Driving Palm Oil Towards Sustainability? Different Governance Arrangements Compared

Global palm oil production is expanding to fulfil the growing worldwide needs for cooking oil, food ingredients, biofuels, soap and other chemicals. This increase stimulates economic growth in producing (mostly developing) countries but also leads to serious environmental and social problems such as destruction of tropical forests, more climate change and threats to small-holder livelihoods. Its global character in production and consumption, the number of different actors involved and its multiple uses makes promoting sustainability in palm oil a complex challenge. Individual nation-states can no longer control and regulate such global flows and have to connect with other actors, such as private companies and NGOs. Conventional notions of economic and political power as steering this sector are insufficient and multiple alternative governance arrangements are emerging, including certification schemes. Analysing these dynamics requires an adequate conceptual framework and this paper aims to contribute to this by building on the concept of global networks and flows as introduced by Castells. Global networks like palm oil supply encompass multiple actors and complex relations between them, and the relevance of one particular actor is primarily determined by his position within the network. Power in networks is primarily related to managing access to the network and controlling the organisation of the (im)material flows (‘programmers’). Another source of power lies in connecting different networks (i.e. the ‘switchers’). The possibilities for creating change towards more environmentally sustainable palm oil relate closely to the structuration of networks and flows which depends critically on the roles played by these programmers and switchers. The diverse palm oil governance arrangements, including labelling and certification schemes, that presently exist are identified and assessed in this paper.