Constance McDermott

Balancing agendas for climate mitigation and environmental justice continues to be one of the key challenges in climate change governance mechanisms, such as Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD+). In this paper we apply the three-dimensional environmental justice framework as a lens to examine the REDD+ process in the Lao People’s Democratic Republic (Laos) and the REDD+ social safeguards. We focus particularly on challenges to justice faced by marginalized communities living in forest frontier areas under an authoritarian regime. Drawing on policy analysis and open-ended interviews across different policy levels, we explore procedural, distributional, and recognitional justice across the REDD+ policy levels in Laos. We find that REDD+ social safeguards have been applied by both donors and state actors in ways that facilitate external control. We underscore how authoritarian regime control over civil society and ethnic minority groups thwarts justice. We also...

Timber legality trade restrictions and verification are a bundle of contemporary mechanisms triggered by global concerns about forest degradation and deforestation. The European Union Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade initiative is a significant effort to not only screen out illegal timber and wood products from the EU, but also support trading partner countries to improve their legality definitions and verification processes. But by using bilateral agreements (Voluntary Partnership Agreements) as a key mechanism, the EU legitimizes trade partner nation-states as the authority to decide what is legal. We engage in a theoretical debate about the complexities of the meaning of legality, and then analyze empirical data collected from interviews in Ghana, Indonesia, Vietnam and Europe with policy, civil society and industry actors to understand how different actors understand legality. We find hegemonic notions of Westphalian statehood at the core of 'global' notions ...

This article examines the EU FLEGT Voluntary Partnership Agreements (VPAs) with Ghana and Indonesia to explore how scale and sources of authority shape access to forest resources. VPAs require the development of internationally recognized legality verification systems to eliminate trade in illegal wood and thus aim to reinforce state law while opening it to broader national and international scrutiny. Analysis of relevant documents, combined with over 70 stakeholder interviews at local to international scales reveal significant differences between Ghana and Indonesia in the design of their verification systems and the attention given to local and domestic forest access. Yet in both countries, a strong focus on legality verification, coupled with a lack of key governance reforms, favors international trade over local access. This calls into question the EU’s growing legality agenda and highlights the need for alternative approaches to reforming domestic resource governance that are more appropriate and beneficial for local forest users.

There has been recent debate around the role of 'fads' in global conservation measures, and the lessons they hold for achieving desired conservation and development outcomes. Fads are characterized by initially widespread enthusiasm and major mobilization of resources followed by abandonment in favor of the next fad. Debate centers less on whether such fads exist, but rather on whether they represent opportunities for incremental policy learning, or are symptomatic of the more systemic failure of a market-based conservation agenda and the reinforcement of existing power inequalities. The European Union (EU)'s Forest Law Enforcement, Governance, and Trade (FLEGT) Action Plan aims to prevent the trade of illegal timber among the EU and its trading partners especially in the 'Global South'. Fifteen years since launching the Action Plan, we ask whether the processes and outcomes of FLEGT, and specifically the Voluntary Partnership Agreements (VPAs), resonate with the dynamics observed in other processes dubbed 'fads' within conservation and development arenas, and if so, what we can learn from this. Drawing from interviews, grey literature, and scholarship, we examine FLEGT VPAs as following three key stages of a fad: (1) there is initial enthusiasm by a wide range of actors for FLEGT as something 'new' or groundbreaking , (2) discrepancies and disagreements emerge about its end goals, i.e. whether it's core purpose is to distinguish legal from illegal wood in the EU marketplace, or to achieve deeper governance reforms; while the means for achieving those goals borrow heavily from previous market-based initiatives (3) actors and champions become fatigued, yet at the same time frame elements of their own involvement as a 'success'. Identifying these fad-like characteristics calls into question the 'newness' of FLEGT, by uncovering its many similarities to other market-based measures such as certification that exacerbate inequalities. Hence, branding FLEGT a success without challenging its role in the unequal concentration of power and resources, is likely to further entrench these inequalities in subsequent conservation fads, while a focus on incremental learning misses the larger failures and injustices of market-based approaches and can reinforce their re-emergence.

Forest certification—or, as it is sometimes called, green certification—aims to identify forestland that is managed to meet agreed-upon standards and, sometimes, to label products originating from those forests. The underlying goal of forest certification is to ...

To date much of the global-scale comparative research on environmental forest policy has focused on ‘macro-level’ policy goals and objectives. Although it is important for identifying broad trends, such research overlooks the specific policy settings that serve to ‘set the bar’ for on-the-ground environmental performance. This article helps to fill that gap by presenting and applying a framework for comparing

... Constance L. McDermott, Kelly Levin, and Benjamin Cashore • 91 34. Auld, Gulbrandsen, and McDermott 2008. 35. ... European Journal of International Relations 6 (4): 513–542. Auld, Graeme, Lars H. Gulbrandsen, and Constance McDermott. 2008. ...

Competition among environmental certification systems has created considerable demand for transparent comparison. Drawing on the case of forest certification, this article presents an analytical framework for comparing certification standards and government policies according to their policy approach and environmental threshold requirements. A detailed analysis of existing policies is applied to one key indicator, i.e. riparian buffer zones, where it reveals

... In: Rayner, Jeremy; Buck, Alexander and Katila, Pia eds. Embracing Complexity: Meeting the Challenges of International Forest Governance - A global assessment report prepared by the Global Forest Expert Panel on the International Forest Regime. IUFRO World Series (28). ...

ABSTRACT Schemes for reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation, and enhancing carbon stocks (REDD+) have raised concerns about their effects on forest communities and social equity more generally. National legal frameworks play a critical role in mediating these concerns within different country contexts, from the definition of fundamental constitutional rights to the articulation of specific REDD+ legislation. However, the complexity of REDD+ and its associated legal frameworks makes assessing the balance of rights, responsibilities, benefits and costs challenging indeed. This paper draws on a case study of Indonesia to illustrate how the application of an equity framework can help navigate this complexity. The paper applies the McDermott et al. (2013) Equity Framework to assess core legal texts at multiple scales, including key articles of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, as well as Indonesia's Constitution, its REDD+ strategy and selected legislation. We find that these selected legal instruments address the procedural issue of who is considered a relevant REDD+ stakeholder, including forest-dependent communities and private and public actors. Policies in the form of Ministerial Decrees also prescribe the distribution of carbon payments. However, the current legislation does not address critical contextual dimensions, including the distribution of bundles of rights and obligations regarding land and forest entitlements of forest-dependent people. Likewise, while there are Ministerial Decrees that spell out the distribution of rights and duties of different levels of government (central, provincial and local), there is no clear indication if the resources needed to ensure their respective attributions are equitably allocated. These results highlight the importance of adopting comprehensive frameworks for assessing equity that situate detailed analysis of specific REDD+-related laws within their broader legal and fiscal contexts.

ABSTRACT The principle of "Free, Prior and Informed Consent" (FPIC) is promoted through international agreements and safeguards in order to strengthen social equity in resource management by requiring consent from indigenous and/or local communities prior to actions that affect their land and resource rights. Based on early experiences with implementing FPIC standards in mining and forestry, we examine how FPIC has impacted social equity and why. In both sectors FPIC was first operationalized through non-governmental standards that revealed ambiguities surrounding its definition and implementation. In mining, FPIC was first codified in the standards of financial investors, while in forestry FPIC emerged within competing market-based certification schemes, resulting in contrasting definitions. In both sectors, contextual factors such as government laws and policies, the socio-political environment and the overall distribution of rights and resources strongly shape the impacts of FPIC on equity particularly for actors without strong legal rights. These findings are significant for emerging arenas such as REDD+, where there is much debate around the role of governments, financial institutions and market-based actors in applying FPIC for social equity outcomes. (c) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

This article investigates how land users perceive laws restricting deforestation and forest degradation, notably Brazil’s National Forest Code, and how legal meaning emerges as place specific to influence their legal compliance. Interviews were held with land users in Acre state, a municipality with high rates of deforestation located in the forest frontier of the Brazilian Amazon. Critical legal geography was applied as a theoretical framework to investigate the ways in which legal meaning emerges in and through that social context. This research finds that non-compliance is associ- ated with pervasive conditions of social stress combined with lived experiences of contradictory legal processes, including shifting legal discourses and inconsistent local law enforcement. In such social contexts, local legal meaning associates forest conservation laws with socio-economic and legal inequality and the reinforcement of structures of social exclusion.