British Columbia's environmental forestry policy record in perspective

Some environmental groups and US forest companies, each for their own reasons, have criticized forest policy in British Columbia as lax, and the US Congress and media have taken up the call for stricter regulations in Canada. A comparison of BC forest policy with the policies of the USDA Forest Service and six major softwood-harvesting states reveals that British Columbia has more stringent regulations than has been supposed. Focusing on clearcutting, riparian zone management, and protected areas, we find that BC policy in spring 2001 was generally comparable to that of Washington State and Oregon; only the Forest Service had stricter rules. State practices in Texas, Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia were less stringent

Private regulation, public policy, and the perils of adverse ontological selection

What problems can private regulatory governance solve, and what role should public policy play? Despite access to the same empirical evidence, the current scholarship on private governance offers widely divergent answers to these questions. Through a critical review, this paper details five ontologically distinct academic logics – calculated strategic behavior; learning and experimentalist processes; political institutionalism; global value chain and convention theory; and neo‐Gramscian accounts – that offer divergent conclusions based on the particular facets of private governance they illuminate, while ignoring those they obfuscate. In this crowded marketplace of ideas, scholars and practitioners are in danger of adverse ontological selection whereby certain approaches and insights are systematically ignored and certain problem conceptions are prioritized over others. As a corrective, we encourage scholars to make their assumptions explicit, and occasionally switch between logics, to better understand private governance's problem‐solving potential and its interactions with public policy.ISSN:1748-5983ISSN:1748-599

Mixed signals: NGO campaigns and non-state market driven (NSMD) governance in an export-oriented country

In the past two decades, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have targeted international customers of Canadian staples, intent on cajoling and coercing them to favour exporting firms certified as practising responsible fisheries and forestry management. The link between these campaigns and the adoption of these non-state market driven (NSMD) mechanisms is, however, more complex than often portrayed. There is an uneasy tension between demands favouring NSMD as a new form of private governance that will vary its own stewardship standards according to scientific information, multi-stakeholder deliberations, and price signals; and traditional demands that focus on a specific behaviour of a specific firm over a specific, albeit narrow, environmental problem. Indecision on the part of NGOs about the approach to take creates mixed signals, affecting firm decisions (purchasers and producers) in ways that can reduce the institutionalization of private authority. We examine these dynamics by unpacking the campaigns and their implications for the potential and consequences of NSMD governance

Private regulation, public policy, and the perils of adverse ontological selection

10.1111/rego.12354Regulation & Governance1541183-120

Switching between lenses for a better view: A critical review of private regulatory governance theories and the role of public policy

2018 Utrecht Conference on Earth System Governanc

Managing pandemics as super wicked problems: lessons from, and for, COVID-19 and the climate crisis

10.1007/s11077-021-09442-2Policy Sciences544707-72