Public and Private Food Governance: The Case of Palm Oil

Private governance arrangement often fill in what governments are not (yet) willing or able to regulate, sometimes to outplay them and to prevent that governments take action, and sometimes to show alternatives for public governance or to challenge it to take up more thorough public action. This paper assesses on the collaboration and competition between public and private arrangements by reviewing and discussing labelling standards and certification practices in the context of palm oil. Different standard-setting initiatives have evolved in the palm oil sector over the last years, most notably the “Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil” (RSPO) and the recently established “Indonesian Sustainable Palm Oil” (ISPO). ISPO is a mandatory government-led certification scheme while RSPO is a multi-stakeholder voluntary international standard. Based on fieldwork in Indonesia, the paper examines to what extent the relation between these two initiatives can characterized as collaborative or rather competitive. The paper shows that food governance in the context of palm oil and the sustainability challenges it generates leads to shifts in responsibility between public and private actors and the introduction of innovative governance arrangements.