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Steven A. Wolf &#38; Ritwick Ghosh (2020)Land Use Policy, Volume 96, pp. 1035-52Abstract. Standards for carbon accounting are a core element of environmental governance. We study the production of standards as situated and practical action, which is shaped by opportunities, resource constraints, and existing infrastructure. Careful observations of this work reveals what people do and how they organize their actions relevant to the particular questions, conventions, and resources at hand. We apply this practice-centered, ethnomethodological approach to study the creation of an accounting protocol for nitrous oxide emissions from corn production, an effort within the broader project of enlisting agriculture in carbon markets. We find that efforts to create a far-reaching, rigorous, and efficient standard were frustrated by lack of data, contestation of knowledge claims, and the challenges of collapsing real-world heterogeneity into a model and a set of tidy decision rules. In this sense, carbon accounting standards should be understood as provisional, and potentially unstable, compromises.Excerpt. "Studying production of standards from the perspective of situated actions and practices requires looking at the (inter)actions of professionals engaged in formalization of routines that structure specification and quantification. While this work is disciplined by existing infrastructure and historically constructed political economic relations, these people are working on the frontier. They do not have access to directly relevant precedents. They must adapt and create new ways of doing, interacting and justifying. This “radical openness” (Bowker and Star, 2000; Storper, 2000) characterizes the work of producing economic routines, just as it does social life and environmental governance. Existing scripts, conventions, norms, and rules enable and enhance the efficiency of social interaction, but they are abstract. They are, arguably, necessary, but they are not sufficient. Applied to real world action contexts, people working in specific material and sociocultural settings– for example, those engaged in producing a new accounting protocol - must act creatively and pragmatically (Lederer, 2012). In situations in which people enter from diverse scientific disciplines and professional cultures, the challenges of confronting novelty multiply. In these situations, the actors must develop ‘workarounds’ – i.e., practical agreements to complex, messy problems - and they must do so without the benefit of conventions (i.e., established grammars) that harmonize expectations (Thévenot, 1984). […]&#160; Standards yield legitimated, privileged representations of a state of being or trajectory of change. While these representations introduce stability and efficiency into socioeconomic processes, they obscure the values (Busch, 2000), conventions of practice (Thévenot, 1984), and narratives (Bowker and Star, 2000) that gave rise to these privileged accounts. The power of a standard is based specifically on its capacity to mute arguments regarding alternative specifications of the world (Thévenot, 2009).”Link to the review&#160;