dan klooster enviromental certification of forests the evolution of enviromental governance in a...

8/14/2019 Dan Klooster Enviromental Certification of Forests The Evolution of Enviromental Governance in a Commodity Net

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Journal of Rural Studies 21 (2005) 403417

Environmental certification of forests: The evolution of environmental

governance in a commodity network

Dan Klooster

Department of Geography, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL 32306-2190, USA

Abstract

Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) influence social and environmental aspects of commodity production through certificationschemes like organic and forest certification. As these become mainstream, however, they are often compromised by the interests of more

powerful agents. Utilizing the concept of governance in global commodity networks, this article examines the mainstreaming of forest

certification. By working with retailers, forest certification expanded rapidly. The retailer focus, however, limits the spread of forest

certification among medium-sized, small, and community forest management operations. It also raises questions of fairness because it

imposes costs on forest managers without providing compensation through higher prices. NGOs now implement programs to make

Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certification more accessible and more useful to forest managers, but these do not resolve the

imbalance of power between the big retailers demanding certification and the small forest managers who must absorb increased costs.

The dominance of big retailers in commodity networks provides an attractive route to rapidly mainstream certification schemes, but it

also limits their reach and compromises their equity.

r 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction

Through institutions such as organic certification, Fair

Trade certification, and the environmental certification of

forests, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) attempt

to use the market to exert environmental and social values

on production processes. As these interventions become

increasingly influential in markets, however, they also

appear to become increasingly compromised by commer-

cial market values and the interests of other market actors

(Renard, 1999, 2003;Guthman, 2004a, b; Raynolds, 2004;

Klooster, 2005; Taylor, 2005a; Taylor et al., 2005).Analysts of certification movements need a clearer under-

standing of the mainstreaming process, including the

strategies NGO actors apply to increase the influence of

certification interventions.

Commodity network analysis is proving to be a valuable

way of looking at the impact and evolution of these

interventions. It brings into focus the concept of govern-

ancethe relationships between different firms, govern-

ment, andsometimesNGOs that shape a production

process. Governance frequently involves driving sectors

that play a disproportionate role in determining the

production decisions of the less powerful firms. Research-

ers in the global commodity network literature raise

questions about the importance of NGOs in commodity

network governance, including the way certification

systems affect governance. They also suggest that actors

might use certification instruments to further their own

interests. Retailers, for example, might use it as a way to

exert control at a distance over suppliers, to shift thecosts of surveillance onto their suppliers, and to insulate

themselves from the publicity risks of supplier actions

(Ponte and Gibbon, 2005, p. 22; Raikes et al., 2000;

Hughes, 2001; Freidberg, 2003a; Raynolds, 2004; Taylor,

2005a).

Environmental certification of forests provides an

important example of a mainstreaming strategy strongly

shaped by the retailer dominance of wood commodity

networks. From its roots as an alternative to tropical

timber boycotts, it has become a kind of global public

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policy (Counsell and Loraas, 2002) with support from the

World Bank, USAID, several European governments,

influential environmental organizations, and by transna-

tional retailers such as IKEA and The Home Depot.

A number of observers, however, raise concerns that the

retailer-focused expansion strategy of forest certification

appears to favor large forest enterprises over small ones,northern operations over southern ones, and may be

unable to meet the special needs of community forest

managers, which play a significant, and increasingly

important, role in world forest management (Molnar,

2003; Rametsteiner and Simula, 2003; Taylor, 2005a). In

particular, observers note the inability of the institution to

systematically deliver higher wood prices to most certified

forest managers. In Mexico, for example, IKEA and

The Home Depot demand environmentally certified wood,

but they also require high volumes, uniform physical

characteristics, and low prices. These commercial values

condition the ability of other actors to fully realize

the social and environmental values of environmental

certification of forests (Klooster, 2005).

Certification promoters recognize some of the contra-

dictions that have arisen from their retailer-focused

strategy, however, and are engaged in debates and policy

modifications to be more successful in promoting the social

and environmental values they favor, especially among

smaller forest management operations in the global south.

Several projects in Mexico illustrate the parallel activities

certification promoters use to enhance the social and

environmental influence of the institution by helping

certified forest managers meet retailer demands for wood

that is not only certified, but also available in high volumes,uniform physical quality, and low cost.

Through an examination of the expansion strategies for

forest certification globally, and the reflection of this

strategy in Mexico, this article argues that NGOs can be

quite successful using retailer-focused strategies to promote

the fairly rapid adoption of socio-environmental certifica-

tion; through certification, NGOs successfully participate

in the governance of a buyer-driven commodity network.

Because of the characteristics of such networks, however,

retailer-focused strategies compromise the environmental

and social goals of certification institutions. This requires

supplementary and parallel approaches to broaden and

deepen the potential social and environmental leverage

of certification. In the current phase of mainstreaming

environmental certification of forest products, such ap-

proaches are underway. In a market context of disparate

power relationships, however, their success is far from

assured.

This article first outlines relevant theory about govern-

ance in commodity networks, including questions about

the role of NGOs and concerns about the way different

actors might use certification mechanisms to further their

own ends. Second, it analyzes several phases of the

evolution of environmental governance of the wood

commodity network, including some of the reflections of

these phases in Mexico.1 Third, a conclusion identifies the

implications of that evolution for debates about govern-

ance and mainstreaming certification institutions.

2. The governance of global commodity networks

In commodity network analysis,2 researchers examine

the connections between consumers, producers, and work-

ers, make clear the unequal distribution of power between

those actors, and show how their relationships shape the

process of production through networks that are increas-

ingly decentralized, transnational, and global. The ap-

proach is simply a broader version of the analysis of Global

Commodity Chains (GCC), which analysts define as a

network of organizations and production processes result-

ing in a finished commodity (Gereffi and Korzeniewicz,

1994;Raikes et al., 2000, p. 392).

Frequently, the globalization of commodity chains

brings falling prices for producers, especially for agricul-

tural commodities and manufacturing activities with low

barriers to entry, such as shoes (Gwynne, 1999; Gereffi et

al., 2001). Following the collapse of an international coffee

agreement limiting entry, for example, the GCC for coffee

re-organized along lines that are more buyer-driven and

that decrease the share of revenues going to coffee growers.

These changes in commodity chain governance increased

rural poverty as the price producers received for coffee

plummeted (Fitter and Kaplinsky, 2001;Ponte, 2002).

Governance is central to the GCC approach. The

governance concept recognizes that trade in goods and

services along a chain is very often more than a series ofarms-length transactions where buyers and sellers only

bargain over price. In many cases, lead firms strongly

influence what is to be produced, how, where, and by

whom (Gereffi, 1994). Initially, two main types of

governance were identified. In producer-driven chains,

large manufacturers such as automobile companies exert a

driving influence on parts production and retailing

processes elsewhere in the chain. In buyer-driven chains,

in contrast, large retailersWal-Mart for example

largely determined what is to be produced and at what

price (Gereffi, 1994). Increasingly, however, GCC research-

ers recognize significant variety among drivers and driving

forces within GCC governance, and call for greater

attention to the role of government and civil society

especially NGOsin influencing GCCs (Gereffi, 2001).

Ethical trading standards and certification systems such as

Fair Trade, organic, and environmental certification of

forests are examples of civil society attempting to insert

ARTICLE IN PRESS

1I report on the spread and impact of forest certification in Mexico in

greater detail elsewhere (Klooster, 2005). Methods for that project were

principally interviews with Mexican foresters, NGO workers, and forest-

owning villagers.2A more elaborated explanation of commodity network analysis is

available elsewhere (Klooster, 2005).

D. Klooster / Journal of Rural Studies 21 (2005) 403417404


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social and environmental considerations into the already-

existing governance of a GCC (Hughes, 2001; Humphrey

and Schmitz, 2001; Freidberg, 2003b; Ponte and Gibbon,

2005;Taylor et al., 2005).

Many of the actors involved in the governance of

commodity production are linked in a network, not a

chain. In furniture commodity chains, for example, thereare import cross-over influences from fashion designers,

fashion magazines, furniture manufacturers, and also style-

shaping furniture retailers such as IKEA (Leslie and

Reimer, 2003). Similarly, pressures from NGOs have been

instrumental in imposing ethical standards on certain retail

sectors (Barrientos, 2000; Hughes, 2001; Bartley, 2003;

Freidberg, 2004). The work on Fair Trade coffee also

demonstrates the importance of NGOs and civil society

actors who come from outside the narrow coffee commod-

ity chain (Bray et al., 2002; Renard, 2003; Mutersbaugh,

2004; Raynolds, 2004). The image of a chain directs the

readers attention to the part of a network most directly

linked to the movement of a commodity through its

multiple stages of production to consumption. The image

of a network more clearly invites researchers to consider

the influences of actors external to the chain, especially

NGOs.

Furthermore, enriched with convention theory, com-

modity network analysis suggests that the governance of

commodity chains involves values of different kinds. These

include various social and environmental values, but also

commercial values such as considerations of available

volume, economies of scale, prices, and physical character-

istics (Ponte and Gibbon, 2005, p. 22;Raynolds, 2004). The

commercial values of driving firms in commodity networkscan erode the social and environmental values of the NGOs

promoting certification (Renard, 2003), or condition the

acceptance of certification upon crossing hurdles such as

price and volume, and therefore limit its spread and impact

(Klooster, 2005).

Commodity network analysis, in summary, contributes

to understanding the mainstreaming of environmental

certification because it suggests the relationships of power

and values between the various agents involved in the

governance of commodity production. It suggests that

socio-environmental certification is a mechanism in which

NGOs attempt to influence the governance of global

commodity networks. At the same time, it indicates the

importance of recognizing that driving firms already

influence the social and environmental values effectively

expressed in a network, and might even make use of socio-

environmental certification interventions for their own

governance purposes. Some researchers, for example,

hypothesize that there is a tendency for firms to push for

external parameter setting and enforcement so that they do

not have to invest in the monitoring and testing themselves,

but can shift those costs to suppliers (Humphrey and

Schmitz, 2001). Third party certification and influence on

the content of standards are key tactics for lead firms to

transfer the costs of quality control to suppliers and to

achieve control at a distance (Ponte and Gibbon, 2005,

p. 18).

3. The evolution of environmental certification of forests

Environmental forest certification can be understood as

an evolving attempt by NGOs to influence the governance

of a global wood commodity network. In a first phase,

boycotts and direct actions targeted the big wood retailers

and logging companies. In a second phase, environmental

organizations joined with retailers and others to develop

environmental certification as a boycott alternative. In a

third phase, a coalition of NGOs, intergovernmental

organizations, and government agencies aggressively pro-

moted certification by pressuring retailers to require

certified forest products from their suppliers, and by

providing incentives to forest managers to certify their

forests. This strategy produces several limitations to the

continued spread of forest certification, however. In anongoing fourth phase, certification promoters are attempt-

ing to enhance the influence of environmental certification

through programs to make it more accessible and more

useful to forest managers.

3.1. Phase I: governance through threat of boycott

The roots of certification go back to the international

environmental movements of the 1970s and 1980s. Tropical

deforestation and biodiversity loss became one of the most

important issues for environmentalists of the 1980s and

early 1990s (Myers, 1980; Wilson, 1988). They alsocriticized the destructive activities of large logging compa-

nies, ranging from clearcuts in the Pacific Northwest of the

US and Canada to the tropical forests of Africa, Asia, and

South America (Vogt et al., 2000). Environmentalist

organizations in several countries urged consumers to stop

buying wood from tropical forests.

In Germany and the Netherlands, for example, local

governments stopped using tropical timber in public

construction, and Englands Prince Charles called on his

countrymen to boycott tropical hardwoods from unsus-

tainable sources. In the US, some state and municipal

governments debated prohibiting government purchase of

tropical woods. Activist organizations organized protests,

pickets, leaflet distribution, petitions, and media campaigns

against loggers and retailers selling tropical timber from

sources they considered unacceptable. Tropical timber

imports to parts of Europe declined in the late 1980s and

early 1990s. All of this had a major psychological effect

on the timber trade (Viana et al., 1996, p. 4;Wille, 1991;

Vogt et al., 2000; Counsell and Loraas, 2002).

In this initial phase of the environmental governance of

forests, NGOs attempted to influence a GCC for forest

products through boycotts, threats, and demonstrations

directed against logging companies and large wood

retailers (Fig. 1).

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D. Klooster / Journal of Rural Studies 21 (2005) 403417 405


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3.2. Phase II: governance through environmental

certification

Some environmentalists, however, doubted that boycotts

would make much difference, since only a small percentage

of tropical wood makes it into export markets. In addition,

forest land use competes with tropical agriculture, and so

efforts to discourage logging might encourage forest

conversion to export crops like coffee or bananas or oil

palm that were not the focus of boycotts. Furthermore,

boycotts require an enormous commitment of resources,

and could squander the goodwill of progressive consumers(Wille, 1991). In the mid and late 1980s, a few environ-

mental organizations began to identify acceptable sources

of wood. Friends of the Earth UK developed a good

wood buyers guide and, until monitoring and enforce-

ment issues became awkward, handed out seals of

approval to selected manufacturers and retailers (Viana

et al., 1996;Counsell and Loraas, 2002). In the early 1990s,

The World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) began forming

buyers groups of retailers and wood processors who

committed themselves to the purchase of acceptable wood.

In the United States, in 1989, the SmartWood program

became the first independent forestry certifier. It conducted

forest audits to identify and promote well-managed sources

of tropical hardwoods. By identifying products from well-

managed forests, promoters hoped these environmental

certification and labeling programs would foster a kind of

reverse boycott (Wille, 1991;Viana et al., 1996;Maser and

Smith, 2001).

Interest in a non-governmental approach to the environ-

mental certification of forest management grew after the

failure of efforts rooted in existing inter-governmental

organizations. Friends of the Earth tried to get the

International Tropical Timber Organization (ITTO) to

implement a certification scheme, for example, and there

was an eco-labeling initiative proposed in the European

Union, but both were undermined by industry opposition

(Counsell and Loraas, 2002). Similarly, the intergovern-

mental Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 offered

only a very weak statement on forest principles. Mean-

while, some forest product companies made unverified

claims about the sustainability of wood and paper

products, and environmental activists saw the need for anindependent organization to set standards (Cabarle and

Ramos de Freitas, 1995; Viana et al., 1996; Greenpeace,

2004). At the same time, a few wood retailers, processors,

and forest managers sought a way to dispel consumers

skepticism about their claims of environmental responsi-

bility by backing them up with external verification

(Hansen, 1997). Meanwhile, because of the complexity of

the issues and the difficulty in sustaining mobilization,

consumer movements dwindled during the early 1990s;

environmentalists needed the participation of commercial

groups in establishing a certification scheme (Counsell and

Loraas, 2002).

In 1993, 130 participants from 26 countries came

together and established the Forest Stewardship Council

(FSC) to provide a general set of environmental certifica-

tion standards for forest management. The latent threat of

boycotts created an alliance of environmental NGOs and

the forest industry; FSC members include influential

environmental organizations such as the Rainforest

Alliance, the WWF, Greenpeace, and Friends of the

Earth, and very large companies including IKEA, Home

Depot, and B&Q. Membership is organized in three

chambers: social, environmental and economic, with

northern and southern subchambers (Bass et al., 2001;

FSC, 2004). Several US foundations and the governmentsof Austria and the Netherlands also supported the

formation of the FSC (Viana et al., 1996; Cashore et al.,

2004).

Certification requires standards, evaluation procedures,

and tracking procedures to produce verifiable certificates

for forests, labels for products from those forests, and

chain of custody certificates tracing the wood through

manufacturers and retailers. This is supposed to unleash a

consumer-driven market that provides

an incentive for forestland owners to manage their lands

in ways that will benefit their local communities

economically (potentially, a premium price for logs to

the local landowners and a greater market share for the

local mill operator) and environmentally (a landscape

that has greater ecological integrity and thus better

protects the environmental wealth of the community,

such as clean water and biological, genetic and

functional diversity within the overall landscape) (Maser

and Smith, 2001, p. 2).

Certification and labeling is supposed to become a tool

to accelerate the implementation of ecologically respon-

sible forest management by mobilizing the power of the

marketplace (Greenpeace, 2004).

ARTICLE IN PRESS

Forest

managers

Wood

processors

Wood retailers

Individual consumers

EnvironmentalOrganizations

Boycotts

and other

actions

Fig. 1. In an initial phase, environmental activist organizations pressured

retailers and logging companies with direct action campaigns of various

kinds.



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The FSCs stated goals are to improve forest conserva-

tion, reduce deforestation, and identify well-managed

forests as acceptable sources of forest products. According

to the organizations website:

The FSC shall promote environmentally appropriate,

socially beneficial, and economically viable managementof the worlds forests.

Environmentally appropriate forest management ensures

that the harvest of timber and non-timber products

maintains the forests biodiversity, productivity and

ecological processes.

Socially beneficial forest management helps both local

people and society at large to enjoy long-term benefits

and also provides strong incentives to local people to

sustain the forest resources and adhere to long-term

management plans.

Economically viable forest management means that

forest operations are structured and managed so as to

be sufficiently profitable, without generating financial

profit at the expense of the forest resources, the

ecosystem or affected communities. The tension between

the need to generate adequate financial returns and the

principles of responsible forest operations can be

reduced through efforts to market forest products for

their best value (FSC, 2003b).

The FSCs primary function is the generation of generic,

international standards. These resulted from negotiations

involving pro-labor and pro-indigenous rights groups,

professional foresters, academics, industrialists, environ-mentalists, and forest product retailers. In practice, the

FSCs goal of promoting environmentally appropriate

forestry contains both environmental and technical for-

estry aspects. Ten principles and criteriawhich serve as

the framework for more specific national and regional

standardsaddress (1) environmental aspects of manage-

ment, including environmental impact and special protec-

tion for high conservation value forests; (2) technical

forestry aspects of management such as a forward-looking

management plan and a detailed monitoring strategy; (3)

social aspects of management, including indigenous peo-

ples, land tenure, and workers rights; and (4) the economic

viability of forest management, especially through diversi-

fied production (Table 1). Furthermore, these coalition

members sought a certification framework with a high

degree of external legitimacy, and therefore they insisted on

procedures that stress documentation and audits. Forest

management operations are expected to demonstrate

ARTICLE IN PRESS

Table 1

The 10 principles of the Forest Stewardship Council

Principle 1: Compliance with laws and FSC principles Principle 6: Environmental impactForest management shall respect all applicable laws of the country in

which they occur, and international treaties and agreements to which the

country is a signatory, and comply with all FSC principles and criteria.

Forest management shall conserve biological diversity and its associated

values, water resources, soils, and unique and fragile ecosystems and

landscapes, and, by so doing, maintain the ecological functions and the

integrity of the forest.

Principle 2: Tenure and use rights and responsibilities Principle 7: Management plan

Long-term tenure and use rights to the land and forest resources shall be

clearly defined, documented and legally established.

A management planappropriate to the scale and intensity of the

operationsshall be written, implemented, and kept up to date. The

long-term objectives of management, and the means of achieving them,

shall be clearly stated.

Principle 3: Indigenous peoples rights Principle 8: Monitoring and assessment

The legal and customary rights of indigenous peoples to own, use and

manage their lands, territories, and resources shall be recognized and

respected.

Monitoring shall be conductedappropriate to the scale and intensity of

forest managementto assess the condition of the forest, yields of forest

products, chain of custody, management activities and their social and

environmental impacts.

Principle 4: Community relations and workers rights Principle 9: Maintenance of high conservation value forests

Forest management operations shall maintain or enhance the long-term

social and economic well-being of forest workers and local communities.

Management activities in high conservation value forests shall maintain

or enhance the attributes which define such forests. Decisions regarding

high conservation value forests shall always be considered in the context

of a precautionary approach.

Principle 5: Benefits from the forest Principle 10: Plantations

Forest management operations shall encourage the efficient use of the

forests multiple products and services to ensure economic viability and a

wide range of environmental and social benefits.

Plantations shall be planned and managed in accordance with Principles

and Criteria 19, and Principle 10 and its Criteria. While plantations can

provide an array of social and economic benefits, and can contribute to

satisfying the worlds needs for forest products, they should complement

the management of, reduce pressures on, and promote the restoration

and conservation of natural forests.

Source: FSC (2003c).



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adherence to standards in the field, and also on paper.

Certifiable forests must have detailed management and

monitoring plans, for example (see Principles 7 and 8 in

Table 1).

Conversely, although economic viability is mentioned,

there is no explicit attention to the commercial convention

of price, either in the FSC principles or elsewhere. UnlikeFair Trade certification in coffee and some other commod-

ities, there is no mandated minimum price for forest

managers, for example, nor are there requirements for

wood processors or retailers to invest in environmental

protection or social development. Prices are left up to the

workings of the market (Taylor, 2005a).

Using the principles and criteria, the FSC evaluates

third-party auditing firms and grants them the right to

conduct forest audits and grant certification. Evaluators

examine the ecological, social, and professional forestry

aspects of forest management. They review the forest

management plan and supporting documentation, visit

logging areas to see how the plan is actually executed,

observe working conditions in logging camps and sawmills,

and talk with other stakeholders in forest management,

such as indigenous peoples, members of surrounding

communities, environmentalists, and government regula-

tors. Frequently, the certifying agency imposes Corrective

Action Requests (CARs) on certified forest management

operations.3 Annual audits monitor progress of the forest

manager in meeting CARs and remaining in compliance

with other FSC requirements (see Fig. 2). The evaluation

reports undergo peer review before certificates are issued,

and a public report summarizes the evaluating teams

findings to interested stakeholders. Logs from certifiedforests can bear a label with the FSC trademark

demonstrating their source from a managed forest.

Certifying agencies also evaluate wood processing compa-

nies. Those with adequate tracking procedures to keep

certified wood separated from non-certified wood earn a

chain of custody certification, which permits it to apply

the FSC trademark to the wood products it manufactures.

FSC certification improves the production process in

forests. Studies of certification documents in the US,

Europe, and Mexico for example, show that nearly all

certified forest managers were required to improve

management plans and to increase monitoring activities.Many were also required to manage specific forest areas for

biodiversity conservation, to increase dead wood remaining

in logged areas, to protect riparian areas, to implement

threatened species management plans, and to decrease the

environmental impact from logging roads. Many also had

to improve worker safety and training, and reduce

or eliminate pollution from chemicals and equipment

(Rametsteiner and Simula, 2003; Gerez Fernandez, 2004;

Klooster, 2005;Newsom et al., 2005;Newsom and Hewitt,

2005;WWF, 2005).

Certification is costly, however, especially for small-scale

producers. Forest managers must cover the costs of audits,

certification fees, and the costs of meeting the CARs.

Under Mexican conditions, average evaluation and mon-

itoring costs can total $US36,000 over 5 years. If indirect

costs of prescribed corrective actions are included, that cost

can reach $US60,000 over 5 years (Madrid and Chapela,

2003;Taylor, 2005a).

3.3. Phase III: the expansion of certification amidst retailer

dominance

Forest certification took off rapidly. Activists promoted

it through direct action campaigns focused on the big

retailers, and also through coalitions with business,

government agencies, and multilateral organizations. The

case of Mexico illustrates the global situation.

3.3.1. Activist pressure and retailer acceptance

Convinced of the efficacy and importance of FSC

certification, environmental NGOs such as Greenpeace,

the Rainforest Action Network, and the WWF aggressively

promoted the instrument with the wood retailers and

processors who drive the commodity network; half of the

global timber harvest is processed by 50 firms and the top

50 users of wood consume 10% of the total (WWF, 2001;

cited inTaylor, 2005a). In 1998 and 1999, activists picketed

150 Home Depot outlets, rappelling from roofs, chaining

themselves to piles of old-growth wood, and arranging

logging slash to write the Home Depot logo onto clear-cut

hillsides. They demanded the company eliminate wood

sales from endangered forests and to give preference to

certified wood, and in August 1999, Home Depot pledged

to do so. Home Depot is the worlds largest building

ARTICLE IN PRESS

Forest

managers

Wood

processors

Wood retailers


Auditing

firms

Audits and

certifications

Forest

Stewardship

Council

Fig. 2. In a second phase, environmental organizations and the forest

industry formed the Forest Stewardship Council, which accredits auditors

to inspect and certify forests and factories.

3Forest management operations with more serious failings would have

to resolve them as a precondition to attaining certification. A certified

forest manager who fails to complete required CARs, could have

certification revoked.



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materials and home improvement retailer, with stores in

the United States, Canada, Chile, Argentina, Puerto Rico,

and Mexico. Revenues for fiscal year 2003 were $58.2

billion; the company has 280,000 employees (Calvert Social

Index, 2004). Within a year, Lowes Companies Inc. and

IKEA, the second and third largest lumber buyers in the

world, also pledged to sell only environmentally certifiedforest products, as did Centex Corporation and Kaufman

and Broad Home Corporation, the first and second largest

single-family home builders in the US (Murphy, 2001;

Morris and Dunne, 2004).

At the same time activist environmental organizations

were engaging in direct action, the WWF continued a

strategy of organizing retailers and wood processors into

buyers groups, now called Global Forest and Trade

Networks. About 700 companies in 14 countries have

pledged to purchase certified wood, with FSC the preferred

scheme for buyers groups in the UK, the Netherlands,

Belgium, Austria, Switzerland, Germany, Brazil, USA and

Japan. Members of Global Forest and Trade Networks

generate more than half of the demand for certified wood

products, and 2/3 of the demand for FSC labeled products

(Bass et al., 2001; Taylor, 2005a). FSC-certified forest

products comprise an estimated $5 billion of sales world-

wide (FSC, 2005a).

The success in getting so many retailers and wood

processors to adopt FSC forest certification resulted from

activist pressure, and also the retailers own interests in

commodity network governance. Large numbers of Amer-

icans and a majority of Europeans say they prefer to

purchase environmentally labeled wood products, and

might be willing to pay a little bit more for them (Vloskyet al., 1999;Oyewole, 2001;Teisl et al., 2002). Retailers like

Home Depot, B&Q, and IKEA, however, announced

commitments to purchase only environmentally certified

wood products without experiencing significant consumer

demand for them. Forest management information was

lacking and willingness to pay surveys are not necessa-

rily an accurate predictor of actual behavior (Hansen,

1997).

Although concerns about future sales were an important

consideration (Johnson, 1996, p. 206), retailers were

immediately interested in protecting their brand image in

the face of activists direct action campaigns: A company

as large as ours (Home Depot) has to meetand want to

exceedthe expectations of a public that regards us as a

social institutionand severely targets and punishes us if

we do not behave responsibly (Eisen, 1996, p. 203). A

spokesperson for the UK do-it-yourself building supplies

retailer B&Q expressed a similar sentiment about the

influence of activist direct actions:

We werent losing customers. yWe also knew that we

werent ever going to have customers demanding

sustainable timber in our stores. But we knew that if

our name, B&Q, was associated with destruction of

tropical forests or even temperate forests, that our brand

nameywould be damaged (Alan Knight cited in

Counsell and Loraas, 2002, p. 12).

Supporting the FSC also supports retailer interests in

clear and consistent commodity network governance. First,

when they commit to FSC, they can also join it and

influence its evolution. As a Home Depot spokesperson put

it in when FSC was only a few years old, ultimately, the

question is not whether we will have certification,

but whether the industry can define or participate in a

credible certification process before certification defines

the industry (Eisen, 1996, p. 204). Second, it provides a

global standard for global corporations. According to an

IKEA spokesperson, an international company like

IKEA needs internationally accepted standards. We cannot

communicate a large number of different national forestry

standards from different supplier countries to environmen-

tally conscious customers, for instance in Europe and

North America (Johnson, 1996, pp. 205206). Further-

more, it provides an instrument that their customersare likely to understand and believe in. In B&Q

stores, FSC replaced as many as 20 different environ-

mental labels that left customers confused and distrustful.

The third-party characteristic is also helpful to retailers

because it is more credible than their own internal

efforts. According to a B&Q representative, We need

independent certification. Without independent certifica-

tion, suspicion and skepticism will prevail (Hodkinson,

1996, p. 208).

Fourth, certification provides the retailers with a useful

instrument of surveillance and control at a distance over

their suppliers. When environmental activists in the 1980s

wanted to know the sources and quantities of the tropical

timber B&Q was selling, at first, it could not tell them

because it did not know; suppliers would not always tell

them what country the wood was from.

What concerned B&Q was that there was no way of

preventing timber from a badly managed forest coming

into our stores. When such timber did come in, business

was being damaged, either in the form of customer

boycotts, reduced staff morale, lost sales, or bad

publicity (Hodkinson, 1996, p. 207).

The third-party nature of FSC certification also removes

the responsibility and costs for monitoring suppliers. In

some areas, IKEA still conducts its own forest inspections,

but it increasingly relies on the FSC process (IKEA, 2004,

p. 10).

Finally, adopting certification is consistent with these

companies clearly expressed environmental and social

values. It allows them to express these values, even though

they are secondary to their financial goals (Klooster, 2005).

3.3.2. Spreading certification to forest managers

Retailer commitments to certification have repercussions

farther up the commodity chain. The Home Depot claims

to have transitioned more vendors to FSC certified wood

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than any other retailer in America (Home Depot, 2005).

Retailers like the Home Depot, IKEA, and a European

charcoal retailer played important roles in getting Mexican

wood processors and forest managers interested in

certification, for example (Klooster, 2005). Similarly, the

driving force behind the spread of forest certification in

South Africa is the WWF-initiated buyers group in theUnited Kingdom, which includes 11 local governments and

94 companies including B&Q and IKEA. B&Q agents and

suppliers hosted public fora to advertise FSC in South

Africa and required its suppliers there to certify (Morris

and Dunne, 2004).

As the extremely large firms that dominate the wood

GCC pledged to purchase only certified forest products,

demand rose quickly. In 1999, meanwhile, forest industry

groups and national governments began to promote a

number of other forest certification labels, none of which

are as environmentally or socially rigorous as the FSC

scheme (Gale, 2002; FERN, 2004). In 2002, the Pro-

gramme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification

schemes (PEFC) overtook the FSC in total certified area

(Rametsteiner and Simula, 2003). To increase the supply of

FSC certified wood, the World Bank and World Wildlife

Fund formed an alliance with the goal of certifying 200

million ha of forest (Bass et al., 2001;World BankWWF

Alliance, 2005).

Forest certification now influences international forest

policy debates quite explicitly, with the World Bank

justifying the lifting of its self-imposed ban on financing

logging projects in the tropics by promising to require

third-party forest certification for the tropical forestry

projects it supports (World Bank, 2002, p. 6). The Bankalso cooperates with the WWF Global Forest and Trade

Networks. European governments have also contributed to

FSC activities, and the United States Agency for Interna-

tional Development currently promotes FSC certification

and provides technical assistance to certified forest

managers and wood processors. This unprecedented

alliance of major companies, NGOs and a host of other

supporters around the world, means that the commercial,

social and environmental impact of the FSC Trademark on

timber-based products is going to be enormous and

unavoidable (WWF, 2004).

3.3.3. The expansion of certification in Mexico

In Mexico, a network of NGOs, national government

agencies, foundations, bilateral donors, and transnational

retailers have galvanized the spread of forest certification.

Initial support for forest certification in Mexico came from

NGO activists who were convinced of the social and

environmental importance of community forestry and

concerned about its viability amidst neo-liberal restructur-

ing. Community forestry appeared to be threatened by

trade agreements that reduced market protections and a

series of reforms to land tenure and forest regulation that

increased the autonomy of community forest owners and

decreased the role of the state (Klooster, 2003; Taylor,

2005b). This neo-liberalization of the forest sector sug-

gested a future of decreasing state intervention, new models

of forest regulation, and growing competition from

imported wood (Madrid and Chapela, 2003;Anta Fonseca,

2004).

A loose coalition of NGOs, government officials, and

unions of community forest organizations had long soughtways to strengthen the community forestry sector in

Mexico (Klooster, 2003, 2005;Taylor, 2005b). A Mexican

NGO, the Consejo Civil Mexicano para la Silvicultura

Sostenible, A.C. (CCMSS) promotes community forestry

through lobbying, raising public awareness, and support-

ing forest certification. Members of the CCMSS supported

certification for its value in improving the social and

environmental conditions of forest management and

the economic viability of well-managed forests. They

hoped that forest certification would permit domestic

producersespecially communitiesto compete in the

globalized wood market, and they hoped that certification

would demonstrate the importance of community forestry

in rural development and forest conservation to the

Mexican public (Anta Fonseca, 2004; Gerez Ferna ndez

and AlatorreGuzma n, 2005).

The CCMSS formed a partnership with the Rainforest

Alliances SmartWood program to promote certification,

conduct audits, and award certificates. They conducted the

first FSC forest audits in the Yucatan and Oaxaca in 1994

and 1995. In 1997, a national union of community forestry

organizations joined the CCMSS in regional visits promot-

ing forest certification to community leaders, foresters, and

government officials, using funds from a small grant from a

NAFTA parallel organization. In 1999, using developmentassistance from the UK and Swiss governments, the

Mexico office of the WWF financed certifications as part

of their campaign to support community forest steward-

ship in Mexico. Between 1995 and 2001, additional support

came from The InterAmerican Foundation, the Ford

Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the Packard

Foundation, the WWF and the German and UK agencies

for technical cooperation (GTZ and DFID) (Madrid

and Chapela, 2003; Anta Fonseca, 2004). In 10 years of

forest certification in Mexico, the CCMSS conducted 87

forest audits, hundreds of annual audits, and 20 chain-of-

custody audits (Anta Fonseca, 2004;Gerez Ferna ndez and

Alatorre-Guzma n, 2005).

Beginning in about 1998, the Mexican government

became a significant supporter of forest certification. The

Proyecto de Conservacion y Manejo Sustentable de Recursos

Forestales en Mexico (PROCYMAF), a program of the

Mexican Government partly funded by World Bank loans,

was an early promoter of certification in the state of

Oaxaca. From 2000 to 2002, the state government of

Durango aggressively promoted the idea of certification

and partially financed certifications, as did the state

government of Chihuahua. Currently, the federal Progra-

ma Nacional de Desarrollo Forestal (PRODEFOR) takes

on the main role of financing certification through

ARTICLE IN PRESS



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competitive grants to forest owners (Madrid and Chapela,

2003;Anta Fonseca, 2004).

For both government and non-governmental actors,

certification was part of a strategy to promote environmen-

tally appropriate forestry, including community forestry.

Certification validates their efforts at forest regulation and

conservation by making the social and environmentalimplications of their regulation visible (Klooster, 2005).

After learning about forest certification from buyers in

the export market, including retailers like Home Depot, a

number of Mexican wood processing firms also promoted

certification of the forests supplying their mills and even

covered the certification costs in some cases. Wood

processors did this for a variety of reasons, including

improving environmental aspects of forest management,

maintaining a supportive relationship with traditional

suppliers, and strategic assessments that future export

markets with Home Depot and other buyers would require

certification in the future. In addition, the Mexican firms

seeking and promoting certification used it to differentiate

themselves from suppliers possibly using illegally harvested

wood and to make them more attractive to image-

conscious clients. They use certification to demonstrate

their reliability and their ability to monitor supply and

manufacturing chains and to show potential clients that

we are not a Mickey Mouse company (Klooster, 2005).

Forest owners expressed complex and varied motiva-

tions for adopting certification. Initially, forest owners

hoped for higher prices and access to more secure markets.

Forest owners were also attracted to certification as a

means to decrease the environmental impact of forestry

and to improve the future value of their forests. It alsoprovided them with an important and useful validation of

their forest management, a means to demonstrate their

sound forest management to environmentalists and gov-

ernment regulators, thereby reducing risks of seeing

logging permits suspended due to environmental concerns

and increasing the chance of receiving preferential treat-

ment in regulation and development assistance. In addi-

tion, certification provides forest owners with an external

evaluation of the forest managers in their employ and the

forest management systems being applied in their forests

(Klooster, 2005).

In Mexico, forest certification has been part of a political

strategy of NGO activists, government officials, private

businesses, and community forest organizations to find a

place for community forestry in the globalized wood

market. It has helped them influence the national policy

environment for community forestry by validating com-

munity forestry as an acceptable form of forest conserva-

tion. According to Alfonso Arguelles, a Mexican forester

who was involved in the first SmartWood certifications

during the nascent period of tropical timber bans, If

sound forest management had not been accepted as a

conservation strategy, there could be logging bansyeven

though the only thing of any value many people have is the

forest! In the context of community forestry, where

simplistic images of a tragedy of the commons can sour

urban public opinion, this has been especially important.

For Sergio Madrid of the CCMSS, bringing world

standards and putting them in public view has been

positive. Before certification, the only authority over forest

management was a guild of foresters who applied

silvicultural standards. As he puts it, because of certifica-

tion, people now understand that good forest management

includes environmental and social aspects: good forest

management is more than directional felling.The third phase of mainstreaming forest certification, in

summary, involved activists pressuring big retailers to

commit to buying only certified wood, and retailers

pressuring their suppliers to certify. Internationally, it also

involves coalitions of environmental NGOs, national

government agencies, and multilateral governmental orga-

nizations promoting certification with forest managers

(Fig. 3). The case of Mexico indicates the variety of

NGO, government, and foundation support for certifica-

tion, and the variety of motivations drawing forest

managers to adopt the instrument.

3.3.4. How this mainstreaming strategy compromises forest

certification

Environmental certification of forest management has

come a long way from consumer boycotts of tropical wood

and Friends of the Earths Good Wood guide. The FSC

emerged from a coalition of environmental organizations

and business interests, and it developed rigorous certifica-

tion procedures based on social, environmental, and forest

management standards, requiring yearly audits by inde-

pendent organizations. These procedures push forest

managers to improve management plans, to enhance

monitoring activities, to conserve biodiversity and the

ARTICLE IN PRESS

Forest

managers

Wood

processors

Wood retailers


Activist

organizations

Pressures and

incentives to

certify

Government

and NGO

alliances

Fig. 3. In the third phase of the expansion of environmental certification

of forests, activist organizations pressured retailers such as Home Depot

to adopt commitments to purchase only certified wood. At the same time,

Global Forest and Trade Networks involve the WWF, the World Bank,

some private sector actors, and national governmental agencies in thepromotion of forest certification.



10/15

ecological functions of their forests, and to improve

working conditions.

Following environmental activism, big retailers made

commitments to purchase certified wood. The WWF, the

World Bank, and bilateral development aid organizations

promoted the instrument among wood buyers and forest

managers. FSC certification evolved from a mechanismneeded for effective discriminatory grass-roots boycott

campaigns, to become a major international forest policy

tool embraced by global decision-makers (Counsell and

Loraas, 2002, p. 14). In other words, FSC certification has

mainstreamed an NGO concern about deforestation in the

tropics to a document-intensive, buyer-driven preoccupa-

tion for delivering large quantities of certified wood

products to market, with a focus on big forest producers

and large wood consumers (Bass et al., 2001;Counsell and

Loraas, 2002; Taylor, 2005a). This compromises the

instrument in several ways.

First, the international distribution of forest certification

does not so far reflect the original interest in tropical

deforestation that inspired the social movement behind this

novel institution. More than 80% of the certified forest

area is now in the US, Canada, and Europe with only 10%

in tropical countries. Certification appears to mostly be

snubbing small-scale and community forestry. Most

certified forests are publicly owned, about 35% are private,

and only 3% of the area of certified forests are community-

owned (Rametsteiner and Simula, 2003; UNEP-WCMC,

2004). Projections that certification will only reach 2% of

community forests in the next decade are particularly

troubling to forest policy researchers and activists, because

the community share of the global forest estate issignificant and growing. About a fourth of the forests in

developing countries are community owned or managed.

This figure doubled over the last 15 years and will probably

double again in the next several decades (Molnar, 2003,

p. ii).

Second, forest certification has only rarely generated a

clear price benefit for certified forest producers. Some

analysts doubt that forest certification will ever generate

price premiums able to cover the cost of evaluations,

audits, licensing, and the management improvements that

it usually requires. Retailers are the most powerful actors

in wood commodity chains, and they have little interest in

either increasing the cost of the products to consumers or

in passing any increased revenue back to their certified

suppliers (Bass et al., 2001; Morris and Dunne, 2004;

Klooster, 2005;Taylor, 2005a).

With the support of development NGOs, several

government agencies, national wood processing compa-

nies, and community forest organizations, the CCMSS and

SmartWood evaluated 87 forests and granted 35 certificates

in Mexico. Certified forests cover 578,194 ha and produce

about 12% of the legal wood harvest (Gerez Ferna ndez,

2004; Gerez Ferna ndez and Alatorre-Guzma n, 2005).

Certification required forest management improvements

in these operations, but they were probably already the

best-managed forests in the country. Extending certifica-

tion to additional, less well-managed forest management

operations would lead to even greater improvements in

forest management, but also greater costs for audits,

improvements to management documents, and improve-

ments to management practices. So far, many of the costs

of audits, certification fees, and management improve-ments have been covered from the Mexican governments

forest development funds, international foundations, and

multilateral donors. To spread much farther, forest

certification must overcome these barriers of cost. Un-

fortunately, certified wood only rarely earns the producer

extra revenues to cover these costs (Klooster, 2005). The

Mexican market seems unlikely to generate a price

premium anytime soon (Madrid and Chapela, 2003).

Furthermore, when certified forest communities try to

make use of their certified status in existing markets, they

face additional barriers. Buyers seeking certified wood also

demand high volume, uniform physical quality, and low

prices. This reflects a commodity network dominated by

giant retail firmsthe very actors that certification

promoters have been targeting in their efforts to main-

stream the instrument (Klooster, 2005). In Mexico,

certification does generate economic benefits for a few

forest producers, but those benefits are sometimes little

more than maintaining an embattled position supplying an

increasingly competitive, increasingly globalized, wood

commodity network. As presently structured, however,

the instrument seems unlikely to extend beyond the largest

community forest producers in Mexico.

3.5. Phase IV: corrective measures

Forest certification promoters recognize many of these

problems, and are taking steps to ameliorate a retailer-

focused mainstreaming strategy by opening niches for

small and community forest producers. In 2001, the FSC

outlined a social strategy to better serve the needs of local

community forest users, indigenous peoples, forest work-

ers, and small and low intensity forest users. This strategy

identifies the need to improve access to forest certification

by streamlining procedures and lowering certification costs

(FSC, 2003a).

FSC promoters and critics recognized that small forest

owners, some indigenous and traditional community

forests, and operations based on non-timber forest

products confronted certification standards and indicators

irrelevant to the scale of their operations, with costs that

discouraged their participation. In 2002, FSC began work

on a Small and Low Intensity Managed Forests (SLIMF)

initiative to reduce certification costs for small forest

operations. After field tests in Vermont, Brazil, Canada,

South Africa, and Italy, the new procedure became

available for small-scale forest owners, non-timber forest

product producers and forest operations practicing low-

level harvesting. SLIMF streamlines the technical require-

ments for certification assessment, with more appropriate

ARTICLE IN PRESS



11/15

sampling levels, greater emphasis on local rather than

national stakeholder consultation, and a reduction in the

number of required peer reviews (FSC, 2005d). However,

concerns about diluting the FSC standard limit SLIMF to

forest management operations under 1000 ha in area, nor

do they remove documentation requirements of manage-

ment plans and monitoring requirements that comprisehigh indirect costs for forest managers (Molnar, 2003;

Butterfield et al., 2005, p. 18).

The FSC social strategy also set an objective of

improving market access and market benefits for smaller

and community operations, with the understanding that

higher benefits from certification should encourage more

forest managers to seek certification.4 It suggested building

partnerships to establish markets for community forestry

products, building entrepreneurial capacity, and develop-

ing information systems identifying the availability of

wood and non-timber forest products from certified

community and small forests (FSC, 2005d).

The social strategy also suggested that Fair Trade might

play a role for some of the small and community forests

seeking certification, and that Fair Trade forestry might be

integrated into Global Forest and Trade Network activities

(FSC, 2003a). In meetings with other commodity network

members, FSC continues to explore the possibility of

introducing Fair Trade principles into the timber trade

supply chain (FSC, 2005b). The FSC has not clearly

advocated the kinds of Fair Trade principles most

challenging to the retailer-dominated commodity network

in which it operates, however. The social strategy notes

Fair Trades focus on disadvantaged groups and capacity-

building, for example, but it makes no mention of shiftingcertification costs from forest managers to wood processors

and retailers, like Fair Trade does. Nor does the document

discuss the possibility of minimum prices for certified

wood, like Fair Trade does. Other FSC observers, though,

have suggested making requirements for chain-of-custody

certificate holders to contribute to a forest development

fund or guarantee a minimum price for certified wood that

covers the costs of evaluations, audits, and best practice

forestry (Thornber and Markopoulos, 2000;Taylor, 2005,

2005a).

Starting in 2002, the Rainforest Alliance began a

program that closely reflects the goals and objectives of

the FSC social strategy. The Training, Research, Extension

Education and Systems program (TREES), grew out of

forest managers demands for such assistance that dis-

tracted SmartWood,5 a Rainforest Alliance affiliate, from

its certification mission. It also responds to concerns that

certification was becoming too dependent on the possibly

fickle big box retailers, and that the Global Forest and

Trade Networks were failing to make market linkages for

the kinds of small forest management operations and

communities certified by SmartWood (Whelan and Katz,

2003).

TREES attempts to provide economic support to

communities underserved by the forestry certification

movement by bridging some of the barriers small andcommunity producers face when they try to use certifica-

tion in the marketplace.

To compete in the certified marketplace, certified

operations should be able to offer products with the

same or better quality than the competition, and at

competitive prices. Those entering the certified market

in hopes of a premium have discovered that if it exists, it

is a short-term phenomenon until supply volumes

increase. Instead, certification can help a company find

new markets (Whelan and Katz, 2003, p. 45) .

With seed funding from the Ford Foundation, the

Rainforest Alliance mobilized additional support from

USAID, the United States Forest Service, and 20 private

companies including IKEA and Gibson Musical Instru-

ments to provide technical assistance to forest managers

and local wood processors, and help them find buyers

(Rainforest Alliance, 2004).

FSC promoters continue consumer outreach. In 2002,

advertisements in US subways and popular magazines

featuring Jennifer Lopez and Piers Brosnan invited

consumers to become action heros by requesting FSC

certified wood (FSC US, 2002; Taylor, 2005). In the

Netherlands, advertisements on television and print mate-

rials inform consumers that with FSC-timber, you savemore than the forest. Following previous ad campaigns in

2004, 63% of Dutch consumers recognized the FSC label,

up from 12% in 2001 (FSC, 2005c).

Many of these kinds of activities have a clear reflection in

Mexico, especially among certification promoters who

hoped the instrument would give community forestry a

boost in a context of a globalized forest sector.

We thought forest certification was going to take off like

(organic) coffee, but an alternative market has not really

formed. There is no premium price. There arent really

consumers willing to seek out certified wood. Theres no

niche market (Mexican community forestry advocate).

In response, personnel affiliated with the CCMSS are

spearheading the Coordinating Company of Certified

Forest Communities (Empresa Integradora de Comunidades

Forestales Certificadas) to improve the quality of commu-

nity sawmills, to coordinate sales in order to deliver the

volumes certified markets require, and to cooperate in

added-value manufacturing of certified wood products like

doors, boxes, and furniture. If the market doesnt arrive

on its own, well have to go look for it, explained one of

the organizers of this initiative, which involves the

CCMSS, other Mexican NGOs, the federal forest

agency CONAFOR, the Inter American Foundation, and

ARTICLE IN PRESS

4Market-building activities are outside the scope of a certification

agency, but within the purview of many FSC members and partners.5SmartWood is a leading FSC certifier with a disproportionate number

of small, community, and southern forest certificates in its portfolio.

Through its partnership with the CCMSS, SmartWood conducted all the

evaluations in Mexico, for example.



12/15

PROCYMAF, the Mexican federal governments commu-

nity forestry development program that was an early

promoter of certification (Anta Fonseca, 2004).

Similarly, one of the TREES pilot projects works with 10

of the largest certified forest communities in Durango,

Mexico. The project provides technical assistance in

harvesting, hauling, and milling to increase efficiency inwood production by 1020%, without increased environ-

mental impact. It also provides technical assistance in

lumber grading and road building. In Mexico, TREES

operates with support from the USAID Global Develop-

ment Alliance, the US Forest Service, and several forestry

promotion programs of the Mexican federal government

(Rudin o, 2003).

The project also enrolled a large Durango wood

processing firm linked to export markets in the project to

increase lumber yields. The company sent sawmill techni-

cians to mountain communities and led workshops in its

own facilities to train community forestry personnel in saw

sharpening, sawmill maintenance, and sawing efficiency.

This was perhaps the first time in Mexico that an

international environmental NGO teamed up with private

capital to support community forestry (Klooster, 2005).

With support from TREES, several of the ejidos in

Durango successfully supply certified wood molding to

Home Depot and furniture parts to IKEA, as does Nuevo

San Juan Parangaricutiro, one of Mexicos biggest and

most productive forest communities (Rudino, 2003; Anta

Fonseca, 2004;Rainforest Alliance, 2004;Klooster, 2005).

These are some of the largest forest owners in Mexico,

however, and they are able to deliver large volumes at low

prices with uniform physical characteristics.

Mexican community forestry promoters are also at-

tempting to increase domestic demand for certified wood.

In a domestic wood market where many consumers are

impoverished and a significant percentage of the harvest is

used in disposable molds for concrete in the informal

construction sector (Madrid and Chapela, 2003), Green-

peace Mexico has started a campaign to pressure govern-ment purchasers to preferentially acquire certified wood.

To summarize this fourth phase of an evolving

commodity network for wood, a variety of programs

attempt to increase the influence of forest certification on

the governance of the network (Fig. 4). If these programs

can stimulate a price premium, lower the barriers for small

operations to get certified, and make it easier for certified

producers to use certification to access markets, then the

substantial benefits of forest certification will extend

beyond a small handful of already-successful forest

managers and reach a larger number of less successful

operations.

4. Conclusion

Environmental certification of forests is an example of

transnational, non-governmental approaches to environ-

mental regulation and development. This study contributes

to our understanding of the emergence of private

regulatory institutions through a historical analysis of

institutional evolution amid political contestation between

environmental organizations, governments, and other

timber commodity chain actors (Bartley, 2003). The

evolution of FSC forest certification demonstrates that

NGOs can be quite successful using retailer-focusedstrategies to promote the fairly rapid adoption of socio-

environmental certification, which effectively leverages

social and environmental improvements in forest manage-

ment practices in a substantial proportion of the worlds

managed forest area. An important part of the main-

streaming strategy for forest certification involved pressure

from environmental activists on retailers. This is similar to

analyses of the role of NGOs in pressuring UK retailers to

adopt corporate ethics policies, which then govern vege-

table and flower growing in Africa (Hughes, 2001;

Freidberg, 2004). It also involves innovative alliances of

environmental NGOs, governmental actors, and big

retailers in Global Forest and Trade Networks that

strongly influence governance upstream in the commodity

chain.

Environmental certification of forests, however, appears

to be mainstreaming in a very different way than, for

example, organic agriculture, where the market is differ-

entiated between an organic niche and conventional

agriculture with a consumer-generated price premium.

The market for the environmental certification of forests,

however, appears to be advancing towards a retailer-

imposed discipline that makes certification a requirement

for accessing the market, but without providing a price

premium for forest owners. It is as if Wal-Mart required all

ARTICLE IN PRESS

Forest

managers

Wood

processors

Wood retailers

Individual and

institutional consumers

Activist

organizations

Pressures and

incentives to

certify

Government

and NGO

alliances

SLIMF

program

TREES,

Integradora

Consumer

campaigns

Programs to lower the

barriers to getting and

using certification

Fair Trade?

Fig. 4. In the current phase of the evolution of external environmental

governance of the wood commodity chain, NGO-led alliances attempt to

improve the reach and effectiveness of forest certification in a buyer-driven

commodity chain. A Small and Low Intensity Managed Forests (SLIMF)

program decreases the certification costs to some forest managers. A local

Mexican project and an international training and extension program

(TREES) work to link small certified forest operations with markets.

Greenpeace Mexico pressures the Mexican government to demand

certified wood. Meanwhile, incipient debates about Fair Trade have yet

to influence the commodity network.



13/15

of its food suppliers to shift to certified organic practices,

but without paying them higher prices or making provi-

sions to compensate them for certification fees and

increased costs of production. As Freidberg (2003a,

p. 98) noted for the imposition of ethical rules of

production in fresh vegetable trade from Africa to the

UK, growers have very little power in comparison with thebig retailers, and so re-arranging commodity networks

around social and environmental values does not necessa-

rily make them less exploitative.

Furthermore, as commodity network analysts have

speculated (Ponte and Gibbon, 2005, p. 22; Humphrey

and Schmitz, 2001), certification provides the retailers that

drive the global wood commodity network with a tool to

control their suppliers at a distance; it gives them a way to

outsource the costs and risks of commodity network

governance. Third-party certification shifts the costs of

audits, certification fees, and management improvements

away from retailers and onto suppliers. Furthermore, it

does this in a way that does not generate reliable price

premiums for the forest managers shackled with these costs

(Klooster, 2005). In this sense, certification is a governance

tool used by powerful actors in the commodity network to

disciplinethe actions of less powerful actors in the network

by exerting control at a distance (Ponte and Gibbon,

2005, p. 22; see Mutersbaugh, 2005). Nevertheless, as

commodity network theory also suggests, governance is

diffused among many actors in a network, and many of

those actors use certification to validate their activities.

Forest managers, for example, use it to justify their

performance with the forest owners who employ them

and with local environmentalists who might otherwisecriticize their forest stewardship. Government officials also

use it to corroborate the effectiveness of their programs

and policies with funders and citizens. Similarly, wood

processors use chain of custody certifications to demon-

strate that they are not a Mickey Mouse company, but

can track wood and avoid illegally cut timber. These

validating aspects of certification have also proven useful

to environmental NGOs in Mexico defending community

forestry from the threat of logging bans; such policy

influence is an important aspect of how NGOs used

certification to affect the governance of commodity

networks. These actors use certification to authenticate

and communicate sound forest management to important

audiences in the commodity network. Validation is the

other face of discipline. There are tensions between

certification as a way for powerful actors in a commodity

network todisciplineless powerful actors, on the one hand,

and certification as a way for some of those same

commodity network actors to validate their management

practices. This aspect of certification deserves more

attention in the study of governance dynamics.

Multiple actors exercise their powers to shape the wood

commodity network, but transnational retailers dominate

it. They subsume the social and environmental goals of

forest certification under their profitability strategy of

selling high volumes at low prices (Klooster, 2005).

Mainstreaming environmental governance through the

power of retailers is a Faustian bargain that marginalizes

small and community forest managers, shifting the costs of

environmental management onto them but without pro-

viding them with the means to cover those costs. So far,

certification mainly reaches extensive and well-documentedforests, mostly in the North, but fails to reach small or

community forests in the global South where it would

leverage substantial management improvements if it were

less costly and more financially rewarding.

Certification promoters recognized this, however, and

responded with a variety of programs first, to decrease the

barriers forest managers face in getting certified and

second, to increase their success in using certification to

access markets. In Mexico, these approaches have been

successful in linking some of the larger Mexican forest

communities to buyers like IKEA and Home Depot, but

most community forests still remain on the margins of

markets for certified forest products. Similarly, many

community forests in Mexico are too big to benefit from

streamlined, cost-reducing certification procedures like

SLIMF, but still too small to benefit from programs

linking them to retail markets. Although these projects

improve the situation, they do not erase the limitations of

forest certification in reaching small, medium, and com-

munity forest management operations. They do not over-

come the influence of big retailers on the governance of

commodity networks, which continues to presents signifi-

cant obstacles to the ability of certification to leverage

social and environmental improvements more broadly.

Debates about a Fair Trade approach to forestry, mean-while, suggest a more fundamental need to question the

relationships of power in commodity networks and to

challenge the assumption that, on their own, markets can

provide forest producers with the means to cover the costs

of environmental and social improvements to forest

management.

Acknowledgment

I gratefully acknowledge my intellectual debt to Pete

Taylor, Patricia Gerez Ferna ndez, Tad Mutersbaugh,

Marie Christine Renard, Barney Warf, Yolanda Lara,Sergio Madrid, and Margaret Fitzsimmons for comment-

ing on earlier versions of this manuscript. My ideas also

benefited from audience feedback following presentations

at the Denver conference of the Association of American

Geographers, the International Association for the Study

of Common Property in Oaxaca, Mexico, Macalester

College, Yale university, and Florida State University.

I also appreciate the efforts of the anonymous reviewers.

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