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ProdJus (Supranational Forest Governance in an Era of Globalising Wood Production and Justice Politics)

Analysed supranational forest governance in and beyond Europe in relation to globalising production networks and justice politics. Elucidated the differentiation of governance forms and outcomes between Europe and the South, among Southern countries and between the transnational, national and local levels.

Background

ProdJus (Supranational Forest Governance in an Era of Globalising Wood Production and Justice Politics) was a collaborative research project implemented by research partners in Ghana, Indonesia, Vietnam and the UK.

ProdJus research analysed supranational forest governance in and beyond Europe in relation to globalising production networks and justice politics. We had a particular interest in the differentiation of governance forms and outcomes between Europe and the South, among Southern countries and between the transnational, national and local levels. By looking at novel forms of forest governance (Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade [FLEGT] and Ecolabelling schemes), ProdJus improved the understanding of how collective action can address critical challenges in an increasingly globalised world, and what this meant for the future of the European continent in the presence of a more general shift from state-centred territorial governance to flow-centred arrangements.  ProdJus achieved these theoretical aims through new research that combined analyses of global production networks and justice politics in an innovative and transdisciplinary manner, built on an international partnership of leading researchers from Africa, Asia and Europe, and drew on empirical fieldwork in Ghana, Indonesia, Vietnam and Europe.

The project was a partnership of:

The project scientific personnel were:

Emmanuel Acheampong, Ghana Lead Co-Investigator, KNUST  

Dr Acheampong is a senior lecturer at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology. He holds a PhD in Human Geography (researching forest-based livelihoods) from the University of Hull, UK. He is a member of the Forest Connect Working Group which sought to reduce poverty by linking smallholders with markets and service providers. He has researched forest governance systems, timber production networks and forest justices for 15 years, resulting in several publications in peer-reviewed international journals.

Cam Hoang, Vietnam Lead Co-Investigator, VASS    

Dr Hoang is a Senior Researcher at the Institute of Cultural Studies. He holds a PhD in socio-cultural anthropology from the University of Washington, USA. His research interests were forest politics, environmental justice and cultural change among minority ethnic groups in Vietnam. He has over 19 years of experience working with local communities in the mountains of Vietnam, is an emergent public scholar on ethnic and cultural issues in Vietnam and collaborated with Sikor on multi-country research on the politics and governance of carbon forestry.

Achmad Maryudi, Indonesia Lead Co-Investigator, UGM

Prof Maryudi is a Professor at Universitas Gadjah Mada. He holds a PhD in Forest Policy Development from Göttingen University, Germany. His research interests include forest policy and governance, community forestry policy, small-medium forest enterprises and forest tenure. He is active in advising policy at both global and national levels, among others as deputy chair of the Forest Policy and Governance division of the International Union of Forest Research Organizations. He also sat on the EU-Indonesia Joint Evaluation Team on the implementation of FLEGT.

Constance L. McDermott, Science Adviser, UEA

Dr McDermott is a Senior Fellow in Forest Governance and the Leader of the Ecosystems Governance Group at Oxford University with over 25 years’ experience in multi-level governance of forests, climate, and land use change and associated supply chains. Her research examines forest and landscape governance in its many forms, including intergovernmental initiatives, domestic institutions and policy, market-based initiatives such as forest, agriculture and green building certification, and community-based resource management. Her work had spanned the Americas, Europe, Asia and Africa and ranged from in-depth case studies to international comparative research covering tropical, temperate and boreal forest zones in over 30 countries worldwide.

Rodd Myers, Senior Research Associate & Team Leader, Dala for UEA      

Dr Myers had worked on natural resource and agricultural production networks for 12 years in both agricultural and forest-based land use systems as a practitioner and academic. He is an experienced project manager and accustomed to co-ordinating teams dispersed around the globe. His research interests are in local-global environmental justice issues around forest-based natural resources. Most recently, he worked on a global study of multi-level forest governance with the Centre for International Forestry Research. Recent publications focused on forest governance, land use change, and environmental justice. Dr Myers was a member of the Global Environmental Justice Group at the School of International Development.

Rebecca Rutt, Research Associate, UEA

Dr Rutt is a social scientist with over a decade of research and project experience in natural resource management and particularly forestry. Her research tends to focus on issues of concern to political ecology and environmental justice. Prior to this position, she worked at the University of Michigan’s School of Natural Resources and Environment, the University of Copenhagen’s Institute of Food and Resource Economics, and the Food and Agriculture Organization’s Forestry Department. Dr Rutt was employed by the University of East Anglia’s School of International Development and was based in Copenhagen, Denmark.

Our team also recognises the invaluable contribution and leadership that Professor Thomas Sikor made to the conceptualisation of ProdJus.

ProdJus was supported by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond in collaboration with the Wellcome Trust and VolkswagenStiftung through the Europe and Global Challenges initiative.

 

Approach

Global environmental challenges of natural resource management
The sustainable management and conservation of tropical forests was one of the most pressing global environmental challenges. Tropical forests influenced the provision of a range of global public goods, from climate change mitigation to biodiversity conservation and food security. Forests attained an additional global dimension due to the spatial reach of wood production networks connecting loggers in the Global South with consumers in the North, as trees were cut throughout the South for the production of goods destined for the North, in particular Europe. Tropical forest governance also gave rise to claims of social and environmental injustices, such as the violation of forest people’s rights, threats to the planet’s ecological integrity and potential harm to future generations’ capabilities (Forsyth and Sikor 2013). Claims of injustice increasingly featured in supranational forest politics (Sikor and Stahl, 2011). These globalising processes of wood production and justice politics challenged efforts to govern tropical forests at local, national and supranational levels and provided the impetus for unprecedented initiatives to facilitate collective action beyond the nation state (Bernstein and Cashore, 2007).

Global Production Networks
Global Production Network thinking grew out of concepts of commodity and value chains (Bair, 2005, Faße et al., 2009). The shared focus of these concepts was on capturing the full range of extractive, productive and consumptive activities that were required to bring a product from its conception through different phases of production to final consumers (see Kaplinsky and Morris, 2001). Input-output structures between different phases shaped the creation and capture of value, thereby exerting significant influence on network dynamics (Henderson et al., 2002, Coe et al., 2008).

Environmental Justice
Environmental justice began with people’s actual claims about (in)justice (Walker, 2011, Sikor, 2013). This approach recognised the plurality of justice in the sense that more often than not, actors did not agree on a single definition of what was morally right and instead referred to plural notions of justice (Martin et al., 2013). Another key premise was that notions of justice were contextual and experiential, in the sense that they depended on the particular political and historical setting (Fraser, 2009). Research investigated how social actors justified claims of (in)justice in public discourse, lending support to some notions, establishing certain conceptions as dominant and contesting the legitimacy of others.

Theoretical framework
The ProdJus theoretical framework hypothesised the dynamics between supranational governance innovations and justice issues in the governance of tropical forests. We directed analytical attention to the origins of justice claims in global production dynamics and justice politics, as captured in research questions 1-3, the uptake of certain notions of justice in the ecolabelling and FLEGT (RQ4-5) and the effects of ecolabelling and FLEGT on justice issues in tropical forest governance (RQ6-7).

 

Research Questions
The overarching research question of ProdJus was: How do supranational governance innovations respond to issues of (in)justice associated with the governance of tropical forests? The research considered these supranational innovations as interactive elements in forest governance that operated at local, national and supranational levels and across them. It did not take their supranational nature as given, but employed a bottom-up perspective to locate governance arrangements – i.e. their specific forms and effects – within production and political dynamics at various scales (Bulkeley, 2005). More specifically, ProdJus traced the origins of claims of (in)justice in global production networks and forest politics through the following research questions:

RQ1. How were different actors positioned in global production networks in the absence of ecolabelling certification and before the enforcement of FLEGT agreements?

RQ2. What were the most critical justice issues with regard to the governance of tropical forests without ecolabelling certification and before FLEGT?

RQ3. What claims of (in)justice did different actors assert in negotiations over ecolabelling certification procedures and alignment with FLEGT rules? ProdJus then examined how claims of (in)justice were, or were not, taken up in the ecolabelling and FLEGT. 

RQ4. What notions of justice informed these claims, and which ones gained traction in public discourse?

RQ5. Why and how were particular notions of justice institutionalised in the ecolabelling and FLEGT, whereas others were not? Finally, ProdJus determined the effects of FLEGT and ecolabelling on justice issues in the governance of tropical forests:

RQ6. How did the justice notions enshrined in the ecolabelling and FLEGT influence actors’ positions in, and exclusion from, global production networks?

RQ7. What effects did changes in actors’ positions create on justice issues in tropical forest governance?

Methods
ProdJus used mixed methods to collect and analyse data. The empirical basis of the research was primarily interviews with industry actors, starting from the forest levels and working up to retailers, importers, policy-makers and social and environmental campaigners. These data were focussed around claims that actors made, and the positions they took with regards to distributive, procedural and recognition matters. Whilst ProdJus focussed on FLEGT (and specifically the European Union Timber Regulation), ecolabelling was used as a comparison to understand how different governance systems led to different justice politics.

References
BAIR, J. 2005. Global capitalism and commodity chains: looking back, going forward. Competition & Change, 9, 153-180.

BERNSTEIN, S. & CASHORE, B. 2007. Can non-state global governance be legitimate? an analytical framework. Regulation & Governance, 1, 347-371.

BULKELEY, H. 2005. Reconfiguring environmental governance: Towards a politics of scales and networks. Political Geography, 24, 875- 902.

COE, N. M., DICKEN, P. & HESS, M. 2008. Global production networks: realizing the potential. Journal of Economic Geography, 8, 271- 295.

FAßE, A., GROTE, U. & WINTER, E. 2009. Discussion Paper. Value chain analysis: methodologies in the context of environment and trade research. Hannover: Gottfried Leibniz University.

FORSYTH, T. & SIKOR, T. 2013. Forests, development, and the globalization of justice. Geographical Journal, 179, 114-121.

FRASER, N. 2009. Scales of Justice: Reimagining Political Space in a Globalizing World, New York, Columbia University Press.

GEREFFI, G. 1994. Capitalism, Development and Global Commodity Chains. In: SKLAIR, L. (ed.) Capitalism and Development. London, UK: Routledge.

HENDERSON, J., DICKEN, P., HESS, M., COE, N. & YEUNG, H. W.-C. 2002. Global production networks and the analysis of economic development. Review of International Political Economy, 9, 436- 464.

KAPLINSKY, R. & MORRIS, M. 2001. A handbook for value chain research. Ottawa: IDRC. MARTIN, A., AKOL, A. & PHILLIPS, J. 2013. Just conservation? On the fairness of sharing benefits. In: SIKOR, T. (ed.) The Justices and Injustices of Ecosystem Services. London: Earthscan.

SIKOR, T. (ed.) 2013. The Justices and Inj

Results

  • Interviewed over 500 people in Europe, Ghana, Indonesia and Vietnam
  • Published 12 papers on the effect of the EU Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade on different actors in the global timber production network
  • Contributed novel contributions to how EU policy affected actors differently, mostly reinforcing existing norms rather than demonstrating 'new' ways of addressing illegal logging.
  • Critical reflection on the potential of supranational governance innovations.
  • Recommendations on how FLEGT, and other supranational natural resource product governance structures, could be improved from a social and environmental justice perspective.
  • Showed how procedural notions of justice were taken up in FLEGT agreements through an emphasis on civil society participation in the reform of forest law.

Publications

Documents