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Abstract
The Roundtable on Sustainable Biomaterials (RSB) is one of a number of sustainability standards schemes that have been approved by the European Union under its 2009 Renewable Energy Directive (EU RED). The RSB scheme is often referred to positively not only because the sustainability standard is considered to exemplify greater rigour than many of the other EU-approved standards in terms of their claims to protect ‘sustainability’, but also because it provides an example of a ‘multi-stakeholder’ model of standards development that is assumed to confer greater legitimacy on the sustainability standards that are produced. In recognising that standards processes are part of wider processes of neoliberalisation, this paper explores the process in which the RSB standard was produced. In doing so it considers how notions of sustainability embodied in the RSB standards were shaped not only by its ‘multi-stakeholder’ process, but also by wider influences that were brought to bear in that process, including the growing spectre of a ‘standards market’ produced by the EU’s approval of different schemes.
Acknowledgements
I would like to gratefully acknowledge the British Academy for a Postdoctoral Fellowship that enabled the research for this paper to be undertaken. I would like to thank the many RSB stakeholders, Secretariat, consultants and auditors for the time they contributed to my research for and agreeing to my presence at a number of meetings and teleconferences. In addition to acknowledging the very constructive comments of three anonymous reviewers for The Journal of Peasant Studies, I would also like to thank my research group in the Law School at the University of Bristol and the participants at the Workshop on the Rule of Law, Governance and Natural Resources, at the University of Amsterdam, 22–23 January 2015, to whom I presented earlier versions of this paper.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 ‘Some people have bigger mouths than others, some people are more forceful than others, some people are naturally very quiet, and in an aggressive meeting with people like [x], [they] are not going to speak’ (interviewee 15).
2 ‘it’s no good joining an organization like this to sit on the sidelines and not contribute, to make a difference, you’d better be involved in a leadership role’ (industry stakeholder (North), Interviewee 13).
3 The Ford Foundation also funded the participation of a number of other organisations as members of and through consultancies for the RSB, as well as creating the position of its North American co-ordinator.
4 This imbalanced focus on environmental issues as opposed to social issues (including land rights, human and labour rights, and food security) was supported by an online survey of current and past members of the RSB carried out by the author in 2012 (Fortin Citation2012).
5 ‘when things get really tricky [in the stakeholder process, and] … the different stakeholder groups cannot agree … on a single issue, they often refer to a study … but all it means de facto [is] they couldn’t agree and they are deferring the decision to somebody else … [i]n some cases to experts, in most cases they defer it to the auditor’ (Interviewee 36, RSB consultant).
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Elizabeth Fortin
Elizabeth Fortin received a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship to undertake this research, which she held in the Faculty of Social Sciences and Law at the University of Bristol. Her Fellowship examined multi-stakeholder efforts to create sustainability standards and a certification scheme for the biofuels industry. She focused on the process of formulating and implementing the standards, and empirical fieldwork was undertaken with stakeholders in Lausanne, Switzerland, and internationally.