Governing through markets Cashore, Benjamin William; Auld, Graeme; Newsom, Deanna
2004, 20040811, 2008, 2008-10-01, 20040101
eBook, Book
In recent years a startling policy innovation has emerged within global and domestic environmental governance: certification systems that promote socially responsible business practices by turning to ...the market, rather than the state, for rule-making authority. This book documents five cases in which the Forest Stewardship Council, a forest certification program backed by leading environmental groups, has competed with industry and landowner-sponsored certification systems for legitimacy.The authors compare the politics behind forest certification in five countries. They reflect on why there are differences regionally, discuss the impact the Forest Stewardship Council has had on other certification programs, and assess the ability of private forest certification to address global forest deterioration.
One controversial and contested issue concerning forest certification is whether this market-based instrument actually requires participating forestry operations to follow more sustainable practices. ...While previous studies have explored and compared the standards used by different certification systems, our research sheds additional light on this question by systematically assessing documented conditions and pre-conditions that forest companies seeking FSC certification in the United States were required to address in order to obtain, or maintain, their certificates. We examined the changes that 80 SmartWood-certified forestry operations were required to make to forest management, ecological, social, and procedural elements of their forestry practices as a requirement of the certification process. We found that systems elements such as Management Plans, Monitoring and Inventory most frequently required change (by 94%, 79% and 71% of certified operations, respectively), followed by ecological elements such as High Conservation Value Forests and Woody Debris, Snags and Legacy Trees (by 71% and 63% of operations, respectively). We also found regional differences in the number of changes operations are required to make during certification, and found that operations located in states with mandatory Best Management Practices (BMPs) are required to make fewer changes during the certification process than those in states where BMPs are voluntary. We found that small and large operations were given roughly the same number and type of conditions and preconditions. Overall the results show that even the early adopters of certification were required to make important changes as a result of the certification process.
We assess the ability of Cashore, Auld, and Newsom's theoretical framework on “Nonstate Market-Driven” (NSMD) governance to explain the emergence of and support for forest certification in Finland. ...In contrast to Sweden's experience, the environmental group-initiated international forest certification program, the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), failed to gain significant support. Instead, the commercial forest sector created and adopted the Finnish Forest Certification Program, which domestic and international environmental groups ultimately rejected as inadequate. The NSMD framework must better incorporate two key findings. First, the dependence of international markets on the targeted country's forest products can shape domestic certification choices. We found that the largely non-substitutable qualities of Finnish paper products gave the domestic sector greater leeway in responding to international pressures. Second, whether the FSC is being championed primarily to influence a country's domestic forestry debates or indirectly as a lever with which to improve forest practices elsewhere appears to permeate the forest sector's overall receptiveness to the FSC.
The tourism industry can negatively affect wildlife, plants and natural ecosystems through habitat destruction, pollution, over-exploitation of natural resources and visitor impacts to sensitive ...ecosystems. One approach to mitigate such threats is the application of voluntary sustainability standards, supported by training of tourism enterprises and verified by external audits. The Rainforest Alliance standard defines 78 criteria (requirements) for sustainable environmental, social and business practices, and has been adopted by over 600 tourism enterprises - including hotels, lodges and tour boats - in 12 countries. We examined the performance of 106 hotels in six Latin American countries against 29 of the sustainable tourism criteria most directly related to biodiversity conservation. Independent audits were used to assess hotel performance at baseline followed by a repeat assessment after training, about two years later. Mean conformance with the 29 biodiversity criteria increased significantly during this interval, from 44% to 58%. Improvements were greatest for businesses in the lowest third of performance at baseline (laggards) and smallest for hotels in the highest third (leaders). The results indicate that a voluntary sustainability standard and training program can serve both to recognize existing good actors and to drive incremental improvement in enterprises that were previously less sustainable.
•Sustainable Land Management (SLM) aims to benefit people and nature.•Crop certification is an incentive for SLM but its aggregated effect is unknown.•We model ecosystem services (ES) based on tea ...certification data and scenarios in Kenya.•The effect of farm practices could not be accurately captured with our ES models.•Systematic certification accounting could improve spatial impact studies.
Agriculture sustainability standards and certification are increasingly used by the private sector and civil society to incentivize and support environmental conservation and improved rural. However, evidence of impact is limited by methodological challenges that hamper the quantification of certification-induced changes, especially beyond farm level. This paper aims to explore the changes to soil and nutrient regulation ecosystem services from the adoption of Rainforest Alliance tea certification in the Kenyan Upper Tana River watershed. In this study we: i) apply ecosystem service models to simulate the effect of farm-level practices for before and after-certification scenarios, and; ii) evaluate the model applications for their ability to guide future decision making. Our scenario results indicate that a widespread adoption of agricultural practices prescribed in the certification standard reduces sediment export into watercourses. However, an increase in fertilizer use by certified farmers is estimated to result in greater nitrogen and phosphorous loads. Our scenario analyses are highly sensitive to input data and model choice, but show similar relative impacts of tea certification. Opportunities to improve spatial impact measurements to support decision making can be found in the systematic accounting of land management practices by certification organizations and increased remote sensing image accessibility.
In recent years, transnational and domestic non-governmental organizations have created private standard setting bodies whose purpose is to recognize officially companies and landowners practicing ...‘sustainable forest management’. Eschewing traditional state processes and state authority, these certification programs have turned to the market to create incentives and force compliance to their rules. This paper compares the emergence of this non-state market driven (NSMD) phenomenon in the forest sector in eight regions in North Am40erica and Europe. We specifically seek to understand the role of forest companies and landowners in granting competing forest certification programs ‘legitimacy’ to create the rules. We identify distinct legitimation dynamics in each of our cases, and then develop seven hypotheses to explain differences in support for forest certification.
Economic globalization and technological innovations have deeply affected forests, which are facing environmental degradation such as loss of biodiversity, species decline and deforestation. Local ...communities who depends on forests for their livelihoods have also been affected. Governments have failed to address these problems, leading to the creation in 1993 of the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), which creates incentives for the forestry industry to adopt socially responsible, eco-friendly practices. The challenges of forest management are steeper for developing countries because of economic, political and social factors. Furthermore the success of forest certification is also dependent on consumers from developed countries whose growing consumption habits are feeding tropical forest destruction. IBSSSC
The solution put foruard by FSC was rclalixely simple: develop a set of global sustainablc forestry principles and criteria. have national and subnational multistakeholder committees develop ...regionally appropriate standards, have third parties audit forestry operations tor compliance, and certify those who pass the test-providing a badge of honor that, the hope was, would allow certified operations to gain some type of market advantage vis-a-vis their competitors (such as market access, price premiums, and the more abstract notion of a "social license to operate").
The solution put foruard by FSC was rclalixely simple: develop a set of global sustainablc forestry principles and criteria. have national and subnational multistakeholder committees develop ...regionally appropriate standards, have third parties audit forestry operations tor compliance, and certify those who pass the test-providing a badge of honor that, the hope was, would allow certified operations to gain some type of market advantage vis-à-vis their competitors (such as market access, price premiums, and the more abstract notion of a "social license to operate").
Virtually all of the literature on Canada as a “staples state” has focused on two related topics: the impact of a historically staples-based economy on the development of the Canadian state's ...structure, function and policy outcomes; and, given these historical influences, the ability and capacity state officials might have to veer Canada off this “hinterland” pathway by facilitating a more diversified Canadian economy less dependent on the US “metropole”. While these foci are important, the dramatic arrival in the 1990s of Non-State Market Driven (NSMD) governance systems that focus largely on regulating staples extracting sectors such as forestry, fisheries, and mining, has raised important new questions for students of the staples state.
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