Contestations in the emerging soil-based carbon economy: towards a research agenda

This paper highlights the need to consider the processes and relations in the political, knowledge, technical and socio-material complex that underpins the emergence of a soil-based carbon economy. This economy, characterised by the proliferation of voluntary soil-based carbon markets, carbon farming policies, supply chain and other initiatives, operates through private mechanisms (offsetting, insetting) and public policy instruments. This emerging economy entails a number of inherent political and knowledge contestations associated with claims around the mitigation potential of soil carbon sequestration and carbon farming. We adapt a social ecological systems (SES) framework to understand these contestations and draw on a corpus of agricultural, ecological, political and social science literatures to identify and pose critical questions for future research. We conceptualise the emerging soil-based carbon economy as interactions and outcomes among actors embedded within a defined SES (governance, resource systems, resource units, actors). Five themes are identified: Marketisation, abstraction and technogovernance; Power relations and expert knowledge; Disputing the meaning and value of soil carbon; Disruptions: new interfaces, configurations and actor relations; Uncertainties and capabilities. These underpin a research agenda proposal. We argue that an integrative conceptualisation is essential to equitably account for the broad mix of social, technical, economic, political, and ecological contexts in which soil carbon is embedded and present options for operationalising the conceptualisation.