Environmental Certification of Forests in Mexico: The Political Ecology of a Nongovernmental Market Intervention

Abstract

The certification of the environmental and social characteristics of a product's production process is emerging as a significant transnational, nongovernmental, market-based approach to environmental regulation and development. Using conventions analysis and commodity network analysis, this article examines the political ecology of one such market intervention. After only a decade, environmental certification of forests has spread to cover a significant portion of the world's logged forests, major wood retailers increasingly require it, and international environmental organizations strongly support it. In Mexico, where 12 percent of the wood harvest is certified, certification requires forest managers to make substantial improvements to the social and environmental aspects of forest management. Actors in the Mexican wood commodity network include forest villagers, forest managers, wood processors, government regulators, and transnational wood retailers. These actors express an array of environmental concerns, social values, and interests in price and market share. The big retailers, however, are the most powerful actors in the commodity network, and their demands for high volumes and low prices dominate. As a result, forest certification has so far failed to generate prices that permit forest managers to cover the costs of certification and its required forest management improvements; the instrument imposes requirements on southern producers without rewarding them for their increased efforts. In addition to the equity issues, these features of the commodity network limit the adoption of forest certification—and the forest management improvements it generates—to only the largest forest management operations in Mexico. The case of Mexico suggests broader limitations to nongovernmental, market-based approaches to environmental governance and development. These need to be less naïve about the ability of product certification to insert values in markets governed by powerful actors like retailers. Including rules modeled on Fair Trade will extend their reach, equity, and efficacy; nevertheless, voluntary market-based instruments cannot replace a more direct government role in environmental regulation and development projects.

Key Words:

• convention theory
• environmental governance
• Forest Stewardship Council
• global commodity chain

Acknowledgments

The ideas in this article benefited from audience comments at presentations at Florida State University, Macalester College, Yale University, and the 2004 meeting of the International Association for the Study of Common Property. Barney Warf, Deanna Newsom, Tad Mutersbaugh, Patricia Gerez, Pete Taylor, Kelly Watson, Sergio Madrid, Yolanda Lara, and Michael Goodman provided useful criticisms of drafts. Comments from a large number of anonymous external reviewers helped me sharpen my arguments considerably. Pete Taylor, Sergio Madrid, and Patricia Gerez provided key contacts and invaluable insights during fieldwork. Funding for this research came from a summer research grant from Florida State University. I especially thank the many Mexicans who kindly consented to discuss these issues in interviews.

Notes

Source: FSC (2004b).

Source: Public Summary Certification Reports (SmartWood 2004a).

Source: Public Summary Certification Reports (SmartWood 2004b).

Notes: NGOs=nongovernmental organizations; PROCYMAF=Proyecto de Conservacion y Manejo Sustentable de Recursos Forestales en México; PRODEFOR=Programa Nacional de Desarrollo Forestal.

1. These kinds of market-based interventions contribute to two distinct meanings of development, which are often confused. In one meaning, development consists of organized interventions or projects with explicit goals. In a second meaning, development is the expansion and extension of capitalist systems of production, exchange, and regulation, including the increasing globalization of markets (Bebbington 2003, 299). Product certification programs are explicit development projects in the sense that they attempt to leverage specific environmental and social improvements. At the same time, by operating through the market, they are implicitly development projects in the second sense as well, because they promote the extension of market relationships.

2. National statistics on the area covered by forest management plans are not available for many developing countries, but preliminary estimates suggest that at least 123 million ha are covered by a formal management plan of five years duration or longer. Thus, a maximum of 65 percent of the world's production forests was covered by some form of certification in 2000. In 2004, a maximum of 38 percent of the world's managed forests were certified by FSC. Because the estimate of the managed forest area is low, however, these estimates are too high (FAO 2001; UNEP-WCMC 2004).

3. Guthman argues that when price premiums reach consumers, they make the consumption of certified goods seem elitist at the same time they inadvertently legitimate the production practices of the noncertified goods.

4. In this sense, they might offer a kind of antidote to commodity fetishism, which is the idea that the social relationships behind a commodity disappear in markets such that value seems to adhere in the product itself, when it is actually created through the social relations behind it (Hartwick 2000,; 1183; Barham 2002, 351).

5. The key cites to convention theory are from the French literature (i.e., Boltanski and Thévenot 2006; Sylvander 1995).

6. As Freidberg (2003b) notes, Boltanski and Thévenot (2006) list six conventions, Salais and Storper (1997) list four. Following, Sylvander (1995), she distinguishes two main means of quality assurance (Freidberg 2003b).

7. Although Murdoch, Marsden, and Banks (2000) include environmental considerations as a civic convention, for the purposes of analyzing the environmental certification of forests, it is convenient to consider it a separate category of values that market actors draw on to legitimate exchange decisions.

8. For Ponte and Gibbon (2005), this convention helps in understanding the way coffee roasting and retailing firms organize outsourcing to decrease inventory on hand, which is something financial institutions in Anglo-Saxon traditions monitor.

9. The historical evolution of the Forest Stewardship Council as an intervention in commodity network governance is analyzed in more detail elsewhere (Klooster 2005).

10. Since this study was made of active certificates, forest managers must have made progress on nearly all of those CARs.

11. In 2004, CCMSS withdrew from the certification business and SmartWood opened a Mexican office to oversee its evaluation and audit business directly.

12. Pseudonym.

13. The original Spanish conveys this a little differently. “La certificación es una chingonería para el ejido! Nos obliga a superarnos, porque si son solamente uno o dos ejidos en todo Durango con eso, quiere decir que Santiago está superando mas que otros.”

14. An initial count of 2,400 communities with logging permits comes from Bray, Merino-Perez, and Barry (2005).

15. These large communities had assistance in finding buyers and meeting their requirements from a project supported by the Training, Research, Extension Education and Systems program (TREES) of the Rainforest Alliance (Klooster 2005).