Toward SuSTainabiliTy: The roleS and limiTaTionS of ... - Resolve

Chapter 2: Actors – NGOs and Civil Society 20be tackled solely through national-scale policiesand regulatory systems. Tropical forests were stilldisappearing. And, the political environment hadshifted toward a preference for smaller government,freer trade, and resistance to regulation.Also, a rapid increase in economic globalizationmeant that pollution constraints could easilybe allayed by transferring production to foreigncountries.Two decades after Silent Spring, nongovernmentalorganizations (NGOs) such as Friendsof the Earth, the Rainforest Action Network, andGreenpeace were running boycott campaignsagainst unsustainably harvested tropical timberand other environmentally harmful practices, whilean array of socially focused NGOs led boycotts ofNike over labor practices in Asia (Donovan, 1996;Locke, 2002). (These actions followed successfulboycotts in the 1970s of table grapes becauseof farmworker issues, Shell Oil products due toinvestments in South Africa under apartheid, andNestlé for its marketing of baby formula (Murtagh& Lukehart, undated)).While these groups gained political leverage anddrew media attention, productive operating alternativeswere difficult to identify. In the forestryarena, legislative bans on the import of unsustainableforest products ran afoul of rules aboutunfair discrimination against tropical timber. Atthe international level, attempts to embed forestrystandards in the International Tropical TimberOrganization (ITTO) and to pass a global ForestConvention through the United Nations bothfell short, due to global North–South conflictsand opposition from the tropical timber trade(Cashore, Gale, Meidinger, & Newsom, 2006).It was against this backdrop that some NGOsbegan to promote sustainability-focused certificationsystems as a new and sometimesless-confrontational form of environmentaland social activism. As described in Chapter 1,a group of NGOs in the early 1990s, buildingon earlier efforts, coalesced to build the ForestStewardship Council (FSC) as a powerful formof nonstate market governance, regulating andmanaging resource use and trade (Cashore, Auld,& Newsom 2004). In most cases these effortsdid not supplant more confrontational efforts,but instead existed alongside them (McAdam,McCarthy, & Zald, 1996; Morton, 2002).Bartley (2007a et seq.) contends that the engagementof NGOs in certification, at least in theseminal case of the FSC, was shaped by a group offoundations acting collectively to build the field ofcertification. Bartley also notes that this approachto environmental problem solving coincided bothwith significant new barriers to the regulationof global commerce by national actors (e.g., theWorld Trade Organization (WTO) prohibitionon discrimination against tropical timber on thebasis of production issues, as well as rules of theITTO), and with a period of phenomenal growthin foundation assets.In the case of certification, the foundations thatmade the bulk of the investments 1 already hadin place a basic framework—the SustainableForest Funders Network—for collaboratingtoward a collective result. These foundations alsoshared certain key characteristics, including aliberal to moderate ideology, a history of fundingenvironmental organizations, and importantly,existing relationships with the World Wide Fundfor Nature (WWF), which was a central player inthe development of the FSC and similar models(Bartley, 2007a). Foundations strongly favored theFSC over its industry-sponsored competitors, butrather than merely fund the FSC itself, they usedtheir grants to build a larger field around thisorganization and to “make a market” for certifiedwood. Although a similar network did not emergeto promote the Marine Stewardship Council(MSC), major funding from foundations suchas the David and Lucile Packard Foundation andWalton Family Foundation enabled the MSC togrow, and complementary programs supporting1 Nine foundations—The Ford Foundation, Doris DukeCharitable Foundation, Rockefeller Brothers Fund,Surdna Foundation, Pew Charitable Trusts, MacArthurFoundation, Moriah Foundation, Wallace Global Fund,and Merck Family Fund—accounted for $33 milliongranted to forestry certification from 1995 to 2001(Bartley 2007a).Toward Sustainability: The Roles and Limitations of Certification