Logjam: Deforestation and the Crisis of Global Governance (review)

Logjam, the winner of the 2008 Harold and Margaret E. Sprout Award from the Environmental Studies Section of the International Studies Association, provides a thorough assessment of the politics of global forestry governance and the failure to create a global treaty on forests. Humphreys addresses the critical question of why forests continue to be depleted around the world, despite attention to protecting forests at the international level. He does so by examining the main international political forestry processes from 1995 to 2006.

In the book's preface, Humphreys argues that academics who study environmental politics have a duty to turn their attention to providing policy solutions that will enhance the public interest—using not only managerial, problem solving approaches, but also critical theory that addresses the underlying causes of environmental problems. This belief underlies the core argument behind Humphrey's book, that the global loss of forest cover is a systemic problem. If academics focus only on the details of forest policy and negotiations towards a global forestry regime, they may miss the root cause of deforestation, which, he argues, is the fundamental structure of neoliberalism, and the "penetration of publicly accountable organizations, and of nature and common resources worldwide, by business corporations" (p. 214).

Humphreys outlines how the concepts of global public goods and neoliberalism relate to forestry. He applies a standard taxonomy of private versus public goods (categorized by their rivalness and excludability) to the case of forestry. He argues, that, under neoliberalism, new definitions of property rights (such as patents on species and traditional forest knowledge) have caused previously non-excludable goods to become excludable. A fundamental problem with deforestation is that overharvesting of private forestry goods causes destruction to the public goods of the forest, such as the ecosystem services that forests provide to the community. On a global scale, Humphreys argues that these public goods continue to be depleted because of the increasing dominance of private sector rights under neoliberalism. Even though governments continue to own and administer the great majority of forests around the world and are reluctant to cede ownership rights to the private sector, they have been increasingly willing to transfer use rights through timber concessions to private companies, allowing for widespread corruption and violation of forestry protection laws.

The book provides a comprehensive analysis of the failure of major international negotiations to reach a global forestry agreement, beginning with the Intergovernmental Panel on Forests (IPF), which was established in 1995 (following forest negotiations at the UNCED), and existed until 1997. Although the IPF was the first truly global forum for addressing forestry issues, it was only able to negotiate the non-legally binding IPF Proposals for Action, and did not reach consensus on a forestry convention. The World Commission on Forests and Sustainable Development, which met from 1995 until it disbanded after producing a report on "Our Forests, Our Future" in 1999, had "virtually no impact on forests discourse or global governance" (p. xvii) due to the lack of high-level political support for the organization. The Intergovernmental Forum on Forests (IFF) was created as an open-ended, subsidiary body to the Commission on Sustainable Development in 1997, and disbanded in 2000, falling short of establishing a forests convention and instead creating a new body, the United Nations Forum on Forests (UNFF). The UNFF was established in 2001 for an initial period of five years as a new UN organ with universal membership, reporting directly to the UN General Assembly Economic and Social Council. Despite its higher profile, Humphreys argues that the resolutions negotiated by the UNFF were much weaker than the IPF and IFF, and while it incorporated multi-stakeholder dialogue into its processes, these dialogues largely did not affect formal decision-making. The UNFF was able to reach consensus on a non-legally binding instrument on all types of forests in April 1997, but it is far from clear that the instrument will meaningfully address global deforestation.

The book also addresses new nongovernmental forestry governance mechanisms, examining voluntary timber certification...