Book reviews
Henne, Adam. 2015. Environmentalism, Ethical Trade, and Commodification. Technologies of Value and the Forest Stewardship Council in Chile. New York, London: Routledge. xi + 155 pp. Hb.: $145.00. ISBN: 9780415730419.
Environmentalism, Ethical Trade, and Commodification by Adam Henne, Assistant Professor of International Studies and Anthropology at the University of Wyoming, provides a critical analysis of integrating market-based mechanisms into forestry. Henne's ethnographic case study deals with the certification practices employed by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) in Chile. FSC International is an NGO that aims to support sustainably produced timber by providing the FSC label and promoting market incentives. It is a multi-stakeholder organisation that defines criteria for sustainable forest management at the global level and accredits individuals and organisations as auditors who award certification to forest managers at the regional scale. However, how do the involved actors like companies, consumers, indigenous groups and worker associations negotiate what constitutes "good" forestry? Whose knowledge and values are privileged or silenced when good is defined? These are the key issues the study focuses on in order to examine the cultural politics of forest certification in situations of difference and competition.
The author's theoretical approach draws from political ecology and science studies. According to Foucault's concept of "governmentality", he considers forest certification to be a technology of government that locates political agency and influences subject positions. Since certification practices cover the production of economic value as well as the enforcement of the ethical values of consumers, Henne introduces the concept of 'technologies of value' to describe 'a lever for shifting the locus of political power from one set of actors to another' (p. 6). In order to meet the study objectives, his discussion of certification is driven by three analytic principles: a) tracking the strategic use of discursive tools as an act of boundary work, b) understanding how significant objects, such as "knowledge" and "nature" are constructed and become meaningful through their circulation and interpretation, and (c) re-contextualising how knowledge is articulated in the fields of power relations and institutional constraints (pp. ix-x).
The book is divided into six clearly structured chapters including introduction and conclusion. In the first chapter, the author explains how FSC International works and recounts the history of the timber industry and the FSC in Chile. He then introduces key concepts and theoretical perspectives and reflects on concerns about methodology, representation, and authorship.
In Chapter Two, Making Wood and Making Persons, Henne documents the set of motivations of the parties involved in implementing the FSC certification scheme. He traces their subject positions by defining their roles as "the consumer", the environmentalist", "timber producers", and "the Mapuche" and discusses their interaction and often ambivalent position in relation to each other.
Chapter Three, Putting Knowledge to Work, deals with the cultural politics of knowledge in standard-making and shows how a set of authoritative knowledges is privileged whereas the knowledge of forest workers and indigenous groups remains marginalised.
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The fourth chapter, Green Lungs, is a kind of intermission. It consists of a narrative of Henne's ethnographic encounter with consuming firewood in order to disclose the author's presence and social position in "the field". Moreover, the chapter deals with a small-scale program for certifying firewood for local consumption to document the local impacts of environmental regulations and contains a comparison of this endeavour with FSC-Chile.
In Chapter Five, Certification and the Politics of Scale, the author demonstrates the ambivalent relation of FSC certification to the state and discusses how scalar issues impact the standard-making process. By taking up the issue of 'generified' standards (p. 108), he shows how the adaptation of international FSC standards into local ones resulted in broadening criteria instead of reducing them to local realities.
Finally, the sixth and concluding chapter summarises core findings and ties them to theoretical considerations on, for example, the boundary-policing of elite forms of knowledge (p. 129). Furthermore, the author reflects on the role of ethical trade initiatives in creating sustainable and survivable global futures. He argues for tempering any normative judgments about market-based instruments for environmental governance and finishes the book by calling on the reader to do her own ethical labour '... rather than delegating either to technologies beyond ourselves' (p. 132).
The volume results from Henne's fieldwork commenced in 2004 in and around Valdivia and Santiago as part of his doctoral research. To trace knowledge production, he employed a toolkit of qualitative ethnographic methods, such as semi-structured and in-depth interviews that were complemented by documentary research and participant observation in 'zones of awkward engagement' (p. 17). However, what I found absent from the author's documentation of his methodological approach (see Chapter One) is a systematic overview of the collected qualitative data and the procedures employed for analysis. I missed basic information on the total number of interviews conducted, the period of data collection and information on the interviewees' social characteristics like institutional affiliation in order to clarify whose perspective influences or even dominates the results of the study.
The case study highlights the disparity between the simplicity and abstraction of the FSC label and the complexity and tensions in the course of implementing certification practices "on the ground". It demonstrates that the values represented at the negotiating table are neither pre-determined by the international FSC certification scheme nor transparent. In fact, FSC standards in Chile are '... a dependent outcome, shaped by power relations and institutional constraints' (p. 123). Finally, the author concludes that FSC-Chile emerges as neither a form of neoliberal environmental governance and green capitalism as he presumed before doing fieldwork, nor is it the powerful strategy to transform capital from the outside as promoted by FSC-Chile (see Chapter One and Six). Due to the complex scalar issues at stake and because of the rapid changes taking place in the political ecology of Chile, the certification scheme remains an unpredictable force (p. 132).
Despite the methodological shortcomings, the volume provides detailed insights into the political dynamics of implementing certification schemes "on the ground".
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Book reviews
Hence, it is a valuable contribution to the heated debate in the current academic literature about the social and ethical implications of introducing market-based instruments for environmental governance. I would recommend this volume to readers interested in the application of political ecology and techno-science to case study research. Furthermore, in spite the underlying theoretical perspectives, the study might also be a valuable read for policy makers and practitioners in the field of environmental governance who seek an independent evaluation of regulation schemes such as certification.
CLAUDIA KONRAD
University of Trier (Germany)
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