A Socio‐legal Analysis of an Actor‐world: The Case of Carbon Trading and the Clean Development Mechanism

Abstract

This article reviews the Kyoto Protocol's Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), and analyses how it reflects a particular international vision of climate change and its solutions. It discusses how the expectations this approach embeds have become challenged by practice, and practitioners, and how alternative models for the CDM have been put forward. The article argues that these challenges and alternatives can be understood better by borrowing Michel Callon's concept of ‘actor‐world’, in order to analyse how contrasting visions of technologies also inevitably entail conflicting ideas about the world.