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When CSR meets Plural Legal Order: Can Palm Oil Companies do Better than Public Authorities by Committing to Zero-Deforestation in Indonesia?

Asia
Governance
Green Politics
Policy Change
State Power
Otto Hospes
Wageningen University and Research Center
Otto Hospes
Wageningen University and Research Center

Abstract

One of the most controversial issues in public and political debates on sustainability is the expansion of palm oil as a global commodity at the expense of forests in Indonesia. This paper describes the rise and fall of the Indonesian Palm Oil Pledge (IPOP) to zero-deforestation. In 2014 the four biggest palm oil companies of Indonesia signed this pledge at the Climate Summit held in New York, in the presence of the former president of Indonesia. This created a new dynamics and power struggle among authorities governing palm oil in Indonesia. The IPOP was established next to the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil and the Indonesian Sustainable Palm Oil standard. Our first question is: what have been the motivations of the big palm oil companies to launch the IPOP in a plural governance order of regulatory authorities. In 2016 the government dissolved the IPOP. Our next three questions are: how to characterize the interactions between the IPOP and the government of Indonesia after the establishment of the IPOP? what have been the motivations of the government to dissolve the IPOP? what institutional and discursive steps were taken by the four big companies after the ending of the IPOP? The aim of our paper is to contribute to the debate on political CSR and the return of government regulation, focusing on power dynamics between different state and non-state actors in a plural legal order on palm oil. For this purpose, we use the concepts of interlegality (de Sousa-Santos 1987) and governance interactions (Eberlein et al. 2014). We conclude that value chain governance and private governance of palm oil in Indonesia have re-activated public governance and triggered the government to adopt a discourse on sovereignty over palm oil and smallholders to side-track both value chain governance and private governance of palm oil.