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Article Excerpt
When addressing the Stakeholder Forum of the World Commission on Dams (WCD) in 1999, Richard Falk noted that "it may turn out that what is most memorable about this Commission is that it has successfully initiated an inclusive democratic process that has encompassed the most relevant voices." (1) Falk's statement is remarkable, since the WCD was a novelty in global decisionmaking--decisions were made not by states, but by a variety of nonstate actors.
The World Commission on Dams is no longer unique in this regard. The Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC), but also initiatives such as the Rugmark Foundation labeling scheme for carpets produced without child labor, the Earth Island Institute's "Dolphin Safe" label for tuna, the Common Code for the Coffee Community (4C), and the Mining, Minerals and Sustainable Development (MMSD) initiative are further illustrations of a growing market of nonstate processes in which issues are defined, rules are made, and compliance with these rules is monitored. As far as their output is concerned, these governance processes appear to resemble international regimes--with the important difference that it is not states but nonstate actors who generate both the "principles, norms, rules, and decisionmaking procedures" and the expectations associated with them. Hence, we might speak of transnational regimes that have emerged in many areas where international regulation is either absent or weak. (2) As the phenomenon of nonstate rule making beyond the state is of relatively recent origin, conceptual and theoretical consensus is still weak. As a result, authors have referred to qualitatively similar phenomena as "global public policy networks," "private authority," "public-private rule making," "nonstate market-driven governance systems," or "civil regulation." (3)
Partly resulting from the lack of conceptual and theoretical consensus, the implications of the observed trend toward nonstate decisionmaking beyond the state remain unclear. While some associate the emergence of multistakeholder initiatives with a democratization of world affairs--implying that Southern interests are adequately represented in such initiatives--others warn that the bypassing of democratically elected governments may further weaken the representation of Southern interests.
In the context of this debate about the possibility of multistakeholder processes to "close the participatory gap," (4) the FSC is of particular interest. As one of the first global governance arrangements, the FSC bases its decisionmaking on an explicit parity of Northern and Southern stakeholders. This article examines the organizational procedures of the FSC as well as their practical implementation. It concludes that affirmative procedures--components of the governance system introduced to establish a formal North-South parity in decisionmaking--alone are insufficient to strengthen the position of Southern interests. (5) Moreover, the analysis reveals significant disparities in the representation of stakeholders from various geographical regions. While Latin American stakeholders are well represented, stakeholders from African and Asian developing countries play a relatively weak role in the governance of the FSC. In the end, it is therefore not so much the affirmative procedures themselves that make the FSC an interesting model for other global decisionmaking processes, but rather their combination with a multilevel system of standard setting in which national and regional standards specify the meaning of globally developed principles and criteria.
The South in the Private Governance Literature
Given the common assumption that private governance schemes are particularly relevant in contexts of limited public authority, it must come as a surprise that the South--both as a subject and as an object of governance--does not figure more prominently in the contemporary literature on private governance beyond the state. (6) In the development of this literature, three aspects appear to have inhibited a more thorough analysis of what the emergence of private governance means for developing societies. First, a relatively large share of the literature engages in general-level attempts to grasp the phenomenon itself. As a result, a number of studies have distinguished between various types of (public-) private governance beyond the state, examined the relation of these different types to the state system, and explored the implications of their emergence for the conduct of "global governance" more generally. (7)
Second, the empirical literature has so far focused primarily on private governance schemes in the context of global economic and financial governance--for instance, by examining the potential of different sectors of society to self-regulate across borders, the governance contribution of individual actors such as credit rating agencies, or the responses of economic actors to private transnational rules. (8) Consequently, a Northern perspective according to which "governance through private organizations, realistically, is restricted to the more developed parts of the world" dominates the field. (9)
And third, the social origins of private governance have primarily been linked to economic globalization and other developments spurred by industrialized societies. This has led the private governance literature to empirically focus on the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) world and to largely neglect the role of Southern actors as either objects or subjects of private governance.
Summarizing the discussion, Thomas Conzelmann and Jorg Faust have recently argued that "we are so far lacking systematic analysis on whether, beyond formal representation, Southern actors also exert a significant substantive influence within global public policy networks." (10)
Yet, one might contend, the observation that the South does not figure more prominently in the literature on private governance may merely suggest that developing countries de facto do not play a very prominent role in transnational rule-making processes and that the high hopes associated with "multistakeholder initiatives" and "global public policy networks" may therefore not be warranted. In fact, Wolfgang Reinicke and colleagues are very much aware of this point when they note that "although often described as global, most public-policy networks are in fact dominated by elite actors (public and private) from the industrial world, with few ties to developing-country groups or local institutions." (11) As a result, they note a "dual challenge of inclusion," which global public policy networks need to address. They need to ensure that developing country stakeholders are adequately included in the decisionmaking process, and they need to bridge the local-global gap by also including actors whose primary level of engagement is the national or even local level. (12) In the remainder of the article I examine how the FSC has dealt with this "dual challenge of inclusion." The FSC represents a highly interesting case because of its pioneering efforts to base decisionmaking on an explicit parity of its Northern and Southern members. (13) Before discussing the details and implications of the organization's procedures, I introduce in the following section the FSC as a major private governance scheme in the field of global sustainability politics.
Private Global Governance and the South: The Case of the Forest Stewardship Council
Because demanding the inclusion of Southern representatives makes sense only to the extent that the interests of Southern stakeholders are actually affected by the outcomes of private global governance schemes, this section introduces the FSC with a specific focus on the organization's impacts on developing societies. Such impacts can be broadly classified as discursive impacts related to the framing of issues and key concepts of the decisionmaking process; as normative and regulatory impacts related to the establishment of new norms, rules, and standards at the national and international level; and...
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