Experimentalist Interactions: The Emerging Timber Legality Regime and Transnational Forest Governance

Over the past 15 years, something approaching a transnational timber legality regime has progressively emerged from the intersection of multiple public and private initiatives across different geographical regions and levels of governance. At the heart of this emerging regime is the European Union’s Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade (FLEGT) initiative, which includes two main components: (1) negotiating Voluntary Partnership Agreements (VPAs) with producer countries to build domestic institutions that assure the legality of exported timber and promote sustainable forest governance; and (2) enacting legislation in the form of the EU Timber Regulation (EUTR) that makes it an offense to place illegally harvested timber from whatever source on the European market and obliges firms to demonstrate “due diligence” that they have not done so. As we have shown elsewhere (Overdevest & Zeitlin 2014, 2017), the EU FLEGT initiative comprises an experimentalist governance architecture, involving extensive participation by public and private stakeholders in establishing and revising open-ended framework goals and metrics for assessing progress towards them through continuous monitoring and review of local implementation, underpinned by a penalty default to sanction non-cooperation. At the same time, moreover, other major markets such as the United States and Australia have also adopted legislation prohibiting the import of wood harvested illegally in its country origin, while the main international private forest certification schemes – the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) and the Program for the Endorsement of Forest Certification (PEFC) – have revised their standards and indicators to meet the ensuing timber legality verification requirements in these jurisdictions. Such developments, together with ongoing campaigns by transnational NGOs and advocacy networks to expose legality violations, have put growing pressure on both importing and producing countries around the world (including China) to adopt measures of various kinds to combat trade in illegally logged wood. This paper will analyze the interactions between the EU FLEGT initiative and the other components of the emerging transnational timber legality regime, including both public timber legality requirements and private certification. It will explore how far, and through what institutional channels and mechanisms, these interactions are in fact producing a joined-up transnational regime, based on a shared normative commitment to combat illegal logging and cooperative efforts to implement and enforce it. The paper will likewise consider how far this regime’s focus on ensuring timber legality may be supportive or subversive of more ambitious commitments to environmental sustainability. The paper will also examine how far these interactions between the different components of the emerging timber legality regime are producing other beneficial effects associated with effective experimentalist governance architectures, such as increased stakeholder participation, enhanced accountability of governments and firms, and recursive learning from comparison of local implementation experience. Finally, the paper will discuss how far and in what ways FLEGT and other components of the emerging timber legality regime may contribute to the broader transnational campaign against deforestation through agricultural conversion.