Forest Certification as a Global Civil Society Regulatory Institution

Published in Social and Political Dimensions of Forest Certification, Errol Meidinger, Christopher Elliott & Gerhard Oesten, eds.https://digitalcommons.law.buffalo.edu/book_sections/1187/thumbnail.jp

Private Import Safety Regulation and Transnational New Governance

Published as Chapter 12 in Import Safety: Regulatory Governance in the Global Economy, Cary Coglianese, Adam M. Finkel & David Zaring, eds. This paper examines the role of ‘private’ (non-governmental) regulatory programs in assuring the safety of imported products. Focusing particularly on food safety it argues that private regulatory institutions have great capacity to control safety hazards and to implement dynamic systems for detecting and correcting nascent risks. However, to establish the accountability and legitimacy relationships necessary for long-term effectiveness, private safety regulatory programs must devise new ways of incorporating and responding to the interests of developing country producers, laborers, consumers, and governments. Developed country regulators can aid this process by ‘orchestrating’ transnational governance processes to ensure that private regulatory programs collect and share information, maximize transparency and participation in their standard setting procedures, and experience incentives to deploy maximal care in implementation, monitoring, and enforcement.https://digitalcommons.law.buffalo.edu/book_sections/1190/thumbnail.jp

Reconstituting \u3cem\u3eHaudenosaunee\u3c/em\u3e Law, Sovereignty, and Governance

This article introduces a symposium issue on Law, Sovereignty, and Tribal Governance: The Iroquois Confederacy that grew out of a conference at the University at Buffalo Law School in 1998. The symposium was heavily attended and debated by the indigenous peoples of the region. The article argues that core lessons of the conference included the requirement to understand and implement sovereignty as tool of cultural survival, particularly in its insistence on a land base; that sovereignty has been adopted as a central concept by Indian peoples both because it provides a necessary social bulwark and because it facilitates a discursive connection with non-native peoples; that tribal sovereignty requires a continual defense and reinvention of governance institutions; and that tribal sovereignty includes not just relative political autonomy, but also political good sense — sound thinking in the classical indigenous understanding

The New Environmental Law: Forest Certification

This paper argues that the rapidly expanding practice of forest certification, together with similar developments in other sectors, is creating a new template for environmental law. Nongovernmental organizations and some industry actors are establishing binding regulatory standards, systems for monitoring compliance, sanctions for non-compliance, and, when things work well, methods for assessment and revision. It locates these developments as a part of “phase 3” of environmental law, which also involves a proliferation of other initiatives beyond traditional regulation. Finally, it offers a preliminary discussion of the efficacy, adaptability, coherence, and legitimacy of the emergent system

The Public Uses of Eminent Domain: History and Policy

This paper examines the effects and implications of the ‘public use’ requirement for the exercise of eminent domain in the United States. It is part of an ongoing inquiry the consequences of eminent domain in the United States. The first part examines the history of the public use requirement, both how the doctrine has been articulated and logically extended and what purposes have been accomplished under it. The second part of the paper is an analytic critique of the public use doctrine. After considering whether any principled standard can be developed to delimit the proper uses of eminent domain, it examines a number of the difficult empirical and political questions confronted in any effort to develop such a standard that properly limits state power to confiscate privately held property

Competitive Supragovernmental Regulation: How Could It Be Democratic?

This paper explores the possibility that a developing form of regulatory governance is also sketching out a new form of anticipatory regulatory democracy. \u27Competitive supra-governmental regulation\u27 is largely driven by non-state actors and is therefore commonly viewed as suffering a democracy deficit. However, because it stresses broad participation, intensive deliberative procedures, responsiveness to state law and widely accepted norms, and competition among regulatory programs to achieve effective implementation and widespread public acceptance, this form of regulation appears to stand up relatively well under generally understood criteria for democratic governance. Nonetheless, a more satisfactory evaluation will require a much better understanding of which programs win regulatory competitions, and why

Importing Democracy: Promoting Participatory Decision Making in Russian Forest Communities

Published in Environmental Democracy Facing Uncertainty, Cécilia Claeys & Marie Jacqué, eds. This paper describes how the World Wildlife Fund for Nature (WWF) jump-started democratic institutions in Russian rural communities to create a basis for social, environmental, and economic modernization within the Russian forestry sector. In Russia’s post-soviet markets and institutions, a host of multinational companies and large transnational environmental organizations sought to promote the restructuring of Russia’s legal and economic infrastructure and active subsidiaries in Russia. In order for modern forestry approaches to be imported, management practices that had developed in the West needed to be adapted to Russia’s unique context, which led forestry holdings in Northwestern Russia to become involved in Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certification. Due to this involvement with the FSC, community participation should have increased considerably as well. However, civil society organizations were limited in villages where there was no pre-existing tradition of acting as real stakeholders in the surrounding forests. This paper describes how networks, local communities, and cultural understandings (“social imaginaries”) are involved in instituting more democratic management practices in Russian forestry.https://digitalcommons.law.buffalo.edu/book_sections/1186/thumbnail.jp