“There’s an App for That!”: Ordering Claims on Natural Resources through Individual Carbon Accounts in China

ABSTRACT In China, the exchange of carbon credits prevalent in global environmental governance has expanded beyond emissions exchanges focused on polluting industrial installations and peripheral green lungs. Instead, an innovative field of individual carbon accounting schemes rescaled the responsibility for carbon emissions, savings, and offsets to the consumer-citizen through digital apps. This repurposing of carbon cannot be traced to simple top-down command-and-control measures conventionally associated with authoritarian regimes, nor to pure market-driven interests ascribed to neoliberal governance. In individual carbon accounting the auditing, consultancy and accountability strategies preaching resilience in the face of the global risks and capitalist crises meet with the Marxist-Leninist commitments to the “mass line.” The Chinese Communist Party and related actors thereby foster GDP growth while performing environmental redress. Chinese social management measures, including individual carbon accounting, belong to a cybernetic, autonomous, and aspirational promise of a more harmonious melding of ecology and economy, often distilled in visions of Ecological Civilization, yet placing hope in the possibility of green capitalism.