The Climate Change Kaleidoscope: A Contextual Perspective of Organizational Change and CO2 Markets

This paper develops a critical analysis of carbon markets in response to the conference theme of ‘capitalism in question’ and the ODC division’s calls for discussions of ‘different governance and leadership systems at the societal and organizational level’. Contemporary efforts of regulators to foster the business response to climate change focus upon the development of CO2 markets. These CO2 markets introduce a business cost relating to CO2 emissions, thus giving businesses an incentive to reduce their climate impact as part of their profit maximization objectives. The economic incentives which are introduced by CO2 markets are aligned with classical scientific-rational theories of organization change which assume that logic and efficiency are the primary drivers of organizational behavior. In this paper we adopt a contextual view of organizational change in order to evaluate the current design of CO2 markets. Our analysis suggests a number of issues which future CO2 regulation, market based or otherwise...