State actors and international forest certification policy: Coalitions behind FSC and PEFC in federal Argentina

Forest certification has been so far described as a non-state, market-driven form of private governance developed by non-state actors. However, bureaucracies can influence the effects of these programs in many ways, using their competencies to either enhance or restrict non-state certification schemes. The objective of our work is to analyze the role state agencies played in the forest certification standard development processes in Argentina, including the related coalition building strategies. Our hypotheses are that forest certification is not an activity among merely private actors, but that state agencies do play a small but necessary role in creating favorable frame conditions, and in standard formulation and scheme establishment. Coalitions built around production-oriented state agencies and strong political sectors have a stronger influence in the formulation of standards of forest certification schemes than coalitions between conservation-oriented bureaucracies and environmental NGOs. In order to understand the process of standard formulation for FSC and PEFC in Argentina, data on the different schemes were collected from public statements from stakeholder organizations, written summaries of debates of schemes from both public meetings and meetings by the groups writing the standards, and statements from the agencies in charge of writing the standards. The results show that in Argentina, FSC was temporarily useful to the forestry sector and landowners as a quick solution and hence was supported even by utilitarian state agencies. In light of an evolving operational PEFC scheme four years later, this support by state agencies was dropped and shifted towards the more landowner-friendly PEFC. After this dynamic in the coalition building process, FSC was on a decline in Argentina.