| This dissertation attempts to describe and explain outcomes associated with an emergent form of governance in global commodities trade: third party certification and labeling programs for environmental and social well-being. Third party certification and labeling programs emerged in the 1990s as efforts to capitalize on the preferences of "green" consumers by encouraging firms to voluntarily meet NGO-defined criteria outside of existing state regulatory mechanisms. Most research on such programs has focused on their economic viability, usefulness as a policy instrument, or effects in improving outcomes in production settings. However, the experiences of the most developed case to date---the Forest Stewardship Council---suggest that these programs may best be understood as entrepreneurial coalitions seeking to introduce new norms, rules, and conceptions of control in the broader regulatory arenas surrounding the commodities they address.; This study adopts a hybrid sociological institutional approach to engage in an embedded comparative analysis of the Forest Stewardship Council as an emergent para-regulatory social form in domestic and transnational wood markets. I argue that the program originally developed as a strategic effort on the part of institutional entrepreneurs to take advantage of a public crisis of legitimacy in international trade in wood products by enlisting the support of powerful retailers in Europe and North America. However, as the FSC effort began to make inroads in specific markets, dominant industrial interests reacted, and more generalized struggles over the legitimacy of the program and the new rules and relations of power it represented ensued. At the same time, the organization faced a variety of internal challenges as it attempted to rationalize and institutionalize its procedures and standards in settings around the world.; Turning to England and the United States as comparative case studies, and supplementing the findings with data from other countries, I show that the nature and extent of the organization's subsequent institutionalization and influence in domestic spaces has been shaped over time primarily through interactions between three sets of causal variables: relations of power between firms along the commodity chain, pre-existing state regulatory environments, and dominant cultural perceptions. Skilled institutional entrepreneurs, who often stand at the crossroads between industrial and environmental interest groups, serve as the principal agents of change at the domestic level, primarily through their efforts to reframe understandings of self-interest and build new coalitions. Transnational influences and dynamic changes within the domestic governance field have also ensured that pre-existing domestic environments condition, but do not determine, outcomes.; Taken together, the findings largely support the usefulness of a dynamic sociological institutional approach in describing and analyzing multinational contestations over market governance. The findings also provide several theoretical insights into models of action that inform sociological studies of stability and change in markets. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)... |
