Setting the Standard
Setting the Standard
Certification, Governance, and the Forest Stewardship Council
Setting the Standard chronicles the emergence andimplications of an ambitious experiment in civil-society-led globalgovernance: the Forest Stewardship Council. The FSC was born in 1993 asa grassroots initiative to promote "environmentally appropriate,socially beneficial, and economically viable management of theworld's forests" through an international system of forestcertification.
The recent establishment of an FSC standard for British Columbia wasachieved only after difficult and protracted negotiations at theregional, national, and global levels. Drawing on a pioneering casestudy of this negotiation process, Setting the Standardexplores the challenges associated with implementing the FSC'sglobal vision on the ground. It also undertakes a detailed comparativeanalysis of FSC standards and standard-setting processes elsewhere inCanada, the United States, and Europe, and grapples with the broaderimplications of the emerging FSC experience for global governance andregulatory theory.
A powerful and well-researched account of the emergence of forest certification in the British Columbia forest sector. The authors' attention to democratic processes within forest certification is path breaking, and their calls for reform are important.
A superb extended case study of the development of the Forest Stewardship Council's British Columbia forestry certification standard. This book's multi-level, interdisciplinary comparative analysis yields a rich set of insights that challenge many conventional regulatory paradigms.
This book makes an absolutely essential contribution to the literature on voluntary environmental standards and environmental certification schemes by providing the sort of detailed, contextual, and comparative empirical account of standard-setting that is fundamental to advance our understanding of the phenomenon of contemporary governance.
1 Introduction
Part 1: Developing the FSC-BC Standard
2 The Rise and Rise of Forest Certification
3 The BC Forest Policy Context
4 Hard Bargaining: Negotiating an FSC Standard for British Columbia
5 Beyond British Columbia: Standards Development in OtherJurisdictions
Part 2: Analyzing the FSC-BC Standard
6 Tenure, Use Rights, and Benefits from the ForestÂ
7 Community and Workers' Rights
8 Indigenous Peoples' Rights
9 Environmental Values
Part 3: Governance within and beyond the FSC System
10 A Political Network Analysis of FSC Governance
11 A Regulatory Analysis of FSC Governance
12 An Institutional Analysis of FSC Governance
Part 4: Conclusions
13 Theorizing Regulation and Governance within and beyond theFSC
14 Reflections on the Nature and Significance of the FSC-BC Case
Appendix
Notes
References
Index
