Technocratic norms, political culture and climate change governance

In this article we analyse the challenges of multi‐scalar governance within climate change as an element of the green economy. Specifically, we focus on the ways in which global neoliberal discourses of governance predicated on technocratic norms interface with regional, national, and subnational contexts. The goal of the analysis is to develop a better understanding of how purportedly universalistic prescriptions for addressing climate change developed at the global level – the financialization of carbon emissions through managed markets – interact with local political economic cultures. We argue local political economic cultures play a crucial role in governing how local economies operate and that universalistic policy prescriptions are unlikely to succeed if they do not incorporate flexibility to take account of unique local economic practices. To support this argument, we examine the dynamics of climate governance through the creation of emissions markets in three different cultural contexts: the European Union, Australia, and the state of California in the United States. In each, we find varying interactions between global technocratic narratives and scale‐level political and cultural structures. These context specific interactions in turn contribute to different governance and economic outcomes with respect to climate change.