Abstract
Conservation non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and firms have been promoting global voluntary standards, such as the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), to produce environmentally responsible goods in tropical countries. This research seeks to understand the strategies and the effectiveness of conservation NGOs with respect to the RSPO. Our research documents that the conservation NGOs, when engaging with the RSPO, may be divided into four categories based on the type of resources mobilised and the conservation goals: 1) 'Collaborative NGOs' seek to change the system from within by providing scientific research-based information, by holding strategic positions and by creating rules; 2) 'Opponent' remains outside the RSPO while using it as a platform for public campaigns; 3) 'Opportunistic' focuses on conserving geographical areas by adopting either collaborative or opponent strategies to reach their goals; and 4) 'Sceptic' supports communities to secure local land rights. These NGOs have implemented strategies that strengthened RSPO's institution. However, the institutionalisation of the RSPO prevents the NGOs from reaching their goals for three reasons: 1) individual NGOs cannot change strategy; 2) NGOs using different engagement strategies are unable to collaborate; and 3) the sceptic NGOs are structurally excluded from the RSPO, though local land rights are a fundamental matter of concern for biodiversity conservation. NGOs would be more effective in reaching their goals either by focussing on their initial conservation objectives or by strategically collaborating with each other outside the structures of the RSPO.
Highlights
From October 2006 to October 2011, one of the authors was a staff member of one of the conservation NGOs that is a Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) member. This provided direct access to information on the specific objectives and the resources of NGOs engaged during the RSPO annual meetings, General Assembly (GA), and RSPO bodies linked to biodiversity conservation, such as the Biodiversity and High Conservation Values Working Group (BHCV WG)
This study finds that conservation NGOs adopt four main forms of engagement with the RSPO based on two main criteria: the resources they are allocated and the specific objectives they pursue
This research demonstrated the importance of taking a political ecology approach and considering the diversity of NGOs’ engagement with the RSPO
Summary
Tropical forest biodiversity is declining at an alarming rate of more than 1% per year, largely because of agricultural expansion into forests (WWF et al 2014). southeast Asian countries, especially Indonesia and Malaysia, follow this trend due to the recent surge of the palm oil industry that. Banks and agro-business firms in these countries were seeking to secure their long-term supply and to protect themselves from possible negative environmental campaigns (RSPO 2002) Their major financial institutions (e.g., Rabobank, Standard Chartered) were financing the firms converting forest into large-scale oil palm plantations. Researchers have demonstrated that the emergence of certifications for global commodities, such as RSPO, can be qualified as a new capitalist instrument (Fouilleux and Goulet 2012), promoted by dominant economic players (Fouilleux 2013; Oosterveer 2014) and major NGOs (Cheyns 2012; Escobar and Cheyns 2012; Pye 2013), and operating at the expense of local people (Ponte et al 2011; Fouilleux 2013; Cheyns 2014) These researches meet the growing political ecologist’s consensus on synergistic relationships between the protection of nature and neoliberalism, where, the largest conservation NGOs in terms of staff and turn over (such as WWF or Conservation International) would directly support market expansion (Igoe and Brockington 2007; Benjaminsen and Svarstad 2010; Igoe et al 2010a,b; Büscher et al 2014). What can NGOs do to better achieve conservation outcomes?
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