MELISSA LOW

PhD Student

Research Title: Climate Governance, Transparency, and the Pursuit of Carbon Accountability in Singapore
Research Group: Tropical Environmental Change (TEC)
Thesis Advisor: Prof David Taylor

Transparency in the proposed research refers to the process of reporting and disclosure of activities to enable the tracking of progress towards climate change related activities and/or targets. Transparency is often portrayed as a key aspect in governance. Data are an important currency in our information age that can help shape behaviors, ideally for the better. Examining the transformative promise of transparency in generating greater accountability in climate governance has captured the attention of many scholars of climate change and policy using a variety of disciplinary lenses. These deliberations started with a focus on improving greenhouse gas (GHG) management by studying the content for disclosure, depth, quality and quantity of information, intended recipients and the channels of communication. These comprise the what, how much, to whom and how questions of transparency.

Since the early 2010s, scholars have turned their attention to the why. They do so to understand the politics behind transparency. Scholarship in transparency thus evolved from being chiefly concerned with making visible what is produced, constructed, decided and defined to making visible the apparatuses and powers that make it possible to produce, construct, decide and define (Latour, 2004: 35) and who may be excluded from such processes and outcomes i.e. what is deliberately hidden from view. Against this backdrop, this research intends to examine how transparency and accountability work to make visible information about what, how much, to whom, how and why carbon is governed and administrable in the pursuit of carbon accountability in Singapore.