Forest governance: connecting global to local practices

Abstract

The way forests are being governed and managed today has substantially changed over time (Agrawal et al., 2008). Discourses such as sustainable forest management, decentralized forest management and participatory forest management have become very influential in programmes, policies, and projects all over the world, being practised in diverse forms, and with various intended and unintended impacts on the ground (Pulzl, 2005; Rayner et al., 2010). Since these discourses and practices have initially been fueled and funded by international organizations, NGOs and donors, it seems as if these initiatives have been ‘forced’ upon countries and communities (Humphreys, 2006). Hence, it is tempting to analyse this global-local nexus from an hierarchical perspective, such as regime theory, which sketches an international institutional structure that sets rules, norms, incentives and sanctions that others follow at lower levels of the administrative scale. However, such a hierarchical perspective probably overstates the enforceability of international rules, norms and discourses, and undervalues the room for manoeuvre for national and local actors. Therefore this chapter takes another stance by advocating a flat ontology of world politics, as advocated in the quotation above. It analyses how ideas, norms and rules travel through global networks that bind bundles of practices at a worldwide scale. Such a flat perspective however implies that many traditional definitions of governance no longer hold. One example is ‘the setting, application and enforcement of rules’ (Kjaer, 2004: 12). Although this definition might apply to some instances of global governance, such as in the case of legally-binding trade rules of the WTOthat can be enforced through court ruling, this chapter argues that the majority of global governance initiatives work fundamentally differently. Often, binding and enforceable rules lack, or remain only paper regimes, and yet global governance initiatives produce impacts on the ground through other mechanisms than international rules (Bernstein and Cashore, 2012). Therefore, in this chapter, global governance is conceptualized as the worldwide diffusion of certain practices through: (1) ideas and discourses; (2) standards and procedures; and (3) technologies and resources (Dobbin et al., 2007; Shove et al., 2012). The assumption is that practices – such as eating hamburgers or curries – diffuse around the globe anyway, but that governance initiatives can promote the spread of certain practices that aim at addressing specific policy problems. Such a diffusion can take different forms: as speech acts, as policy plans, as institutionalized norms, as technical handbooks or as a supply of resources and materials. The examples we in this chapter investigate from this perspective all relate to global forest governance. Consequently, the practices this chapter looks at are those that address the issues of deforestation and forest degradation, ranging from administrative practices in offices to management practices on the ground. Examples of the latter are initiatives that might reverse the loss of forests (the use of innovative technologies for agricultural intensification), increase the area of protected forests (the designation of new forest protected areas) and enhance their sustainable management and use (the introduction and application of certification schemes) (McDermott et al., 2007; Rayner et al., 2010). At the same time, we look at global governance practices that advance such preferred forms of forest use, management and protection, like spreading ideas, providing resources, codifying norms and designing global standards. Thus, practices of global governance in our analyses imply both the governing of people and the management of forests. For that reason, practices of forest governance illustrate in detail the role of agencies, objects, technologies and infrastructures in the reproduction and transformation of (bundles of ) practices that connect multiple global and local sites (Schatzki, this volume). The above picture matches well with the view of globalization theorist and New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman (2006) who argued that the world has become ‘flat’, being connected through networks of global cities, computers, social movements, companies, etcetera, which stretch beyond national borders and operate on a global scale. It also mirrors many of the insights of Manuel Castell’s (2005) theory of the network society. So when for example discussing the conflicts between forest-poor developed and forest-rich developing countries in the context of global forest governance (Kolk, 1996), we should bear in mind that these unequal power relations exist next to many horizontal links which coshape the field. Global ideas, norms and standards, for example on sustainable forest management (SFM), travel from the global to the local and have an impact on practices of forest management on the ground (Overdevest and Zeitlin, 2012). In turn, practices and experiences in specific sites may feed into national and international dialogues on forests (Arts, 2004).