Beyond certification: New Models of sustainable commodity governance

This project studies innovative governance models that promote sustainable production of globally-traded agricultural commodities such as palm oil, coffee and cocoa, which currently contribute substantially to global deforestation.

A range of market-driven sustainability governance initiatives have emerged in recent decades, most commonly in the form of supply chain certification schemes such as Fairtrade, Rainforest Alliance or the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO). However, such approaches have largely failed to address large-scale structural causes of deforestation.

Such failures have motivated new experiments with governance approaches designed to operate at larger sector, landscape or jurisdiction-wide scales. For example, the RSPO is currently piloting a ‘jurisdictional certification’ approach where sustainability certificaiton is carried out at a jurisdictional (usually subnational) scale. This is coordinated through multi-stakeholder governance processes, and supported by program interventions that:

• promote enabling government policies
• strengthen economic development opportunities for smallholder farmers,
• train farmers about sustainability standards.

This project builds a new evidence base on these important but under documented governance models, asking: How and by whom are these new governance approaches being designed and what are the consequences for sustainability governance practices on the ground?

This research involves construction of an original database of 33 case studies of transnational multi-stakeholder, market-based sustainability commodity governance schemes operating in Indonesia and Peru.

Each case is profiled based on qualitative data sources including program reports, websites, government documents, media reports and a selection of key stakeholder interviews. This facilitates short written summaries of key characteristics of each governance scheme, addressing each initiative’s aims and problem definitions, scale and scope of operation, identity and roles of participants, and policy and regulatory instruments. Quantitative ratings of the key characteristics of each case further facilitate systematic comparison between cases.