Hostage to Norms: States, Institutions and Global Forest Politics

Abstract

Global forest politics reveal surprising impacts of environmental norms on state behavior at the international level. Negotiations regarding deforestation have repeatedly failed to produce a policy agreement. Instead of abandoning the deadlocked talks, governments created the United Nations Forum on Forests (UNFF), a hollow entity deliberately deprived of decision-making powers. Various theoretical perspectives fail to explain why states create blank international institutions without policy mandates. Several arguments are advanced here. First, a global norm of environmental multilateralism (NEM) helps explain the creation of the UNFF as well as universal state participation in it. Second, such "good" norms can have negative consequences in world politics. NEM prohibits states from disengaging from failed political initiatives, and fosters the creation of hollow institutions that nourish skepticism about the effectiveness of global governance. Finally, global forestry defies the widespread academic notion that norms, institutions and governance are coterminous. Sometimes states design "decoy" institutions whose function is to preempt governance. Copyright (c) 2005 Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Setting the bar: an international comparison of public and private forest policy specifications and implications for explaining policy trends

“…There is no question that great strides have been made by comparative policy scholars who have assessed and explained overall trends governing national (Eisner 1993) and global (Braithwaite and Drahos 2000) styles of regulation. Likewise, environmental and forest policy scholars have improved our understanding of the emergence of national forest programmes (Humphreys 2004) and forest certification (Cashore et al 2004), both of which are explained, in part, by a neoliberal agenda that has prevented the development of a global forest convention or other binding inter-governmental agreements (Bernstein 2002;Dimitrov 2005). But what is missing from the literature on policy development, and environmental/forest policy in particular, has been a focus on the actual content and approach of the regulatory frameworks.…”

“…Most global-scale comparative research on forest policy to date has focused on broad 'macro-level' goals and objectives found in national forest programs (Howlett and Rayner 2006;30), and international forestry deliberations (Dimitrov 2005;Humphreys 2006). This scholarship has been important in describing, and advancing explanations for, the varying emphases on economic, environmental, and social goals governing domestic and global forest policy development.…”

Into the Woods: Analyzing Normative Evolution and the International Tropical Timber Organization

“…12 Legro's work on normative analysis can go a long way towards remedying this deficiency. He posits two biases in this area that have skewed analysis [21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30]. One is an inability to perceive "norm robustness" as an independent variable for research purposes, separate from the effects generally attributed to the norm.…”

The role of forests in climate change mitigation : a discursive-institutional analysis of REDD+ MRV

“…This finding puts into perspective the cynicism of many commentators on the willingness and capacity of (developing) countries to implement international agreements. Too often, developing countries are portrayed as signing international agreements to please donors without any intention of implementing such agreements (Dimitrov, 2005;Humphreys, 2006;Young, 1999b). However, as the findings of this study show, (some) developing countries take efforts to implement the international (environmental) agreements they sign.…”

“…Most accounts of effectiveness of environmental institutions, especially the forest and climate regimes of which REDD+ is a part (Giessen, 2013;Humphreys, 2006;Rayner et al, 2010;Smouts, 2008), are mostly pessimistic (Dimitrov, 2006;Dimitrov, 2005;Dimitrov et al, 2007;Humphreys, 1996Humphreys, , 2006Humphreys, 2014;Young, 1999a;Young, 2011). This pessimism about the potential of environmental regimes to address the deforestation and climate change problems is indeed understandable, given that the rate of global deforestation remains high 130 | P a g e (FAO, 2015) and that there is an increase in GHG emissions (IPCC, 2014).…”