The State in Private Forest Governance: A Comparative Analysis of Forest Certification in Canada, the USA and Russia
Political Science
Final Report Abstract
The central goal of the research project was to explore the interactions between state forest policy and private forest governance mechanisms, such as forest certification, across three countries: Russia, Canada and the US. These issues have so far received considerably less scholarly attention in the literature compared to the emergence and effectiveness of forest certification as a non-state forest governance instrument. During the DFG research fellowship, the research work focused on exploring the dynamics of state responses to forest certification at the federal and regional (i.e., provincial/state) level. State responses differ across countries and regions ranging from no action to active involvement and from energetic support to rejection. The research objectives for the funding period included mapping and explaining the variation of regional governments’ responses to forest certification in Canada and the USA. The methods of data collection and analysis included literature review, document analysis and research interviews. Whereas the exploration of the provincial governments’ responses in Canada has generated less novel results and confirmed the findings in the existing broad literature on Canada, the study of the US state governments’ responses produced theoretically and empirically interesting results. My study shows that the initial convergence of state responses in the USA to the support and endorsement in the late 1990s and the early 2000s shifts to more diverse reactions in the late 2000s. The endorsement is reflected in the decisions of the state forest agencies to certify all or parts of the state public forest lands (e.g., state forests and parks, and wildlife and fisheries units). Several states, in particular in the Great Lakes region, increased their support and endorsement over the 2000s by increasing certified public areas and expanding their support of private forest certification. In the states in the Northeast of the USA (north of Maryland), the reactions are more diverse, but in general these states show much less support and endorsement for forest certification, with some early certification adopters dropping certification (Massachusetts). In the Southeast, the majority of the states drop certification, with the exception of South Carolina that certified parts of its state forests very late – in 2013. Two main groups of factors can be distinguished that explain the initial convergence of the US state governments’ responses to forest certification. First, political expectations for certification generated by environmental groups and the industry sourcing timber from state and county lands motivated the governments to consider certification. Second, the supply of financial and other types of resources enabled the governments to experiment with forest certification of public lands. Whereas several states were able to mobilize state funding for certification, the majority of the state forest agencies received support from charity foundations and private conservation institutions. The policy choices of the states and local governments do not remain stable. Moreover, the economic and political factors (industry and NGO pressure) and resource-based explanations are not sufficient to explain the evolution and diversification of responses at the state level after the convergence period. First, my research shows that the political decisions concerning forest certification are renegotiated periodically and reflect constantly changing constellations of actors, their evolving interests and thee capacities and organization strategies they employ to realize these interests. Second, the evolution of policy choices depends on how well these choices are embedded in the system of institutionalized normative and cultural meanings actors attach to public forests and their ecological and social values and functions for the public.
