Novel Institutions for the Earth and Negotiated Governance Knowledge

This paper takes a short discussion on private governance in global environmental politics as entry point for introducing a theoretical framework on the importance of negotiated knowledge for novel institutions; it intertwines this theoretical framework with findings from the negotiations which brought about the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) – the first transnational certification organization for sustainable forestry. Across the fields of IR, public policy and Science and Technology Studies (STS), knowledge has become viewed as embedded and probed in action, anchored in socio-material arrangements of documents and models as well as enacted in bodily performances which involves objects of various sorts. Drawing on this conceptualization of knowledge, this paper mobilizes the concepts of governance knowledge and translation: Actors draw on, produce, and circulate governance knowledge in negotiations of novel governance arrangements. Translation, then, is the communicative practice of manufacturing consensus, it refers to the way in which new entities are formed. To perform translation is both a form of movement and an exercise of power in which governance knowledge is replicated or imitated and differentiated at the same time.