Governing CO2 Emissions in Delhi, India: The Clean Development Mechanism and the Informal Recycling Sector

There is a consensus among policy makers that climate change must be addressed through global governance frameworks based on the measurement and reduction of CO₂ emissions. This ‘carbon control regime’ at the global scale requires cooperation from municipal governments whose task is to monitor and enforce its implementation locally. Scholarly research on metropolises in the global South tends to focus on policies aimed at adapting to climate change, and this paper seeks to contribute to a growing body of scholarship focused on the efforts of municipal governments in the global South to mitigate CO₂ emissions. I examine the impact of the UNFCCC’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) on solid waste management in Delhi, India. The main argument of this paper is that the CDM has contributed to the emergence of an environmental urban governance regime based on calculating and reducing CO₂ emissions. This data fetishism obscures the relatively high recycling rates achieved by Delhi’s large informal sector, which is ubiquitous but difficult-to-measure. This has justified a dramatic shift in Delhi’s waste management strategy, as plans to build sanitary landfills have been abandoned in favor of waste-to-energy incinerators, three of which have been approved by the CDM. This policy shift has precipitated conflict over the ownership and control of waste between small-scale informal enterprises and large formal-sector enterprises, and it relocates value from the labor of informal-sector waste collectors to waste matter itself which is required for the operation of waste-to-energy plants. I conclude that the overriding principle of this emergent governance regime is capital accumulation rather than the mitigation of CO₂ emissions, and its inability to incorporate extensive informal environmental management systems calls into question its overall effectiveness.