"The Forest and the Marine Stewardship Councils constitute new global governance institutions using voluntary certification and labelling as market incentives to encourage sustainable management. Utilizing a comparative political economic framework, the authors analyze shifting British, Canadian and Australian responses to the stewardship councils"--
AbstractNegotiating global environmental agreements involves aggregating and mediating divergent interests. In multiparty electoral systems, the process begins at the subnational level where interests aggregated by business associations, trade unions and civil society organizations are represented to political parties and governments in an effort to secure better (from their perspective) policy outcomes. How domestic political systems aggregate, represent and mediate diverse competing interests is a key question within comparative politics with some analysts favouring pluralism and others defending corporatist and policy network arrangements. This rich domestic literature has no global equivalent, due to the dominance until recently of intergovernmental forms of interest mediation at the global level. The rise of sector‐specific global governance organizations such as the Forest Stewardship Council suggests it is timely to investigate the different arrangements being used to mediate global interests and derive some hypotheses about how these shape global politics and policy. Using a grounded theory approach, this article compares and contrasts four different global interest mediation arrangements: intergovernmental (UNForum on Forests (UNFF)), single‐interest (Responsible Care (RC)), multistakeholder (Marine Stewardship Council (MSC)) and corporatist (Forest Stewardship Council (FSC)).
In November 2004, the Tasmanian government requested the state's planning body, the Resource Planning and Development Commission (RPDC), to undertake an evaluation of a proposal to establish a pulp mill at Long Reach near Bell Bay on Tasmania's Tamar Estuary. In early 2007, Gunns Limited, the project's proponent, pulled out of the RPDC process and the government established an alternative, 'fast‐track' process under the Pulp Mill Assessment Act (PMAA). This article evaluates the RPDC and the PMAA assessment processes using a 'good environmental governance' framework composed of eight criteria – transparency, accountability, openness, balance, deliberation, efficiency, science and risk. The comparison reveals that although the RPDC process fell short of the ideal, it was markedly superior to the PMAA process that replaced it. The case highlights how political economic power can be used to the detriment of public planning and the communities and environment that rely on it.
Examines cleavages between civil society organizations in the International Tropical Timber Organization, strategies adopted to mediate conflict, and the capacity of the environmental movement to influence the politics of international regime formation.
Argues for the involvement of civil society actors in the global politics of environmental protection. Human & nonhuman production takes place in a socionatural web where social & ecological relations are unified, & this relationship has been interwoven since life on the planet began. However, the modern private factory/free market/proprietary technology regime has increased social production without ecological & social feedback mechanisms for remaining within ecosystem limits. The state & the market are both inadequate for slowing growth & improving the quality of the ecosystem. Civil society intervention is needed at the local, national, regional, & global levels. The activities of the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) in promoting sustainable production & consumption of global forest products are explored as one such civil society actor. Its efforts are compared with that of the Standards Council of Canada (SCC)/Canadian Standards Assoc (CSA) to illustrate the relative weakness of state & industry response to the forest crisis. L. A. Hoffman
