THE CLEAN DEVELOPMENT MECHANISM AS ETHICAL DEVELOPMENT?: RECONCILING EMISSIONS TRADING AND LOCAL DEVELOPMENT EMILY BOYD 1,2 * and MICHAEL K. GOODMAN 3 1 Department of Geography and Environmental Science, University of Reading, Reading, UK 2 Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden 3 Department of Geography, King’s College London, The Strand, UK Abstract: This paper examines the ethics of the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) in its architecture, processes and outcomes and its potential to allocate resources to the poor as ‘ethical development’. Two specific examples of CDM projects help us to explore some of the quan- daries that seem to be quickly defining operating procedure for the CDM in its efforts to bring entitlementsto the poor. The paper concludes with reflections on the normative and social complications of the CDM and closes with three key areas of further investigation. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Keywords: climate change; CDM; ethical development 1 INTRODUCTION In a slightly ironic reversal of fortune, the spectre of ‘unequivocal’ (IPCC, 2007) climate change has opened up key opportunities for a renewed interest in the development oppor- tunities for the global poor. One of the leading processes for cementing this growing con- nection between climate change and development is what is known as the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), which came out of Kyoto in 1997 but was firmed up subsequently in the Marrakech Accords in 2001. Yet, this cementing of mitigation and development is of a particularly ‘neo‐liberal’ flavour: the CDM is, at its core, about the creation, expansion and governance of markets designed to sequester carbon out of the *Correspondence to: Emily Boyd, Department of Geography and Environmental Science, University of Reading, RG6 6AH, Reading, UK. E‐mail: emily.boyd@reading.ac.uk Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Journal of International Development J. Int. Dev. 23, 836– 854 (2011) Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/jid.1813