intermediaries. This is particular apparent in blockchain-based attempts at “building linkages across markets” for climate products (DAO IPCI, n.d.: 4) puts it. Projects like Estonian-headquartered blockchain Earth Ledger (n.d. emphasis added) claim that “Anyone Can Participate” in a “positive social and environmental impact platform”, yet only “incentivizes verified users to work together towards the restoration of our Planet”. Similar forms of so-called ‘distributed’ output are found at the DAO IPCI (n.d.) where “Operators” of climate finance applications are granted control over the following: “Approval of new Ledgers and issuance of independently assured Units in the amount within the established limit; Approval of New Issuer’s access to trading (Marketplace); Approval of the Accredited Auditors List”. The question of who authorizes the ‘operators’ and verifies users is often side-stepped. Such questions awkwardly point to elements of centralization in projects intended to be decentralized or ‘distributed’. The fact that many of the ‘new’ distributed points of authority are occupied by ‘old’ centralized actors was illustrated at the ‘live launch’ of leading climate finance blockchain applications. The DAO IPCI itself for instance launch saw ‘big green’ NGOs, as well as current and former official Director for Climate Change at the World Bank attend an event entitled “Decentralized Integrity: Climate Finance and Carbon Markets” at the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

The key point here is despite the previously noted emphasis on accounting, who, how and what actual contributions blockchain climate projects make to GHG emissions reductions are all very murky. A prominent example here is Carbon Grid Protocol (2018: 8), a project mobilizing a “Proof-of-Green” consensus model undertaken by Singapore’s New Era Energy and supported by both the Climate Chain Coalition and the UNFCCC. Here individuals represented as “Carbon Grid Authority Nodes” serve as “independent and accredited validators that have previous experience in CDM or VCS-related protocols, or exhibit, host, or carry out green or renewable energy-related projects, events, or initiatives”. These nodes, in turn, grant users access to what is billed as its “digital gateway to green projects & DApps”.

Like all sustech solutions, blockchain climate finance projects may enable GHG emissions reductions. As this section has argued, however, there are important tensions and limits to market-based climate governance unaddressed in the imaginaries informing these projects. Most evidently, a stress on achieving efficiencies through decentralization re-creates centralization. This is just one pathology of climate governance that is extended in supposedly decentralized blockchain-based applications. More significantly perhaps is that ‘real-time accounting’ may work more to enable financial speculation than rapid GHG emission reductions. Continuities with the casino-like nature of finance more generally are underlined by the kinds of outrageous 50,066.87 annual percentage yields offered by projects whose stated goal is to bid up the prices of carbon credits by trading of digital tokens representing a tonne of carbon offsets, such as Klima DAO, (Sharma, 2021). These speculative concerns and the related “loss of environmental integrity” of supposedly CO2 reduction projects were even raised by the global carbon trading professional body (International Emissions Trading Association, 2022: 6). These worries arose at the same time as a Swiss-based blockchain infrastructure start-up called Toucan Protocol was reported to have become the world’s leading purchaser of carbon offsets (Rathi and White, 2022). The context of speculative trial and error experimentation growing to an ever scale points to the need for on-going research tracing and scrutinizing efforts at resolving, or at least limiting, tensions between efficiency gains geared towards speculation versus those for actual GHG emissions reductions.

Conclusion

What kind of ‘cooler’ world then are blockchain-based climate finance conjuring? This article argued that ‘cool’ experimentation repositioning fintech as sustech only incrementally contributes to cooling a rapidly heating planet. Materializing in pilots of and partnerships between members of the Ottawa-based Climate Chain Coalition (CCC), blockchain climate finance projects provide improved access to, and enhanced efficiencies in, markets for existing climate products, such as carbon credits. At best, these market governance improvements (a) incrementally enhance input participation by individuals and smaller firms, as well as (b) help to better account for some GHG emissions reductions. At worse, though, blockchain-based climate finance projects distract from the materialization of alternative visions, such as those seeking to more drastically widen input participation and scale GHG emissions reductions through far less market-oriented or ‘marketized’ forms of climate governance.

The dominant imaginaries informing blockchain-based climate finance projects rehash and extend visions of market access and efficiency that have failed in addressing existing shortcomings of climate governance. Their continuing stress on individual access to, and accounting efficiency of, climate markets is contrasted with urgent needs for far more drastic changes at greater scales than currently offered by market-based climate finance that blockchain-based sustech only incrementally improves upon. These imaginaries of market improvement are also contrasted by alternative “crypto-commonist” (Husain et al., 2020) visions that have thus far failed to scale beyond small activist communities.

Further scholarly scrutiny is thus needed to continually interrogate imaginaries underpinning on-going initiatives aimed at re-positioning financial technologies like blockchain as ‘sustech’. Research on technological solutions to the limits of market governance should examine whether similar or different visions are materializing in more or less novel manners. In particular, further studies can attempt to identify possible alternative visions of climate governance that do widen participation while improving outcomes in ways that are not merely reliant on live market trials of novel technologies (Campbell-Verduyn and Huetten 2019). Blockchain experiments that materialize visions beyond the imaginaries identified in the climate finance projects examined in this article may arise and should be given attention along with the less finance-centred blockchain experimentation coordinated by the CCC in the energy or forestry sectors. Existing blockchain-based climate projects are not all confined to carbon trading. For instance, projects promoted by the World Economic Forum (2018) seek to more widely enable the “[p]eer-to-peer trading of natural resources or permits” for water extraction and timber production.

In assessing the self-described ‘disruptiveness’ of other ‘sustech’ applications of this technology beyond finance future research could also aim to draw empirically beyond industry media and white papers that, as this article has confirmed, have the tendency to “regurgitate the imaginaries of blockchain projects without any critical reflection” (Husain et al., 2020). Instead, there may be more marginal blockchain-based sustech projects not being covered by industry press or having official support from the CCC or UNFCCC, organizations that continue to promote highly speculative applications of this technology such as “clean nonfungible tokens” (Sarkar,2022). Overall, there is much for future research to examine in assessing whether on-going ‘cool’ technological experimentation are actually fulfilling the goal of cooling the planet.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Earlier versions benefited from insightful feedback from the journal reviewers and editor, as well as participants in the December 2019 University of Warwick workshop “Exploring Technology-Led Private Experiments in ESG and Sustainable Governance”, the October 2020 Annual Political Science Workshops of the Low Countries, and a November 2020 research colloquium at the Käte Hamburger Kolleg Centre for Global Cooperation Research, University of Duisburg-Essen. A research fellowship at KHK/GCR21, along with research assistance by Peter C. Jager and Erwin Voloder is gratefully acknowledged. The usual disclaimers apply.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Malcolm Campbell-Verduyn

Notes

Malcolm Campbell-Verduyn is assistant professor in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands. His research combines a general focus on ideas and materiality with a specific interest in the roles of non-state actors, technologies and technical artefacts in contemporary global governance. He is the author of Professional Authority After the Global Financial Crisis (2017, Palgrave MacMillan) and editor of Bitcoin and Beyond: Cryptocurrencies, Blockchains and Global Governance (2018, Routledge).

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