A New Calculable Global World in the Making: Governing Through Transnational Certification Standards

Abstract

Governing with quantification rests on preliminary processes of transforming the world to make it quantifiable through conventions of formatting and equivalence-making. This chapter investigates a new globalized mode of governing, operating, away from states, through voluntary certification standards. Considering the case of sustainable palm oil certification, it follows the most vulnerable “stakeholders”, from their daily life in remote rural areas to the governing public roundtables and private confidential negotiations. Fostering the dialogue between the extended convention theory framework and governmentality studies, the chapter shows that in a new kind of “standardizing liberalism” [libéralisme normalisateur], “governing by standards” shifts the political debate about power, legitimacy and the common good onto measurable certifiable characteristics of goods and services to be chosen by autonomous opting individuals.

Audit credibility and LGBTQI rights: certification operation in the margins

“…In this context, the perceived needs of made-up beneficiaries can be far from the needs of actual beneficiaries (Walgenbach, 2001). Actual beneficiaries tend to become “smallholders” (Thévenot, 2022, p. 224) whose voices are seldom heard, and if someone wants to make a formal complaint of any kind, these complaints need to be formulated in ways that comply with the knowledge base of the certification audit and its associated procedures. This, in turn, makes it difficult for individual beneficiaries to make their voices heard (Bain and Hatanaka, 2010; Silva-Castañeada, 2012; Arnberg et al ., 2022).…”

“…Yet another action to demonstrate credibility in certification auditing is the establishment of standards that auditors can use for reference when the audit is carried out. One argument in favor of standards is that the audit becomes transparent and fair, because all audits follow the same standards and are also documented in relation to those standards (Boiral and Gendron, 2011; Silva-Castañeda, 2012; Thévenot, 2022). Another argument is that generic standards enable the certification audit to be seen as a purely technical and objective process that is independent of the auditor performing the audit (Boiral and Gendron, 2011; Jeacle and Carter, 2011).…”

The Challenge of Quantification: An Interdisciplinary Reading

“…Also, to be mentioned in the French school is sociologist Luc Boltanski, collaborating with Thévenot on grammars of "Orders of worth" that are needed to make sense of how justice is itself justified by different actors under different normative frames. So market-worth is distinguished from civicworth, industrial-worth, and others (Boltanski and Thévenot 2006;Thévenot 2022) 9 .…”

“…Here De Leonardis shows how quantification of poverty and inequality were accompanied by a semantic shift obscuring the bonds of domination linking the subjects, and where inequality becomes "a distributive difference, a gap, a disparity: a distance, and no longer a tie", realizing what she calls the dreams of "indifferent power", shifting out of focus important dimensions of power, politics, and institutions. In the same volume, (Thévenot 2022) offers an illuminating analysis of how quantification, as deployed in the setting of standards, helps to transform common goods -such as collective solidarity, environmental concerns and the role of traditions into commercial labels. In this way, civic worth, green worth and domestic worth are subsumed under the category of market worths.…”

Boundary experts: Science and politics in measuring the Sustainable Development Goals

“…Magnitudes that are measured are rarely pre‐given (Desrosières, 1998; Fjelland, 2021). Numbers therefore work best if what they represent can be remade in their image (Porter, 1995; Thévenot, 2022).…”