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.
Market globalization and the globalization of environmental concerns have spurred demand for greater international accountability for forest stewardship. In response, a range of multi-lateral ...governmental and non-governmental initiatives have emerged to redefine the rules of global trade, and demand verification of the legality and/or sustainability of forest products originating from within and outside national boundaries.
At the same time there is a lack of transparency and shared understanding about the environmental forest policies that already exist within the world's leading forest producing and consuming countries. The result is that many stakeholders have developed perceptions about a country's regulatory environment that are not consistent with what is actually taking place. This book provides a uniquely detailed and systematic comparison of environmental forest policies and enforcement in twenty countries worldwide, covering developed, transition and developing economies. The goal is to enhance global policy learning and promote well-informed and precisely tuned policy solutions.
Forest policy classification is critical to conducting comparisons and understanding performance variations across cases. Chinese-style forest policy has been in a black box to many outsiders, who ...tend to assume a decentralization policy model due to a great diversity of forest and socio-economic conditions in China. To test this hypothesis, we used the policy prescriptiveness framework to classify on-the-ground forest practice policies in central government and eight provinces, covering extensive territorial variations. We found that the eight subnational cases that implemented local policies appeared to be consistent with central policies, but there were also subtle differences within them. Our findings show that China utilized centralized and top-down policy models.
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.
There is currently great concern about the sustainability of forestry and the contribution of private forestry towards this aim. The need to better understand the impact of different policy choices ...on private forestry has never been more important. This book includes a selection of peer-reviewed papers from a conference held in Atlanta in March 2001.
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