Climate Moralities Offset: A Case of Formative Voluntary Carbon Markets

Abstract

This article contributes to sociological scholarship on climate change by examining the development of the voluntary carbon offset market in Finland. While intended to address the collective challenge of climate change, voluntary carbon offsetting has faced criticism for commodifying emissions and shifting responsibility to specific actors. Enabled by voluntary carbon markets, emissions and climate impacts are attributed to companies and individuals, reflecting the idea that each entity possesses its ‘own’ emissions that they can choose to offset. However, this attribution does not happen on its own. The present study thus examines how the collective problem of acting on climate change is coordinated through particular moral engagements. We focus on the socio-legal formatting of the voluntary carbon offset market in the context of Finland, a Nordic welfare state. We trace the trajectory of Compensate, a key Finnish offset provider whose activities sparked public controversy and led to criminal charges for violating the country's Money Collection Act as well as a legislative reform aimed at formalising voluntary offsets. The controversy centred on the nature of voluntary offsets and whether to consider them to be generally beneficial climate actions or self-interested activities. Based on the theory of the sociology of engagements, our analysis shows how actors engage in moral and political coordination in order to foster and sustain engagements with climate change. More broadly, our case demonstrates that producing and facilitating engagement with climate change through a voluntary market is not merely a matter of implementing effective instruments and arrangements—leading ultimately to the individualisation of climate action—but a result of complex moral and socio-legal formations. We conclude that the formatting of particularised climate engagements is a collectively produced process that necessitates an analysis of the shared moral coordination involved.