Devising low-carbon desires in the Australian urban economy

The dynamics of the carbon economy are now widely canvassed and debated across a range of disciplinary and theoretical traditions. To date, debates on it have tended to focus on the development of markets through which carbon comes to be calculated, commoditized, and exchanged, and/or on how individual firms come to govern themselves in relation to carbon, with analytical attention focused on various techniques, including carbon budgets, energy management, climate champions schemes, carbon footprinting, and the purchase of carbon offsets. This work has proven critical in shifting the debate on the role of the corporate sector in climate politics away from initial concerns in the 1990s with the oppositional politics of resource-based economic interests such as resistance to environmental governance interventions from mining corporations. While largely focused on the workings of carbon markets in global or regional terms and the activities of large corporations, this work has nonetheless produced a picture of the much more complex landscape through which economic interests have come to be expressed in relation to climate change and the ways in which new forms of carbon governance are being forged. In this chapter we build on and depart from this extant work on the carbon economy, using a perspective that has received little attention in the field to date. We approach it through the lens of urban carbon governance. Specifically, we are concerned with the ways in which urban economies - and the firms, sectors, circulations and practices through which they are made - are (and are not) being enrolled into projects of governing carbon. We do so as part of a wider project on urban carbon governance in Australia that has revealed the extent to which governing through and with corporations is occurring. Our analysis of initiatives operating in Australian cities has revealed an ecology of nearly nine hundred initiatives involving state and nonstate actors working alone and in hybrid partnerships; acting across different domains, objects, subjects, and through different mechanisms; and enrolling diverse practices and materialities (M^cGuirk et al. 2014). Of these nine hundred, corporate involvement in activities with a specific intent to govern carbon beyond their own building or organization has happened in only 7 percent of cases. Corporations are nonetheless the focus of carbon governance initiatives established by others, especially local governments.