Institution Building across Borders

From Global Standards to Local Practices: A Study of the Forest Stewardship Council certification program in Russia

Olga Maletz (External Project)

The project investigates the local unfolding and local impact of transnational private programs seeking to regulate corporate environmental and social behaviour of firms in a global economy. It focuses on the recursive processes of enactment and implementation of transnational private standards of corporate environmental and social responsibility in local contexts. Specifically, the project analyses the case of the Forest Stewardship Council, a transnational nongovernmental organization that designed global principles and criteria of good forest management and a system of certification of complying firms. In the FSC forest certification system, in order to be implemented global principles need to be adapted to a local natural and social context. The project shows that no matter how different and inappropriate local practices, laws and regulations may appear to be, skilful local activists navigating between different levels and nodes in a patchy system of transnational natural resource governance use local institutions and practices as a resource and facilitate the translation of global norms into local practices.

Olga Maletz worked on this project as a graduate student at the International Max Planck Research School in October 2005-January 2009 and as post-doctoral fellow in the working group “Cross-Border Institution-Building” in February-September 2009. With Sigrid Quack and Sabrina Zajak, she is currently looking into identifying similarities in the local unfolding of transnational environmental and labour standards.