Disentangling Benefit-Sharing Complexities of Oil Extraction on the North Slope of Alaska

This paper analyses benefit-sharing arrangements between oil companies, native corporations, the North Slope Borough, and Indigenous Peoples in Alaska. It aims to disentangle the complexities of benefit-sharing to understand existing procedural and distributive equity. We identified benefit-sharing regimes involving modes, principles, and mechanisms of benefit-sharing. This includes modes that reflect institutionalized interactions, such as paternalism, company centered social responsibility (CCSR), partnership, and shareholders. Principles can be based on compensation, investment and charity. Mechanisms can involve negotiated benefits and structured benefits, mandated by legislation, contracts, or regulation. Furthermore, mechanisms can involve semi-formal and trickle-down benefits. Trickle-down benefits come automatically to the community along with development. The distribution of money by the North Slope Borough represents the paternalistic mode, yet involves investment and mandated principles with top–down decision making. They are relatively high in distributional equity and low in participatory equity. Native corporations predominantly practice the shareholders’ mode, investment principle, and mandated mechanisms. The oil companies’ benefit-sharing represents a mixed type combining CCSR and partnership modess, several principles (investment, compensatory, charity) and multiple types of mechanisms, such as mandated, negotiated, semi-formal and trickle-down. These arrangements vary in terms of distributive equity, and participatory equity is limited

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.</p

Articulating FPIC through transnational sustainability standards: A comparative analysis of Forest Stewardship Council's standard development processes in Canada, Russia and Sweden

An increasing number of sustainability standards integrate the principle of free, prior and informed consent (FPIC) as a requirement to ensure respect for the rights of Indigenous peoples. FPIC remains a contested norm, due in part to divergences of interpretation and gaps in implementation. Drawing on a typology based on FPIC conceptions, this paper presents a comparative analysis of the Forest Stewardship Council's (FSC) standard development processes in three countries, Canada, Russia and Sweden. The paper investigates the dynamics of designing FPIC requirements and conceptions of FPIC reflected in national standards. Drawing on semi-structured interviews and analysis of written standards, this study finds similarities in terms of the key debates, such as the scope of Indigenous authority and applicability of FPIC to non-Indigenous communities, however underscored by different stakeholder dynamics and outcomes. Despite the structuring presence of International Generic Indicators, different conceptions of FPIC are reflected in national standards

Biodiversity conservation through forest certification: key factors shapingnational Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) standard-development processesin Canada, Sweden, and Russia

Our work focuses on the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), one of the most stringent, but also contested certification schemes for sustainable forestry. Responding to criticisms concerning inconsistency at the national level, FSC-International recently increased the prescriptiveness of its international standards, including the development of biodiversity-related International Generic Indicators (IGIs). We aim to understand recent efforts in Canada, Sweden, and Russia to revise national-level FSC standards in line with biodiversity-related IGIs. What were the key factors influencing the standard-development process and its outcomes? Were stakeholders satisfied with the negotiations and what was finally achieved? The data were drawn from semi-structured interviews with key participants, a comparative analysis of biodiversity-related indicators in newly approved FSC standards, and analysis of reports prepared by national FSC offices. We applied the Institutional Development and Analysis framework within a complex systems approach to identify multiple interconnected factors that shaped standard-development processes and outcomes in each country. Our findings indicate that despite persistent efforts of FSC-International to harmonize FSC standards across all countries, there are a number of interrelated key factors, which influence outcomes at the national level. Four common clusters of endogenous factors were key to standard-development processes and outcomes in each of these countries: process-related factors, biodiversity-related actions, desired level of control over biodiversity-related outcomes, and adequacy of available knowledge about biodiversity. Forest governance was the only common cluster of key exogenous factors in Sweden and Russia, many of which were identified as constraining the emergence of a consensus-oriented negotiation process. Our findings indicate that efforts to enhance the consistent performance of forest certification for biodiversity conservation require an improved understanding of negotiation outcomes as the emergent products of interactions between multiple exogenous and endogenous factors. This implies a need for a greater focus on process management aspects during future negotiations

The politics of scale in global governance: do more stringent international forest certification standards protect local rights in Russia?

This paper interrogates how the increasing stringency of international rules on Free Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC), as reflected in the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC)’s certification standards, is shaping the rights afforded indigenous and local communities in Russia. Viewing the FSC as a ‘global governance generating network’ (GGN) that gains rule-making authority through diverse ‘forums of negotiation’ at multiple scales, we examine how international rules are negotiated and re-configured regarding 1) the ‘scope’ of requirements – who is included or excluded from FPIC and 2) ‘prescriptiveness' – the level and specificity of the rights afforded to FPIC holders. We find that Russian stakeholders perceive the increasing prescriptiveness of FSC's global FPIC policies as disrupting their existing norms of negotiated compromise, and originating from well-defined and politically influential indigenous populations elsewhere in the world. This has spurred intense debate on the scope of who should qualify for FPIC in Russia. While FSC-Russia's Social Chamber members have used formal standard-setting processes to negotiate for the increased stringency and scope of some FPIC requirements, industry-backed forums have inserted numerous exceptions, and drawn on external expertise and legal counsel to further restrict who counts as an FPIC rights-holder. These ongoing contestations highlight the risk that prescriptive international standards protecting local rights may narrow the scope of whose rights matter in their local implementation

Oil Extraction and Benefit Sharing in an Illiberal Context:The Nenets and Komi-Izhemtsi Indigenous Peoples in the Russian Arctic

How can indigenous communities in illiberal regimes benefit from oil production? This paper compares the experience of two indigenous peoples in the Russian Arctic, the Nenets and the Komi-Izhemtsi, in their quest for environmental protection and the development of benefit-sharing arrangements with Lukoil, a Russian oil company. The Nenets people, recognized by the Russian state as indigenous, are marginalized political actors who identified a route to receiving compensation for loss of land and damage to the environment as well as economic benefits under the auspices of Russian law and Lukoil’s corporate policies. In contrast, the Komi-Izhemtsi, despite indigenous status in global institutions including the United Nations and the Arctic Council, are unrecognized as indigenous domestically and initially received no compensation. Their path to benefit sharing was more challenging as they partnered with local nongovernmental organizations and global environmentalists to pressure Lukoil to sign a benefit-sharing agreement. Ultimately, the comparison illustrates how transnational partnerships can empower indigenous people to gain benefits from natural resource exploitation even in illiberal political systems