(Page 2 of 28) - Leaders and Laggards? Comparing European and North American Approaches to Non-State Environmental Governance authored by Auld, Graeme. and Cashore, Benjamin.

Leaders and Laggards? Comparing European and North American Approaches to Non-State
Environmental Governance

Benjamin Cashore, Elizabeth Egan, Graeme Auld and Deanna Newsom

Introduction

The prevailing consensus among most environmental policy scholars is that, for at least

the last decade, Europe has become the place of advanced and innovative environmental policy
development, either “catching up” to (Vogel 2003), or forging ahead of (Speth 2004), lagging US
environmental policy. This is not a hard conclusion to make. From efforts to relax existing
forestry and environmental domestic regulations in favour of development interests, to the refusal
of the United States to sign the Kyoto protocol, despite the US being the worst contributor to
globally warming, whether measured nominally or per capita (with Canada and Australia close
behind), its “negative” (Howlett and Ramesh 2003) public policy responses have understandably
caused much consternation to those who care about the troubling environmental deterioration of
the world’s planet.

But can we draw such stark generalizations across all efforts to address environmental

deterioration? How do we begin to assess complex and diverse policy innovations that vary
within and across sectors, let alone countries, and whose short and long-term impacts are
uncertain? Moreover, what can we say about the increasing use of non-governmental policies in
North American and Europe, including voluntary, self-regulation, reporting, and consumer-
oriented labeling approaches. Do they follow the same trends in public policy noted above? Or do
they take on a different flavour that when assessed, ads an important caveat to generalizations
about public policy?

The purpose of this paper is to shed light on these questions by addressing what is

arguably, of all recent private sector policy innovations, the furthest away from government
control than any other: non-state market driven (NSMD) governance systems that turn to the
market-place for policy making authority. Exploring this question reveals important differences
within Europe and within North America regarding the emergence of NSMD in the forest sector,
known as forest certification.

Drawing on exiting theoretical and empirical work by Cashore, Auld and Newsom

(2004), that explores the emergence of forest certification in British Columbia, Canada, the US,
Germany, Sweden and the United Kingdom, this paper assesses the case of Finland, which was
not included in the first comparative project and which presents a puzzle: despite being highly
dependent on foreign markets the emergence of forest certification took a very different twist.
While forest companies in other export dependent cases showed, in response to market pressure,
initial interest in exploring (in the case of BC), or achieving (in the case of Sweden), certification
according to the environmental group supported international Forest Stewardship Council (FSC)
standards, Finnish forest owners steadfastly rejected the FSC approach. Instead, forest owners
developed a “made in Finland” certification program that transnational environmental groups
themselves ultimately rejected as inadequate. Yet Finnish forest owners were so successful in
defending their own certification program that many sources of international market pressure,
have, if somewhat reluctantly, accepted the Finish alternative to the FSC as adequate in meeting
their demands for eco-friendly certified timber.

Why would this be so? Understanding just why Finland would differ from the case of

British Columbia, we reveal below, significantly enhances our understanding of the emergence of
NSMD governance, and highlights the need to conduct careful sectoral-level analyses. Indeed,
with Finland recently ranking at the top of the 2005 environmental sustainability index, our paper
illustrates what those who champion the index themselves emphasize: that important differences
exist within firm firms, sectors, and policy subsystems that country level generalizations do not