Imposing legality : hegemony and resistance under the EU Forest Law Enforcement, Governance, and Trade (FLEGT) initiative

Timber legality trade restrictions and verification are a bundle of contemporary mechanisms triggered by global concerns about forest degradation and deforestation. The European Union Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade initiative is a significant effort to not only screen out illegal timber and wood products from the EU, but also support trading partner countries to improve their legality definitions and verification processes. But by using bilateral agreements (Voluntary Partnership Agreements) as a key mechanism, the EU legitimizes trade partner nation-states as the authority to decide what is legal. We engage in a theoretical debate about the complexities of the meaning of legality, and then analyze empirical data collected from interviews in Ghana, Indonesia, Vietnam and Europe with policy, civil society and industry actors to understand how different actors understand legality. We find hegemonic notions of Westphalian statehood at the core of 'global' notions of legality and often contrast with local understandings of legality. Non-state actors understand these hegemonic notions of legality as imposed upon them and part of a colonial legacy. Further, notions of legality that fail to conform with hegemonic understandings are readily framed by nation- states as immoral or criminal. We emphasize the importance of understanding these framings to elucidate the embedded assumptions about what comprises legality within assemblages of global actors.Peer reviewe

Climate change alters impacts of extreme climate events on a tropical perennial tree crop

Anthropogenic climate change causes more frequent and intense fluctuations in the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO). Understanding the effects of ENSO on agricultural systems is crucial for predicting and ameliorating impacts on lives and livelihoods, particularly in perennial tree crops, which may show both instantaneous and delayed responses. Using cocoa production in Ghana as a model system, we analyse the impact of ENSO on annual production and climate over the last 70 years. We report that in recent decades, El Niño years experience reductions in cocoa production followed by several years of increased production, and that this pattern has significantly shifted compared with prior to the 1980s. ENSO phase appears to affect the climate in Ghana, and over the same time period, we see corresponding significant shifts in the climatic conditions resulting from ENSO extremes, with increasing temperature and water stress. We attribute these changes to anthropogenic climate change, and our results illustrate the big data analyses necessary to improve understanding of perennial crop responses to climate change in general, and climate extremes in particular

Landscape and management influences on smallholder agroforestry yields show shifts during a climate shock

Sustaining yields for smallholder perennial agriculture under a rapidly changing climate regime may require consideration of landscape features and on-farm management decisions in tandem. Optimising landscape and management may not be possible for maximising yields in any one year but maintaining heterogeneous landscapes could be an important climate adaptation strategy. In this study, we observed elevation, forest patch and shade management gradients affecting smallholder coffee (Coffea arabica) yields in a ‘normal’ year versus the 2015/16 El Niño. We generally found a benefit to yields from having leguminous shade trees and low canopy openness, while maintaining diverse shade or varying canopy openness had more complex influences during a climate shock. The two years of observed climate shock were dominated by either drought or high temperatures, with yield responses generally negative. Climate projections for East Africa predict more erratic rainfall and higher temperatures, which will disproportionately impact smallholder farmers.</p

Retrospective evaluation of whole exome and genome mutation calls in 746 cancer samples

Funder: NCI U24CA211006Abstract: The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) and International Cancer Genome Consortium (ICGC) curated consensus somatic mutation calls using whole exome sequencing (WES) and whole genome sequencing (WGS), respectively. Here, as part of the ICGC/TCGA Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes (PCAWG) Consortium, which aggregated whole genome sequencing data from 2,658 cancers across 38 tumour types, we compare WES and WGS side-by-side from 746 TCGA samples, finding that ~80% of mutations overlap in covered exonic regions. We estimate that low variant allele fraction (VAF < 15%) and clonal heterogeneity contribute up to 68% of private WGS mutations and 71% of private WES mutations. We observe that ~30% of private WGS mutations trace to mutations identified by a single variant caller in WES consensus efforts. WGS captures both ~50% more variation in exonic regions and un-observed mutations in loci with variable GC-content. Together, our analysis highlights technological divergences between two reproducible somatic variant detection efforts

When climate justice goes wrong: maladaptation and deep co-production in transformative environmental science and policy

Maladaptation to climate change is often portrayed as arising from the unjust exclusion of vulnerable people. In turn, analysts have proposed knowledge co-production with marginalized groups as a form of transformative climate justice. This paper argues instead that maladaptation arises from a much deeper exclusion based upon the projection of inappropriate understandings of risk and social identity that are treated as unquestioned circumstances of justice. Drawing on social studies of science, the paper argues that the focus on co-production as an intentional act of inclusion needs to be considered alongside “deep” or “reflexive” co-production, which instead refers to the non-cognitive and unavoidable simultaneous generation of knowledge and social order. These processes have linked visions of planetary justice with an understanding of climate risk based on global atmospheric change, and an assumption that community forms an antidote to individualism. The paper uses a discussion of adaptation in western Nepal to illustrate how such deep forms of co-production have significantly reduced understandings of “what” adaptation is for, and “who” is included. Maladaptation, therefore, is not simply unjust implementations of an essentially fair model of adaptation, but also the allocation of exclusionary visions of what and for whom adaptation is for. Debates about transformative climate justice therefore need to understand how their critiques of classical liberal justice generate exclusions of their own, and to engage vulnerable people in reframing, rather than just receiving, circumstances of justice. There is also a need to examine how these circumstances remain unchallenged within environmental science and policy

FLEGT VPAs: Laying a pathway to sustainability via legality lessons from Ghana and Indonesia

The long-term objective of the 2003 EU FLEGT Action Plan was to ensure a legal trade of timber products within and between countries and, by doing so, clear a pathway towards global sustainability and good governance. Voluntary Partnership Agreements (VPAs) between the EU and producing countries have emerged as a primary tool for achieving these goals. VPAs combine legality licensing as a market-based approach to stem illegal harvesting and trade with multi-stakeholder processes that seek to address underlying problems of forest governance, including unclear or contradictory forest related laws and weak community rights. We explore whether the EU FLEGT pathway from legality to sustainability is being laid down through VPAs by drawing on case studies of Ghana and Indonesia. These countries are among the first to agree VPAs and are currently working towards the issuance of FLEGT licenses for timber product exports to the EU. The paper uses a critical socio-legal approach that focuses not only on the negotiation of VPA text, but also on the implications of that text for how VPA policies will be interpreted, enacted and contested in their implementation. Our analysis indicates that both countries are adopting a uniform approach driven by the technical verification requirements needed to license timber for export. This overemphasis on timber licensing fails to address the leading role of the agricultural sector in driving forest loss, constrains civil society participation and creates disproportionate market barriers for local producers. We conclude that a more sustainable approach requires balancing trade-based licensing of large industry with other governance models more appropriate for small-scale operators and domestic markets

Certification with Russian characteristics:Implications for social and environmental equity

This paper applies theories of equity and transnational “governance generating networks” to assess how forest certification is enacted in Russia. Drawing on eight years of field research, we compare the engagement of shifting networks of Russian private sector, NGO, governmental and local community actors in implementing select social and environmental standards and how this impacts the effectiveness of the FSC in tackling local community and environmental concerns. Our case study suggests that much of the parameter-setting for what is addressed in certification's “sites of implementation” happens outside of formal standards-setting processes. In regard to environmental standards, strong and stable transnational environmental networks have been relatively successful in protecting “high conservation value forests”. However equivalent multi-level networks are lacking for key social standards. While a national social NGO has had some success in promoting procedural equity through community participation, we find no evidence that certification was addressing local community concerns for distributive equity. In particular, certification had failed to address the loss of small and medium forest enterprises, loss of local access to sawnwood and rising costs of fuelwood. This highlights the power dynamics of global standards implementation and the need for multi-scale advocacy coalitions to ensure their effective implementation

Forests: the political ecology of international environmental governance

This chapter surveys the complex international politics of forest conservation. Forests emerged as a global environmental concern in the latter half of the twentieth century due largely to the acceleration of tropical deforestation. The acceleration of tropical forest loss since the 1960s has sparked, and continues to propel, the idea of forests as a “global commons” in need of coordinated international governance. An international forest convention could have various advantages, depending on how it is designed. North–South differences are often overemphasized in analyses of international relations. The South American countries have been led by Brazil. The Central American countries, by contrast, are much smaller and some have more difficulty attracting forest aid, which could help explain their greater support for a convention. A growing body of scientific research has uncovered a number of reasons for certification’s uneven growth, as well as its limited relevance to deforestation