0788-C5
John Parkins 1
Forest certification represents a major sector initiative during the past decade. At the same time, two other related trends are driving forest policy development - the science of sustainable forest management and the democratization of forest management institutions. This paper employs the case of Canadian Standards Association (CSA) and Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certification to explore the deliberative nexus between corporate, scientific and public discourse in the context of forest management in Canada. Using literature from environmental risk theory, the deliberative weaknesses of both certification schemes are revealed. The industry-driven public advisory process within the CSA scheme may result in information being disqualified or concealed that would otherwise improve local standards. In turn, the top-down, expert-driven standards development process employed by the FSC may systematically discount public knowledge and under-articulate the contextual nature of sustainable forest management. Improvements to deliberative quality rest on valuing public contributions to the scientific process, and rebalancing competing discourses within the standards development process.
This paper explores the deliberative nexus between corporations, scientists, and the public in the context of forest management in Canada. This issue is timely for several reasons. First, forestry is an increasingly science-based management activity. In addition to several large academic faculties and research centers, witness the expansion of public and private sector sponsorship agreements such as the Sustainable Forest Management Network. The network administers more than $7 million per year to university researchers. Recently, the Canadian government announced $30 million in research funds for three national forest research institutes (Globe and Mail, May 16, 2002). This investment translates into considerable scientific energy focused on forests and forest management in Canada. Second, the proliferation of local-level democratic institutions such as forest sector public advisory committees (consisting of up to 200 groups nationally) and the Canadian Model Forest Program with eleven sites nation wide, encourage public participation in the identification of existing and potential forest benefits. Third, recent corporate interest in forest certification, where products and companies have the opportunity to be independently audited and labeled "green," include opportunities for both experts and the general public to inform forest management decision making. In this paper, I will identify ways in which two national forest certification schemes (Canadian Standards Association and Forest Stewardship Council) attempt to coordinate the points of contact between corporations, experts, and the public in order to further dominant goals and value orientations. These points of contact can be viewed as discursive spaces, where recurrent communication takes place between a number of actors (Dryzek 1990, 2000). My goal is to explore the ways in which two certification schemes within Canada are engaging the public, experts, and corporations in a debate about the state of our forests and how these deliberative spaces allow the values of dominant scheme boosters to dominant.
Forest certification is a global phenomenon. In 2000, the Confederation of European Paper Industries published a comparative matrix of 25 national forest certification schemes (CEPI 2000). Within Canada, the dominant national forest certification schemes are the Canadian Standards Association (CSA), Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI), the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). For this paper, I will deal only with CSA and FSC because these schemes are, arguably, at the leading edge of standards development in Canada and because they provide considerable space for discussion, debate, and persuasion between public, expert, and corporate interests.
In order to understand the ways in which CSA and FSC further the dominant interests of their backers, I will describe the mechanisms constructed for each scheme to deal with the points of contact between public, expert, and corporate interests. For the CSA, the principle role of public participation is to work with the company to develop values, objectives, indicators, and targets for the defined forest area. The performance standards associated with these values and objectives are predefined to some extent by the Canadian Council of Forest Ministers Criteria and Indicators of sustainable forest management (CCFM 1997). CCFM criteria and indicators were developed under extensive public consultation during the mid-1990s in order to reflect "broadly accepted Canadian values...and are consistent with the Montreal and Helsinki SFM processes" (CSA 2002: ii). There are six CCFM criteria ranging from biodiversity to multiple benefits. Under each of these criteria are elements or subcategories under which national indicators are identified. For the CSA process, realizing the diversity of forest eco-types and human activities from coast to coast, the CCFM criteria and indicator framework is maintained, but specific indicators must be revised to reflect the need for meaningful local application. Identifying these local-level indicators then is the primary mandate of the public involvement process. In other words, standards developed for CSA certification at the forest management level are defined in close cooperation with the local public. Usually, a seed document is developed by the company that identifies a first cut or first draft of indicators for consideration by local stakeholders. In defining the SFM standard for a defined forest area, expert guidance is provided initially by the six CCFM criteria that frame the range of indicators under consideration. When requested by the public advisory group or the company, scientists are also invited to provide information on specific local concerns such as habitat management or silvicultural treatments. All of these deliberations, negotiations, and decisions regarding SFM performance measures take place at the local level, generally over an 8 to 12 month period in concert with local citizens, the company, and the occasional outside expert. In general then, the CSA provides space for the intersection between the public, experts, and forest company interests, within the domain of the local public advisory process.
The FSC takes a very different approach to standards development. Unlike the CSA process, which is developed through a coalition of industry and government interests, the FSC standard emerged from an international coalition of non-governmental environmental organizations. FSC International has developed a set of 10 Principles and Criteria upon which national and regional standards are established. For many smaller countries, one specific standard is developed and applied to the entire forest region. For larger countries such as the United States and Canada, regional standards are developed. Within Canada, a Maritimes Standard was the first to be developed while BC and Boreal standards development are expected to be completed in 2002. These standards identify specific ecological, social, and economic performance criteria for that region. Unlike the CSA standard, where indicators are identified in concert with the local public and the forest company, FSC regional standards are developed through broad-based public involvement mechanisms at a national or regional scale. These mechanisms in the FSC are called chambers. Individuals who wish to participate in regional standards development are assigned to one of three primary chambers: economic, environmental, and social. According to chamber descriptions from FSC British Columbia, the economics chamber "includes organizations and individuals with a commercial interest in commercial forest products organizations...The social chamber is meant for indigenous organizations and social movements, which have an active interest in environmentally viable forest stewards...And the environmental chamber is limited to non-profit, non-governmental organizations with a demonstrated commitment to environmentally appropriate, socially beneficial and economically viable forest stewardship" (FSC-BC 2002). In addition to these chambers associated with distinct stakeholder groups, the FSC has developed strong relationships with Aboriginal forestry interests in Canada. For instance, a joint conference between the National Aboriginal Forestry Association (NAFA) and FSC in August 2001 resulted in unconditional NAFA endorsement of the FSC standard (FSC 2001). Somewhat like the seed documents developed by company=s pursuing CSA certification, FSC develops draft standards and these standards are distributed to the regional chambers for discussion and feedback. For instance, the FSC National Boreal Standard Discussion Draft was released in May 2002 for review by the Boreal chambers. The intersection between expert, public, and corporate is fostered through deliberations between FSC, who wrote the standard, the experts who reviewed the standard, and the public, most of whom were involved in one of three regional chambers. Whereas the deliberative space within the CSA framework is locally based and driven primarily by companies seeking certification, the FSC creates deliberative space at the regional and national level. Although significant public input goes in to FSC standards development, the approach is decidedly more top down and coordinated by expert committee.
Clearly the CSA and the FSC cultivate deliberative space for public, expert and corporate interests to discuss and debate forest management standards. The CSA cultivates this space within a local context with sponsorship from forest companies seeking CSA certification. The FSC cultivates this space regionally through participation in FSC chambers in dialogue with FSC expert panels. Both schemes can argue from positions of strength regarding their institutionalized deliberative procedures associated with standards development. However, both approaches fall prey to critiques that are not easily overcome. In the space remaining, I will discuss these weaknesses by employing case examples from environmental risk literature.
The CSA places a high priority on local public opinion by inviting local stakeholders to participate in the standards development process. In Alberta for instance, forest company-sponsored public advisory groups are the primary means for regular public input into forest management planning at the company level (Parkins 2002), and they have played a central role in the certification process. Given the dominant role forest companies play in developing the seed document, and the dominant relationship of corporations vis-à-vis local public advisory groups, to what extent are local public citizens capable of marshaling and sustaining rigorous alternative perspectives that could sustain a debate about forest values and benefits? Where corporate interests dominate a decision making environment, several cautionary tales emerge from the literature.
The first tale is associated with the role of heuristics, or mental short cuts used by institutions to make sense of complex and uncertain situations. At a corporate level, Clarke (1993) develops the idea of disqualification heuristics where decision makers systematically disqualify or disregard information that contradicts a particular conviction. He suggest that such disqualifications can lead organizations to be systematically stupid. The disqualification heuristic allows institutions to move forward, to keep the system moving, to narrow the range of alternatives, even when the possibility of large-scale catastrophes are immediately apparent. Clarke points to four sources that make this mind-set more likely. It is facilitated by information dependencies between regulators and the regulated, by production pressures, by disciplinary specialization among experts and decision makers that circumscribes a field of knowledge, how the world is organized and what is important, and by system permeability or the (un)openness of institutional processes to public scrutiny.
Beyond these more functional arguments at the institutional level, Leiss and Chociolko (1994) put forward a decidedly more critical argument to explain the errors associated with corporate decision making. They suggests it is reasonable to assume that companies will attempt to conceal risks in an effort to gain competitive advantage. In other words "all players -- institutional and individuals alike -- have an interest in seeking to realize the potential net gains to themselves from initiating risk-taking activity... by off-loading some or all of the negative consequences onto others who do not stand to benefit to the same degree as the initiators do" (Leiss and Chociolko 1994:52). These concealments of risk (externalities) are easier to get away with in the complexity of contemporary industrial society because of the interrelationships of biological and physical structures. For instance, it becomes increasingly difficult to identify a causal link between forest company practices and the loss of biodiversity on a landscape when ozone depletion, acid rain, and climate change are coupled with mining and oil and gas activity. Who's to blame?
These examples illuminate the potential for harmful outcomes when deliberative spaces are oriented toward large scale industrial interests and where public scrutiny and public debate is limited by or circumscribed by industrial interests such as production and profit.
The FSC solution to these potentially troubling conditions within local deliberative settings is to extend the deliberative sphere to regional and national level debates. Within this context, corporate interests and resources are matched by the resources of well-funded and influential environmental organizations and supporters from the scientific community. In these larges discursive spaces, a sustained alternative discourse to corporate forest interests and value orientations is more likely to achieve some measure of success. However promising these regional processes may appear in leveling the playing field and improving deliberative quality (measured by sustained discussion, debate and persuasion), the FSC approach to discourse management remains open to other forms of deliberative weakness.
A critique of the FSC approach toward standards development is situated in top-down, expert-driven discursive environments where local and contextualized knowledge tend to be discounted. The critique emerges out of a well-established theoretical orientation known as post-positivism. Post-positivism throws into question the whole notion of objective modes of scientific inquiry and exposes the biases, interests, and objectives of those involved in scientific research. "Post-positivist theory emphasizes science's dependence on the particular constellation of presuppositions, both empirical and practical, that prestructure empirical observations" (Fischer 1993:167). Along these lines of critique, one of the pre-eminent scholars in public risk perception argues for a prioritizing and a repositioning of public knowledge in discursive settings. Slovic emphasizes the complementarity of expert and lay knowledge. "Lay people sometimes lack certain information about hazards. However, their basic conceptualizations of risk is much richer than that of the experts and reflects legitimate concerns that are typically omitted from expert risk assessments" (Slovic 1987:285).
It is instructive to think about lay public contributions to this assessment framework in terms of cultural rationality, where risks are defined according to their perceived threat to familiar social relationships such as families, local communities, economies, and ecosystems. According to Wynne (1996), to dismiss lay public knowledge is to perpetuate one of the fundamental dichotomies which is part of the problem of modernity. Along with natural knowledge versus social knowledge, subjective versus objective, and qualitative versus quantitative, expert versus lay perpetuates the myth that these dichotomies actually exist. Rather, we need to think more critically about the cultural or social dimensions of modern knowledge, how it is constructed, what it focuses on, who benefits, and who pays the price.
Brown (1996) also provides a description of the benefits associated with cultural rationality. In his discussion of popular epidemiology "where lay people detect and act on environmental hazards and diseases" (1996:302), he describes the many ways in which lay people and experts differ in matters of problem definition, study design, interpretation of findings, and policy application. Generally, Brown highlights the ways in which public involvement is not only good politics but good science as well.
So in tipping the balance toward large scale and expert-based standards develop efforts, deliberative spaces become oriented around scientific expertise in ways that discount the contributions of cultural rationality and citizen science.
If in fact society is better served by clawing back some of the decision making authority now firmly in the grip of scientific or corporate interests, if we are to re-establish a place for lay involvement in decisions associated with forest management, what kinds of political and institutional arrangements are required to rebalance these deliberative spaces? An operational methodology for deliberative improvements to forest standards development rest on a firm understanding of public contributions to the scientific process. This paper maps out some of those contributions. Although a thorough discussion of decision making mechanisms would require several more papers, a useful starting point for this discussion would reference Dryzek (2000), Torgerson (1999) and Bohman (1996) who are working in the rapidly expanding area of deliberative democratic theory. Functowics and Ravetz (1985) along with Rosa (1998) have also encouraged us to think about the implications of scientific uncertainty and post-normal scientific methods as a promising new avenue for problem solving in the modern age. These ideas may assist in moving the value orientation of market-based environmental regulators beyond the narrowly prescribed interests of dominant backers.
Bohman, James. 1996. Public deliberation: pluralism, complexity, and democracy. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Brown, Phil. 1996. Popular epidemiology and toxic waste contamination: Lay and professional ways of knowing. In R. Scott Frey (ed.) The Environment and Society Reader, Toronto: Allyn and Bacon.
Canadian Standards Association (CSA). 2002. CAN/SCA-Z809-2002. Sustainable forest management: Requirements and guidance document. Februrary 2002 draft for public review. Canadian Standards Association.
Confederation of European Paper Industries (CEPI). 2000. Comparative matrix of forest certification schemes. Belgium: CEPI Brussels.
Canadian Council of Forest Ministers (CCFM). 1997. Criteria and Indicators of sustainable forest management: Progress to date. Ottawa, ON: Natural Resources Canada, Canadian Forest Service.
Clarke, Lee. 1993. The disqualification heuristic: When do organizations misperceive risks? Research in Social Problems and Public Policy, 5, 289-312.
Dryzek, J.S. 1990. Discursive democracy: Politics, policy, and political science. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.
Dryzek, J.S. 2000. Deliberative democracy and beyond: Liberals, critics, and contestations. New York: Oxford University Press.
Forest Stewardship Council (FCS). 2001. Annual Report 2000-2001. Canada Working Group. Toronto, ON.
Forest Stewardship Council of British Columbia (FCS-BC). 2002. Forest Stewardship Council Home Page [www.fcs-bc.org].
Funtowicz S. and J.R. Ravetz. 1985. Three types of risk assessment. In C. Whipple and V.T. Covello (eds.). Risk analysis in the private sector. New York: Plenum.
Leiss, William and Christina Chociolko. 1994. Risk and responsibility. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press.
Parkins, J.R. 2002. Forest Management and Advisory Groups in Alberta: An Empirical Critique of an Emergent Public Sphere. The Canadian Journal of Sociology, 27(2).
Rosa, Eugene A. 1998. Metatheoretical foundations for post-normal risk. Journal of Risk Research 1 (1), 15-44.
Slovic, Paul. 1987. Perception of risk. Science, 236, 280-285.
Sustainable Forest Management Network. 2002. Policy and Institutional Analysis (Public Participation Team), Edmonton, AB [on-line http:\www.ualberta.ca\sfm]
Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI). 2000. 2001 Edition Sustainable Forestry Initiative Standard. Washington, DC: American Forest and Paper Association.
Torgerson, D. 1999. The promise of green politics: Environmentalism and the public sphere. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Wynne, B. 1996. May the sheep safely graze? A reflective view of the expert-lay knowledge divide. In S. Lash, B. Szerszynski and B. Wynne. (Eds.). Risk, Environment and Modernity: Towards a New Ecology. London: Sage.
1 Canadian Forest Service, Northern Forestry Centre, 5320 - 122 Street, Edmonton, AB T6H 3S5, Canada. [email protected]