Management of carbon credits: a multiple case research

Abstract

The Kyoto Protocol was approved in February 2005 and the carbon market without rules, played by pioneer companies interested in learning by doing and worried about their corporate image, started working towards a formality. As the market of Certified Emissions Reduction (CER) has already established Institutional Environment, it is interesting to study, based on the Transaction Cost Economics (TCE) theory, how the transaction costs induce alternative ways of production, in particular the contracts between private companies, with CDM (Clean Development Mechanism) projects, and the commercialization channels developed by multilateral organizations. For this, the research uses the case studies method to obtain private information about the transactions of CER, and their contracts between Brazilian companies and a multi-lateral organization, the World Bank. A result is that, in contrast with the spot market relationship, the Brazilian CDM projects benefited - in terms of reduction of transaction costs - with the CERs transactions (contracts) involving the World Bank since this bank does all distribution channel functions except the acquisition of CERs property rights.