Governing tropical deforestation from beyond the tropics? Limitations and possibilities
Creators: name: McGlennon, Samuel
Publisher: name: The Australian National University
Year: 2015

description: International trade connects environmental problems in a given location to consumption patterns elsewhere. Relatively few of these connections, however, have prompted 'downstream' actors - located at the consumption end of supply chains - to respond to the upstream environmental problems in which they are implicated. Contemporary tropical deforestation, a problem substantially driven by production of beef, palm oil, timber and soya, provides a prominent exception. In the last two decades, downstream actors - primarily Western companies and governments, often in conjunction with NGOs - have enacted an array of policy, regulatory and institutional responses that target international supply chains for these four commodities. Yet significant uncertainty lingers over the contribution these responses can make to slowing tropical deforestation. Drawing on intensive analysis of current responses and more than twenty interviews and correspondences with practitioners and experts, this study gathers together this array of supply chain responses to interrogate their potential contribution to slowing deforestation. It asks what limitations exist on this contribution, both conceptually (deriving from responses' nature) and empirically (deriving from responses' behaviour) and finds that current responses face significant limitations in both categories. Some of these limitations are inescapable, given the structural features of the underlying problem, but interestingly, others emerge instead from the parameters for responding set by downstream actors. In effect, some limitations are chosen by actors through their framing of the problem of deforestation in such a way that protects, inter alia, consumption patterns and continuing globalisation. Additional limitations derive from the behaviour of actors, whether through counter-productive competition within the dynamics of private sector and civil society or deference to some of the sensitivities confronting governments. In the course of its broad analysis of this newly coherent field, this study also recognises the importance of balancing these limitations with an exploration of the pathways and theories of change through which current responses might be able to overcome them. Multiple of these pathways and theories of change offer promise, though they are nonetheless subject to limitations of their own. Responses may yet be capable of spear-heading deforestation's slowing, even if by themselves their direct effects prove minimal. In short, there is no silver bullet, but greater traction on deforestation is possible by recognising the implications of alternative, deeper framings of that problem, as well as cultivating both an awareness of and willingness to act in ways that go beyond actors' rational interests as narrowly-defined. Against a backdrop of continuing globalisation, this study clarifies the limitations of downstream actors' current responses to a major environmental problem. As international trade acts increasingly to connect these actors to upstream problems, an understanding of these limitations is a platform on which future policy, regulatory and institutional responses can draw.