Global Governance in Forestry: A Cross-National Analysis

Article originally published by International Journal of Sustainable Development & World Ecology

Introduction

Many researchers in social sciences and international law have questioned the effectiveness of global governance at reducing climate change (Finkelstein 1995; Young 1997; Canan and Reichman 2002; Virtanen and Palmujoki 2002; Karns and Karen 2004; Kirton and Trebilcock 2017). Given the persistent issue of global climate change, we need to continue to find ways to adapt to and mitigate the damage (Biermann 2006).

One of the largest detriments to climate change adaptation and mitigation is forest loss (Rudel 2017). Therefore, the issue of the effectiveness of global forestry governance is particularly pressing. However, there are no multilateral treaties that fully encompass protections for all forests. Instead, there are multilateral treaties that focus on the environment or climate change as a whole that have some provisions for forestry issues (Kirton and Trebilcock 2017). The one exception is tropical forestry treaties, which deals exclusively with tropical forest issues. However, because the world’s forests are not all tropical it cannot fully address forestry protection in general. Even with a piecemeal approach, these forestry provisions in multilateral environmental treaties, when used in combination with the tropical forestry treaties, are not exhaustive, which may lead to gaps in forestry protection (Ruis 2001).

On the one hand, researchers argue that global governance treaties in forestry are fragmented and ineffective (Ruis 2001; Biermann 2002, 2017; Biermann et al. 2009). According to Elliott (2017), many multilateral treaties do not have sanctions for non-compliance, lack achievable targets, and have inadequate assessment tools. On the other hand, global forestry governance may be key to reducing forest loss related to climate change issues. Some argue that existing global forestry governance treaties can be useful when combined with bilateral agreements and national laws to create sustainable development in forestry (Kirton and Trebilcock 2017). Though it is important that these agreements focus on monitoring, enforcement, and capacity building among others to be successful (Haas 2004). At the very least, environmental conferences that often lead to multilateral environmental agreements can help with the spread of norms, awareness, and practices that may reduce forest loss (Haas 2002). While many

researchers document failures in global environmental governance (Park et al. 2008), there are several activities and obligations that exist in multilateral environmental treaties that should reduce forest loss. However, researchers still insist that harmonizing existing global forestry treaties or using them when applicable can leave forests at risk (Ruis 2001). Using ordinary least squares (OLS) regression for a sample of 155 nations, I test the association between the number of ratifications of environmental treaties that include obligations to reduce forest loss for each nation and forest loss from 2001 to 2014. OLS is a common method used in the social sciences to test how independent variables are associated with dependent variables when data are only available at one time point, which is the case for the dependent variable data, forest loss. For the main independent variable of interest, I code original data from ECOLEX (law database) for 8 multilateral environmental treaties . . .