Forest Certification in Developing and Transitioning ... - UTas ePrints

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forest certification in developing and transitioning countries
Why has the momentum behind forest certification been weak in most developing
countries? Why have Eastern European countries been eager to adopt forest certification?
Are there bottlenecks unique to developing countries that, if removed, could
pave the way for widespread support in developing countries? What are the effects of
certification — environmental, economic, and social — when it is adopted?
The purpose of this book is to shed light on these issues by turning our individual
and collective research attention from developed country certification dynamics to
developing and transitioning country dynamics. We do so with the knowledge that
the promise of forest certification has yet to be fully realized. Indeed, if the barriers to
its adoption elsewhere are not systematically analysed, understood and acted upon,
forest certification could very well be assigned to the large waste bin of policy
initiatives that failed to effectively address significant and persistent global commons
problems. On the other hand, we are keenly aware that if certification does emerge as
an enduring institution for addressing global forest management, its focus on
transnational supply chains and globally traded commodities could provide a
significant and more efficient way of addressing global problems than the existing
interstate negotiations that currently dominate failed efforts to develop meaningful
global forest management initiatives.
To accomplish these goals, we developed an innovative, exciting, and
comprehensive approach to the study of forest certification. We rejected one of the
more traditional approaches of comparative social scientists that involves raising
grant dollars for ourselves and then going off to study countries in which we do not
live, are unlikely to speak the language, and, despite best efforts, whose cultural
richness we will never fully appreciate as well as someone who has grown up and lived
there. Instead, we developed a comprehensive template to collect systematic, relevant
data on the countries we studied and then identified scholars and practitioners from
the countries we were studying to conduct the research and engage in a discussion of
its implications. The challenges in undertaking and coordinating such an effort paled
in comparison to the benefits that were achieved. As we believe the reader of the case
studies to follow will see, this effort led to the development of rich and nuanced
analyses of forest certification in developing countries in Africa, Asia-Pacific, Latin
America, and emerging economies in Eastern Europe. Moreover, it helped to build an
international community of practitioners and scholars who are at once analytical,
reflective, and rigorous in probing what forest certification is presently
accomplishing, and, more importantly, what it might accomplish in the future. Case
study authors were required to use the research template we had created, but were
given complete latitude to generate hypotheses about why certification developed, or
failed to develop, in their own countries. Moreover, although the template served to
structure their research, it was broad enough to allow the researchers to describe a
rich array of effects as well as unanticipated consequences. As a result, we use the
conclusion to deductively and inductively build hypotheses from these case studies
that we hope will form the basis of future and urgently needed research designed to
shed light on the potential strengths and limitations of forest certification.
yale school of forestry & environmental studies