Nachhaltigkeits-Governance durch Standards und Zertifizierung
Facing global environmental and social challenges, we live in a world of increasing fragmentation of authority. A key issue becomes understanding which institutions have the capacity to contribute to a transformation towards just and sustainable resource use. During the last two decades, sustainability standards have come to be hailed as a panacea for various global social and environmental problems upon which public and private actors are increasingly reliant: governmental actors employ them as benchmarks or even quasi-implementing agencies to govern towards sustainable development; corporate actors voluntarily or coercively come to work with certification to manage sustainability of their own and their supply chain operations (Pattberg 2012).
However, in research and practice the effectiveness of this new mode of governance is contested (e.g. Challies 2013); the conditions and mechanisms of its success are not yet conclusive (Bernstein & Cashore 2012; Boiral & Gendron 2011). This dissertation research aims to contribute to understanding the role of “governance through standards” (Ponte et al. 2011a) and its impacts. The research will draw attention to the design of private standards and their mechanisms of interaction with other institutions to promote sustainable management of resources in local social-ecological systems. To this end, the dissertation project examines a specific institutional arrangement that has emerged to govern sustainability of transnational biofuel production.
Despite the promotion of biofuels as an environmentally friendly alternative to fossil fuels, their rapid expansion from crops set into motion over the past decade has raised numerous concerns about detrimental effects on ecosystems and communities living in and around biofuel production sites (German et al. 2011). In response to these effects, public and private actors on different scales have developed regulations, standards and codes of conduct to mitigate or minimize the negative impacts of biofuels and their production processes (Bailis & Baka 2011). The EU’s 2009 Renewable Energy Directive (RED) created a governance arrangement in which certification serves as proof of compliance with EU sustainability criteria and became a de facto mandatory requirement for producers targeting the EU’s thus 100 percent captive market for ‘sustainable’ biofuels (Ponte 2012).
The European Commission refers to this approach as “the most comprehensive and advanced binding sustainability scheme of its kind anywhere in the world” (EC 2010, 1). This regulation can indeed be considered significant as the pathway explicitly functions as a meta-standard (Kaphengst 2009), recognizing ‘qualifying’ certification schemes as “quasi-implementing agencies” (Biermann & Pattberg 2012). In this way, it exemplifies hybrid governance by actively blending state authority and private (non-state) actors (Bailis & Baka 2011).
Bioenergy production thus presents a case of sustainability governance architecture built despite inconclusive knowledge of whether, and how, certification – although actively employed to account for the sustainability of the sector – actually assists with sustainable management of transnational supply chains and sustainable development at points of production. It thereby not only presents a novel phenomenon for research, but also underscores the urgent need to direct attention towards the institutional arrangement that can effectively deal with challenges of sustainable production. This dissertation investigates the mechanisms at work in the EU’s hybrid governance approach, which has been designed to manage sustainable bioenergy production, by answering the following question:
How does the institutional arrangement of sustainability certification systems for bioenergy influence the management of sustainable feedstock production in the context of developing countries.