Transnational Environmental Governance: The Emergence and Effects of the Certification of Forests and Fisheries (review)

One of the most visible recent trends in the governance of renewable resources internationally (and of much else besides) is the emergence of voluntary certification systems. Two of the best known of these systems are the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) and the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC), which create sustainability standards for forestry products and wild-caught fish respectively. Lars Gulbrandsen’s excellent book traces the evolution of and relationship between these two standards, and uses both to illustrate broader themes and draw lessons about voluntary certification more broadly.

Both the FSC and the MSC are examples of what has been called “governance without government” in international relations. (Voluntary standards can be governmental as well, such as organic standards in the United States, but these are rare at the international level, and are not discussed in this volume). Certification is a particular form of this phenomenon, in which voluntary standards are designed to identify producers who choose to meet high environmental and/or social standards, rather than providing a point of convergence for all producers. Gulbrandsen points out that such standards, while voluntary, are not in fact governance without government—they require effective regulation and enforcement of things like copyright laws in order to function, and governments can have significant impacts on standards, through a variety of mechanisms, when they so choose.

The book asks several questions about the evolution of environmental certification schemes, including how NGO-driven and industry-driven schemes relate to each other, how existing schemes affect new ones, and how effective certification is at achieving its intended goals. With respect to the first question, Gulbrandsen argues, via a comparison of the forestry industries in Sweden and Norway, that getting large producers that sell to the international market and are sensitive to consumer and NGO pressure on board early in the process is key. The market pressure gives producers an incentive to participate in certification schemes. But in the absence of efforts to include producer voices in the creation of a scheme’s principles, rules, and procedures these producers may respond to market pressure by creating their own certification schemes.

That is precisely what has happened in forestry. The FSC has had significant success in attracting forest owners. But an industry-driven scheme, the Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification, has attracted twice as much acreage. Gulbrandsen argues that industry-driven certification systems differ in three ways from those in which NGOs have a major say in the rules. They tend to focus more on management rules and processes than on environmental outcomes, the rules themselves tend to be less stringent, and they are often sympathetic to mutual recognition agreements, by which goods that are certified by one scheme are accepted by another. NGO-driven systems are less sympathetic to mutual recognition, because it can drag standards down to the level of the least stringent system, rather than push producers up to the level of the most stringent. He also finds, however, that when NGO-driven and industry-driven standards co-exist, the latter tends to move toward the former, narrowing the difference and increasing the average stringency of certification systems.

To answer the second question, about the effect of existing certification processes on new ones, Gulbrandsen looks at the effects of the FSC on the subsequent formation of the MSC. The driving organizational force in both of the cases in this book was the WWF, which is developing a specialty in the creation of certification schemes. (It is now, for example, a driving force in the creation of the Aquaculture Stewardship Council, or ASC.) Not surprisingly, MSC certification is structured in ways clearly modeled after the FSC, with some key differences. The standards are global, rather than leaving scope for national conditions, the governance structure is less open, and less attention is given to social, as opposed to environmental, issues.

Gulbrandsen’s answer to the third question, about the effectiveness of...