Philip Schleifer

Private Governance Undermined: India and the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil

Are emerging markets undermining private environmental governance? In the past, most trade in agricultural commodities occurred between developed and developing countries, but in recent years the volume of South-South trade has increased significantly. The booming demand from emerging markets for food, feed, and fiber is now a key driver behind agricultural expansion, causing large-scale deforestation and biodiversity loss in the tropics. By examining the case of palm oil, this article argues that existing private governance institutions are not well equipped to deal with this crisis. They continue to operate on the basis of a North-South trade model, trying to leverage the market power of big-brand companies to achieve their sustainability goals. However, the effectiveness of this mechanism is increasingly undermined by the rise of South-South trade and the different structure and institutional context of emerging market value chains.

Tracing Failure of Coral Reef Protection in Nonstate Market-Driven Governance

Institutional failure remains an important blind spot in the private governance literature. In this article we argue that a focus on scope conditions alone cannot explain why some programs thrive while others cease to exist. Studying the now-defunct Marine Aquarium Council—a certification program for coral reef protection—we adopt an institutional-process approach to fill this gap. Our main points can be summarized in a two-step argument: First, we argue that the scope conditions of private governance are partly endogenous to these processes. Through making strategic decisions, private governance programs have a certain level of control over their environment, and thus over the scope conditions under which they operate. Second, initial choices often unfold path dependencies over time. By tracing the evolution of the Marine Aquarium Council, we illustrate the program’s “mission creep” and the “vicious cycle” of self-reinforcing activity that culminated in its failure.

Emerging markets and private governance: the political economy of sustainable palm oil in China and India

ABSTRACT Private governance programs are now an important source of regulation in global value chains – particularly in context of North–South trade. But can these programs play a similar role in the value chains feeding into fast-growing emerging markets like China and India? Most scholars doing research on the topic draw a pessimistic picture. They argue that the scope conditions for private sustainability governance are not yet present in these markets. Our analysis of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil – a leading non-state certification program – in China and India partially confirms this view. At the same time, however, we find that emerging markets are not a unified category. We observe that sustainable palm oil is beginning to gain momentum in China, whereas uptake in India remains much weaker. We trace this back to a number of key market conditions, which we show are more favorable in China. In addition, our analysis highlights the role of the Chinese state in creating awareness of and shaping firms’ interests in sustainable palm oil.

Transnational Sustainability Governance in the Global South: A Comparative Study of Producer Support in Brazil

A primary objective of transnational sustainability governance is to address governance failures in the global south. But little is known about the conditions under which producer groups in these countries participate in private regulation. To shed some light on this question, this article examines the decisions of key players in the Brazilian agriculture industry to support (not to support) transnational sustainability governance. Using a qualitative case study approach, the article explores how soybean producers first backed the Roundtable on Responsible Soy, but then decided to withdraw their support from the initiative. In the sugarcane sector, the dynamic was a very different one. After initial resistance, the principal industry association switched strategy and endorsed Bonsucro, making it the leading sustainability standard for sugarcane in Brazil. Through a within-in case analysis and cross-sector comparison, this article shows how southern producer groups responded to economic and regulatory changes in the global market place, in particular, a shift in trade flows and the adoption of public sustainability regulation in the global north.

Let's Bargain! Setting Standards for Sustainable Biofuels

This paper studies the contested nature of new modes of governance two decades after the “participatory paradigm�? was announced at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992. With a focus on private multi-stakeholder initiatives, it conducts an in-depth analysis of business-civil society interaction in the Roundtable on Sustainable Biofuels, a scheme created to define an internationally accepted standard for biofuel production. Through its highly inclusive and transparent design, the roundtable provides what could be called ideal institutional scope conditions for participatory governance. However, falling far short of the participatory ideal of open-minded and consensus-oriented deliberation, the analysis uncovers how stakeholder interaction in the roundtable frequently collapsed into power struggles and interest group bargaining. Inquiring into the causes of this deliberation failure, the article identifies the high level of politicization in the biofuels arena as well as the background role of the state as the main explanatory factors.

Varieties of multi-stakeholder governance: selecting legitimation strategies in transnational sustainability politics

ABSTRACT Multi-stakeholder initiatives (MSIs) are often referred to as the ‘gold standard’ of private governance. However, existing MSIs vary strongly in their institutional designs and the ways in which they use inclusiveness, procedural fairness and, expert-based strategies to create legitimacy for their rules. This article investigates these institutional choices. It reviews arguments about demand from legitimacy-granting audiences, isomorphic pressures, and the role played by institutional entrepreneurs, and intergroup bargaining. It explores these mechanisms in an empirical investigation of the formation of three MSIs in the field of sustainable agriculture. Its findings advance our understanding of the conditions under which MSIs adhere or depart from normative ideals of democratic governance.

Transparency in transnational sustainability governance : a multivariate analysis of regulatory standard-setting programs

Beginning in the early 1990s, non-state actors have taken over a wide range of governance functions that used to be the prerogative of states and international organizations. In the field of International Relations and related disciplines, this has intensified debates about a lack of accountability and legitimacy in global governance. Reviewing this debate and the role transparency can play in mitigating the problem, this article uses a new data set to analyze the issue empirically. Examining a sample of 143 regulatory standard-setting (RSS) programs in the field of transnational sustainability governance, we show that “deep transparency” – i.e. the disclosure of salient information – remains a problem in this domain. However, there are also RSS programs that are highly transparent in their practices. Using a multivariate analysis, we investigate the internal and external determinants of these inter-program variations. We find a systematic relationship between inclusiveness and transparency – although no evidence for the conventional wisdom that single-actor business programs are per se less credible. Turning to the external determinants of transparency two findings stand out: First, instead of a “ratcheting-up effect”, we observe a race-to-the-bottom dynamic between competing RSS programs. Second, our results confirm arguments about the positive influence of meta-governance on transparency.

Cramb, Rob A., and John F. McCarthy, eds. 2016. The Oil Palm Complex: Smallholders, Agribusiness and the State in Indonesia and Malaysia. Singapore: NUS Press

Over the past decade, carbon emissions trading schemes have emerged at subnational, national, and regional levels in Europe, North America, and the AsiaPacific. In The Rise and Fall of Carbon Emissions Trading, Declan Kuch offers a theoretically engaging and empirically rich account of the turn to carbon emissions trading in Australia and internationally. Given that carbon trading continues to spread around the world, the notion of “rise and fall” might appear misleading, but as Kuch explains it, it refers to the failure of emissions trading to live up to expectations to “civilize markets” by cooling political conflicts, reducing dissent, and ultimately cutting emissions. According to Kuch, conventional accounts of carbon trading fail to see the political interests, power struggles, and conflicts that always loom large in the measurement and calculation of carbon emissions. The book draws on and contributes to critical literatures on neoliberalism and governmentality, the “technopolitics” of carbon trading schemes, and sociological accounts of their operation. In particular, the book builds on what the author refers to as the performative turn in economic sociology, drawing on the concepts of experimentation, framing, and overflows to develop a theoretically informed understanding of the politics of emissions trading. The book offers several interesting case studies that individually and collectively assess the prospects for emissions trading to civilize markets and cut emissions. A case study of acid rain regulation in Europe and the United States as an experimental “bridge” to carbon markets provides a critical account of the turn to sulphur emissions trading in the United States and a more positive assessment of the European development of the world’s first transboundary air pollution treaty—the Convention on Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution. The perceived success of sulphur emissions trading was transferred to the issue of climate change, facilitating the development of the New South Wales Greenhouse Gas Abatement Scheme in Australia—the first regulatory carbon trading scheme in the world. Kuch provides an in-depth account of the creation and operation of this scheme, situating the development of the scheme in the Australian context of electricity marketization and neoliberal political reforms, and showing how economists used carbon offsets to generate accountable numbers.