LASA/EANLAS: Rethinking Trans-Pacific Ties: Asia and Latin America

Scaling-up sustainable commodity governance through jurisdictional initiatives: political pathways to 'sector transformation'?

• In Event: Sustainability transitions in the primary sectors in Latin America and Asia

Abstract

Voluntary systems of sustainable commodity governance have come under intensified criticism in recent years for failing to catalyze transformative change beyond directly regulated supply chains. In response, there has been a surge of efforts to ‘scale-up’ sustainability impacts through sector- or jurisdiction-wide governance interventions. While it is too early to empirically assess impacts on sustainability outcomes, this paper presents a preliminary analysis of such approaches with reference to conjectured pathways of market, institutional and policy transformation. Analysis focuses on three interacting transformation pathways, involving interventions that respectively target: strategic resource mobilization; collaborative multi-stakeholder dialogue; and cross-scalar coalition-building. The paper first theorizes such pathways by weaving together insights from separate currents of scholarship on global sustainability governance, multi-stakeholder landscape governance, and the anticipatory design of transformative policy interventions. It then scrutinizes preliminary evidence regarding the emergence of conjectured transformation pathways based on a comparative study of two jurisdictional governance experiments being promoted in the Indonesian Provinces of Aceh and South Sumatra. Trajectories of change are shown to depend crucially on how iterative interactions between change pathways reshape configurations of political and economic interests and power, and formal and informal processes of coalition-building amongst participants in multi-scalar sustainability governance processes.

Author

• Kate Macdonald, University of Melbourne