The Environment and International Relations

In October 1993, 130 representatives from 26 countries met in Toronto, Canada, to inaugurate a governance regime designed to protect the world's forests. Participants agreed on ten principles for sustainable forest management, from controlling harvests to ensure steady timber yields over time, to protecting fragile ecosystems, to protecting the rights of local forest-dwellers. The implementation of these principles would not be cost-free, and monitoring compliance hard to achieve. Nonetheless, participants agreed that this program represented a significant step forward in global forest conservation, while still allowing forest owners to benefit economically.

This governance institution – the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) – now covers over 180 million hectares of forest across eighty-one countries, according to 2015 data. In some ways it looks like the intergovernmental regimes we have examined in previous chapters. In others it is very different. First, none of the participants at the Toronto meeting were government representatives. Instead, the driving force behind the establishment of the FSC was a coalition of NGOs, forest owners and timber companies, and forest-dwelling communities, led by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), a leading international NGO. Second, FSC achieves its goals through the transmission of information and the power of the market. If a timber-producing firm signs up to its standards, it agrees to allow an independent auditor to certify its compliance with FSC's principles. If it qualifies, the firm can then affix an eco-label to its products, which tells purchasers and consumers further down the supply chain that the wood they are buying was grown and harvested sustainably. Purchasers can then signal their support for these measures by buying products with the FSC logo – often at a significant price premium, providing an additional incentive for firms to participate in this governance initiative.

The recognition of failures across current state-led efforts to regulate environmental problems has encouraged the decentralization and diversification of traditional sites and modes of governance, shifting regulatory action to markets and to the non-state sector. In Chapter 6 we saw how economic globalization has at best complicated and at worst harmed the state of the global environment.