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ABSTRACT
This paper analyzes an important facet in international environmental governance: the development and implementation of Chile’s national forestry strategy. As a national program designed to reduce emissions from deforestation and forest degradation, and to enhance the role of conservation, sustainable management of forests, and forest carbon stocks (i.e., a national REDD+ program), Chile’s national forestry strategy demonstrates the norm diffusion and institutional structuration commonly exhibited in world polity approaches to global and transnational sociology. Yet, world-system analysis of Chile’s forest conservation program highlights the role of power and positionality along the global division of labor in its implementation. The organized hypocrisy of the Chilean state leads to means-ends decoupling in which the practices of the global institutional order are faithfully executed but have an opaque relationship to climate governance goals. This paper, then, joins a growing scholarship that combines these divergent approaches to highlight advances in environmental governance born from connection to the global institutional order of environmentalism while simultaneously explaining structural issues that hinder efforts to achieve global climate targets.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Correction Statement
This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
Notes
1. Following Cole (Citation2017), we distinguish the world polity approach as that which is focused on states, interstate relations, intergovernmental organizations, and the regime that states create and in which they participate. While some scholars have conflated world polity with the world society approach that analyzes global civil society, we feel it is important to distinguish between these two dimensions of neoinstitutional theory. To be precise, our analysis describes the ways that state structures shape and are shaped by position within the political-economic world system, therefore our work rests squarely in the corpus of world polity research.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Patrick CoatarPeter
Patrick CoatarPeter is a doctoral student in the Sociology Department at Boston College. His research focuses on institutions and scientific knowledge in programs and processes of international environmental governance. He also researches climate finance and inclusive international development while working in renewable energy program design and analysis in Latin America and the Caribbean as a contractor with the U.S. Agency for International Development
Brian J. Gareau
Brian J. Gareau is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Associate Dean for Core Cirriculum at Boston College. Dr. Gareau’s scholarship focuses on the sociology of global environmental governance, especially the governance of ozone layer depletion and global climate change. He also publishes on theorizations of society/nature relations, alternative development, and agri-food systems.