Mapping convergence of sustainable forest management systems: Comparing three protocols and two certification schemes for ascertaining the trends in global forest governance

Abstract

At the global level, two Sustainable Forest Management (SFM) systems, i.e., protocols and certification, have grown significantly in standardizing forest management practices. Protocols are driven by multi-stakeholder groups that outline a series of standardized criteria and indicators agreed upon by participating countries. On the other hand, forest certification involves market-driven multi-stakeholder standardization, assessment, and recognition of a forest management entity’s compliance with standards established by the respective certification program. In this study, we compare the trends in numbers and types of changes that have taken place over two consecutive periods (1995-2005 and 2005-2015) through case studies for three protocols (International Tropical Timber Organization (ITTO), Forest Europe (FE), and Montreal Process (MP)) and two certification schemes (Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) and Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI)). A qualitative review of the respective systems’ institutional histories is followed by a graphical representation of the observed changes. We then compare the relative quantitative changes in the categories of criteria and indicators in the standards of the selected systems. We find that FSC may have been instrumental in other SFM systems changing the ecological types of Criteria & Indicators (C&Is) in both periods. Changes in SFI’s standards correspond to its institutional changes from a purely industry-driven system to being an independent organization. Furthermore, we find that ITTO has been more reactive in changing their C&Is as compared to MP and FE, which may have played a vital role in the standardization discourse. Nevertheless, based on our results, we argue that considering socio-economic institutional elements towards trends and developments in all the five standards is important. The selected five SFM institutions can use our findings regarding the trends in the standardization of global forest management to achieve their respective goals for ensuring the sustainability of forest resources worldwide.

Introduction

Sustainable Forest Management (SFM) promotes responsible forest resource use while recognizing critical contributions of forestlands to human well-being in the form of economic, environmental, and social values (United Nations, 1987). At the global level, two SFM systems, i.e., protocols and certification, have grown significantly in standardizing forest management practices.

Protocols outline a series of standardized criteria and indicators (C&Is) agreed upon by participating countries to achieve sustainable forestry. Different countries are members of different international forestry protocols which are designed by international, national, and sub-national institutions to collect data related to forest trends through monitoring of various factors, e.g., water, biodiversity, silvicultural systems, cultural benefits, and several others (Gulbrandsen and Humphreys, 2006). The mission of the protocols has been to provide policymakers at the national scale with informed strategies to operationalize and improve SFM (Gulbrandsen and Humphreys, 2006; Washburn and Block, 2001).

Forest certification involves standardization, assessment, and recognition of a forest management entity in compliance with standards established by a certification program. Forest certification schemes are recognition and verification systems that aim to assess the performance of individuals or groups of individuals on the level of individual forest management units (FMUs) against a set of standards developed in concert with multiple stakeholders (van der Ven and Cashore, 2018). The most prominent forest certification schemes employ third-party verification, promote the legitimacy of forest management entities and forest products companies in the public sphere, and are driven by environmental awareness of consumers in the market who demand sustainable forest products (Johansson and Lidestav, 2011).

In the 1970s, the role of civil society and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) was limited in forest resource management rulemaking as there was a high probability that persons deemed to be forestry professionals came either from government or industry (Westoby and Simmons, 1989). The rate of deforestation in the Amazon increased from about 12 thousand km²/year in the 1970s to almost 30 thousand km²/year in the 1990s, and the forests in SE Asia and the Congo followed a similar trajectory as well (Rosa et al., 2016). During this time, local and international NGOs associated with social and environmental concerns saw a rapid rise in numbers as well as in their ability to be heard by governments (Berny and Rootes, 2018). They actively campaigned through social coalitions and movements for changing the practices of the industry to be more responsible and accountable (Bartley, 2007). Globalization of some NGOs like Friends of the Earth (FoE) and Greenpeace in the 1970s was a result of the growing emphasis on the need for transnational as well as multi-stakeholder cooperation and collaboration while facilitating decentralization of decision-making agency was felt in the context of management of natural resources, in general, and forest resources, in particular (Lemos and Agrawal, 2006).

Since then, there has been a 37.5% reduction in the global rate of deforestation from 160 thousand km²/year in the 1990s to 100 thousand km²/year between 2015 and 2020 (FAO and UNEP, 2020). The net loss of forest area has shown a 39.7% reduction from 78 thousand km²/year in the 1990s to 47 thousand km²/year in 2020. Despite these reductions in annual rates, a total of around 4.2 million km² of forestland has been lost to other land-uses since 1990, and the primary forest area has decreased by 810 thousand km² since 1990 (FAO and UNEP, 2020). The latest report on the State of the World’s Forests notes that forests currently cover 40.6 million km² of land worldwide, although only five countries carry half and ten carry two-third of that land (FAO and UNEP, 2020).

Approaches to tackle deforestation constitute various multi-level and multi-system forest governance mechanisms driven by different societal interests. Since the 1990s, rather than a genuinely global forest governance system, a variety of fragmentary forestry regime ‘complexes’ with multi-actor partnerships, mechanisms, and programs have arisen attempting to hybridize regulation and control of forest use and conservation (Fernández-Blanco et al., 2019; Lemos and Agrawal, 2006; Rayner et al., 2010). Krasner (1982) defines an international regime as a “set of implicit or explicit principles, norms, rules and decision-making procedures around which actors’ expectations converge in a given area of international relations” (page 186). Biermann et al. (2009) state that the fragmentation of forest governance is “a patchwork of international institutions that are different in their character (organizations, regimes, and implicit norms), their constituencies (public and private), their spatial scope (from bilateral to global), and their subject matter (from specific policy fields to universal concerns).” In spite of their multi-stakeholder nature, it must be noted that public state actors and their authority are still crucial in the international forest policy regime complexes; moreover, Giessen et al. (2016) argue that the co-governance model of public and private actors is just an intermediate step before enough political momentum in regard to state interests and capacities is reached.

In today’s fragmentary global forest management regime (Arts and Buizer, 2009; Dimitrov, 2003; Fernández-Blanco et al., 2019; Humphreys, 2012), there exists a need for comparing and differentiating the chronological developments in protocols and certification schemes driven by their respective goals and missions. This can help us streamline an understanding of global forest governance across multiple strategies. This is especially true as these two systems have become the default for global forest governance to achieve local, regional, national, and international policy goals.

In this context, this study analyzes five major three protocols (International Timber Trade Organization- ITTO, Montreal Protocol - MP, and Forest Europe - FE) and two certification schemes (Forest Stewardship Council - FSC and Sustainable Forestry Initiative - SFI)] to contextualize global changes in the standardization discourse of forest management practices over the last thirty years. The objective of this study is to identify convergence and dissonance between the five major standards over time by comparing the respective number of changes in their words and conceptual framing. We also contextualize those changes in the institutional histories to understand the trajectories of global forest governance discourse. It is not an exhaustive analysis as we do not include all the SFM standards that have ever existed but studying these five major standard systems can give a glimpse at the trajectory of global forest governance. First, we discuss the institutional histories of the five SFM systems. Second, we argue that standard development includes additions, removals, and restructuring of C&Is and in terminologies within those C&Is. Finally, our analysis of these changes in the five standards is discussed, considering the potential dynamics which may have shaped them over time.