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Any effort to understand and assess the role of private governance and climate must pay careful attention to its current and potential impact on global forest management. Forests’ ecosystems contain complex natural interactions and provide critical habita ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate change is severely impacting biodiversity with long-term implications for conservation and management. While biologists, park managers, and conservation organizations have performed extensive research on climate impacts to biodiversity and have dramatically improved scientific understandings of the problem (Lovejoy and Hannah 2005), the influence of this research in the policy process has been limited. Mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions remains the focus of climate change policy, and advancement of adaptation measures, especially for biodiversity conservation, has been slow to take form. This is problematic because institutional coordination for biodiversity at all scales will be essential in a changing climate. What explains this limited response, despite a growing scientific consensus on climate impacts to biodiversity? A critical question that needs to be addressed is how scientific knowledge shapes policy, especially in an issue arena riddled with uncertainty regarding future impacts, as well as a lag of effects. Existing research offers varying explanations. Some theorists would point to a lack of consensus among the scientific community with regard to prescriptions and/or a lack of significant ties between the scientific community and policy deliberations (Haas 1992), to the power of specific interests over others in achieving strategic outcomes (Dahl 1961), the role of coalitions of actors who are delineated by shared beliefs (Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith 1993), or to the broader social structure. This proposed research will design an analytical framework to shed significant light on the above question by applying and assessing various hypotheses about science and policy that Haas and Sabatier/Hank Jenkins-Smith have undertaken. Based on comparative case study research, this research will evaluate whether these theories hold explanatory power, need to be reformulated, or whether other theoretical literature on the policy process should be integrated. Data will be collected through qualitative and quantitative methods, such as surveys, literature analysis, and interviews conducted in case studies. This research aims to improve theoretical understandings of the role of science in policy change, and how the problem of climate impacts to biodiversity can be translated onto the global institutional agenda. In conclusion, drawing upon insights gleaned from collected data, this research will consider prescriptions for contending with the problem at hand. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For most of the last decade research on the emergence of, and support for, non-state market driven governance has understandably focused on dynamics within a single sector. This paper seeks to contribute to the nascent work on cross-sectoral and broader global dynamics of NSMD systems by carefully theorizing about, and identifying differences in, the emergence of NSMD across sectors. Reviewing the cases of forestry, tourism, coffee and mining, we will focus specifically on four seemingly critical factors that influence NSMD dynamics: the market?s ?supply chain? structure (including degree of vertical integration and number of suppliers); the costs and benefits facing firms along the supply chain (e.g. forest owners undergo cost imposition in the case of forest certification but Fair Trade coffee certification provides growers with economic benefits); the nature of the good being regulated (e.g. whether it is ingested by humans) and the emergence and structure of the governing institutions (including the impact of institutional emulation versus institutional creation and the degree of institutional reflexivity). The paper has two primary audiences. First, the paper aims to facilitate future scholarship on the emergence of NSMD systems, from understanding better initial phases in which short term cost benefit calculations are critical, to their longer term institutionalization and legitimation dynamics. For non-governmental actors, the paper will shed light on their strategic choices regarding their championing of, and support for, NSMD systems. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the past decade and a half, interest in non-state market driven (NSMD) governance has grown so that it is now championed to cover virtually every major global problem including forest deterioration, fisheries depletion, mining destruction, tourism, industrial factory conditions in developing countries, e-waste, and climate change. Existing research has revealed a troubling puzzle: support has either been strongest among firms and within regions where regulations are relatively high or it has emerged in niche markets that, by definition, cannot generate global standards to which all production must adhere. What is evolutionary potential of NSMD to move beyond market separation to "ratchet up" global standards? Answering this question requires that the next generation of research focus on three potentially more powerful indirect effects that current support for NSMD systems may trigger: support from less regulated firms as market uptake occurs; learning and norm generation of NSMD systems that may influence more authoritative domestic and intergovernmental policy arenas; and the impacts that standards in one sector may influence regulations in others, such as occurs between forestry and agriculture. We draw on cases from developing and developed countries to illustrates and assess our argument. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will assess the theories and propositions developed in the first paper through cases studies in five sectors where NSMD systems at various stages of institutionalization exist: apparel, forestry, ornamental fish trade, commercial fisheries, coffee production, and protected areas management. We will assess what these cases say about the utility of the three phases, and the specific propositions within and across them. In addition, this paper will assess the range of futures to which phases I and II might lead ? which could include a reinvigorated state process, or some form of shared public private authority. As a result, we theorize about the utility of NSMD systems for creating arenas of policy learning, shared communities, and the diffusions of norms and ideas. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite increasing deterioration of the world?s biosphere, exemplified by dramatic existing and future potential impacts of human-induced climate change, most theoretical/explanatory work within global environmental politics shies away from reflecting on its own implications for developing new initiatives or policy prescriptions. Instead, most scholarship explicitly or implicitly accepts that broad scale transformation, such as changes in societal values and/or political parties are prerequisites for major shifts to sound environmental policy choices. This unreflective theorizing and linear thinking about policy change are both problematic for addressing a class of environmental problems, of which climate change is emblematic, where even those who support ameliorative action also explicitly contribute to the problem. Such problems must be treated differently than, say, explaining policy choices and options regarding the Iraq war or logging in national forests, where traditional interest-based approaches more readily apply.For problems such as climate change, where individual and community choices are complex and contradictory, a new epistemological orientation is needed that delivers greater attention to understanding what policy choices act best to ?constrain our future selves.? For instance, many voters will support an environmental protection policy, such as saving the Northern Spotted Owl, even though they know that doing so will increase the price of forest products sometime in the future. But when faced with an immediate decision to purchase more costly eco-certified timber versus cheaper non-certified lumber, the same individuals will choose the latter. This tendency, which behavioral economists have empirically documented and termed ?hyperbolic discounting,? provides the beginning to our conceptual efforts to develop policy-relevant theory. We move along this path by drawing on the work on ?forward reasoning? and path dependency in political science, economics and sociology that identifies the phenomenon in which what appear to be small and insignificant choices can produce profound impacts on future choices, human behavior and problem definitions. While most work on path dependency has been used by historical institutionalists to explain ?undesirable? policy outcomes (e.g., Jacob Hacker's analysis of why the United States lacks a universal health care system), we argue that these same theoretical insights, but applied by looking ?forward? rather than ?backward?, can be harnessed to understand what mechanisms might produce environmental benefits, such as reducing our greenhouse gas emissions. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]