New paper out on carbon farming in Timor Leste, led by Lisa Palmer (Conjuring Carbon: Resource Materialities in Timor-Leste) https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/25148486221148907

Highlights:

1. Applies the concept of commodity indigenisation to a reforestation and carbon offset program in Timor-Leste.
2. Describes encounters with carbon during a 2019 verification audit, showing how local and outside actors worked in different ways to conjure and make visible carbon.
3. Presents the audit as a stage in the cultural biographies of trees and carbon where carbon gets bound up in local aspirations for environmental and economic renewal.
4. Audits and other technologies establish quantitative equivalence of value between objects
through measurement. Here we begin to investigate the articulation and gestation of a range of local comparisons between an entity and its source of origin.
5. A visit in 2022 foreshadows a further stage in cultural biographies of things: the articulation of a ‘right’ to assert and realise value.
6. Argues that creatively managing the risks of relying on requirements stipulated by the demands of a global carbon market becomes more complex and transgressive over time.