A Review of “Setting the Standard: Certification, Governance, and the Forest Stewardship Council”

This book, now in a welcome paperback edition, is notable as one of the most comprehensive assessments of the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) published to date. The FSC began in 1993 as a grassroots effort to promote more responsible and viable management of forests through an international system of certification. The book begins by connecting the formation of the FSC to the broad history of changing power relations, authority structures, and instruments of global governance for the forest resources of the world. Through a more specific focus on the province of British Columbia (BC), Canada, the book then delineates the political negotiations involved in getting a BC standard accepted by the FSC. The negotiating process in BC thus becomes a lens for examining the FSC’s rules and procedures. The authors also introduce some comparative analysis to clarify what made the BC process unique. The BC case stands out from struggles over certification on the U.S. Pacific Coast, in the U.S. Rocky Mountain region, in the Maritime and Boreal forests of Canada, and in Sweden by virtue of its strong grassroots orientation in an environment of intense international controversy about the political economy of the BC forest industry. Chapters six through nine of the book continue the comparisons to assess four challenging issues for the drafters of the BC standard: tenure, use rights, and benefits from the forest; community and workers’ rights; indigenous peoples’ rights; and environmental values. This analysis precedes the two last parts of the book in which the authors look at FSC as a governance instrument and argue that a distinction between public and private governance is unhelpful.