Global Carbon-and-Conservation Models, Global Eco-States? Ecuador’s Yasuní-ITT Initiative and Governance Implications

The “global carbon age” marks a structural change far beyond the economic realms of implementing carbon trade, affecting the fabric of global environmental governance and its actors. Carbon trade and conservation in the Global South have taken on various forms, and climate change mitigation efforts in light of continued rainforest deforestation are scrambling to establish effective approaches. Ecuador’s Yasuní-ITT Initiative proposes a new global carbon-and-conservation model in the Ecuadorian Amazon that leaves oil reserves of the Yasuní Ishpingo Tambococha Tiputini (ITT) oil fields underground, in exchange for international compensation payments that would be based on voluntary contributions of governments and nongovernmental actors in an international conservation partnership and trust fund under the auspices of the United Nations Development Programme. This model suggests far-reaching consequences, as it introduces new global scales for the sharing and management of environmental costs within a framework of neoliberal cost internalization. The analysis in this paper uses the concept of the “ecological state” (Duit, 2008) as a theoretical point of departure to examine the trans-scalar implications of such a carbon-and-conservation model on global governance structures toward a “global ecological state” (or global eco-state)