Abstract
Reviewed by: Andrew Herod, University of Georgia, USA
Neoliberalism has seen the retreat of the state in many areas – both geographical and institutional – and a rise in arguments that ‘the market’ will drive bad corporate actors from the scene. In this context, contentions that private regulation of economic activities is a better way to achieve desired outcomes than is government regulation have multiplied. Given enough consumer pressure, it is suggested, firms will police themselves and those with whom they do business out of fear that failing to do so will damage their corporate brands. Drawing upon research conducted in China and Indonesia into various corporate certification schemes aimed at forest products and labor rights, this book argues that such claims are largely fallacious.
The book itself is divided into seven chapters. The first (‘Transnational standards and empty spaces’) sets out the context for what will follow. Specifically, the author details how the growth of global production networks (GPNs) in various trades and industries has provided an architecture through which assorted private rules and regulations encouraging corporate social responsibility might flow in efforts to improve workers’ conditions and environmental protections as many governments have increasingly retreated from the regulatory realm. Through such GPNs, so the argument goes, firms with household names that typically sit atop particular GPNs – Nike, Apple, Nestlé, and so forth – can pressure their subcontractors to adopt particular standards as a way by which to pull them up to various planetary minima. The use of private certification schemes, then, has the effect of extricating workers and ecosystems from their historico-geographic contexts and elevating them to a new universal ‘placeless’ plateau. This is a not insignificant development, given that about one-fifth of the world’s workers toil within various GPNs. Following from this, in ‘A substantive theory of transnational governance’ the author critiques notions that Global South countries in which such private rules are implemented are somehow empty spaces waiting to be filled by different global norms. Indeed, he asserts, not only are such spaces not empty, but the social actors and customs which inhabit them can have crucial impacts upon how efforts to implement top-down codes of conduct play out. Having laid out this argument, the rest of the book explores how the particular configuration of laws, social actors, customs, and political circumstances have meant that it has been easier for firms to get credibly certified as complying with various corporate codes in authoritarian China than it has been in democratic Indonesia.
Four case studies constitute the bulk of the book’s remainder. The first of these ponders the question of why Indonesia’s forests have remained largely beyond the purview of certification schemes, throwing doubt upon GPNs’ abilities to pull local timber producers up to global standards. This failure, the author suggests, is largely the result of domestic political economic factors, such as the fact that many timber companies are more interested in supplying their over-built plywood mills than they are in exporting wood for purchase by Global North consumers, or because they use the profits from wood harvesting as a quick entrée into other activities such as finance, agriculture, and mining. In such circumstances, worrying what Global North consumers and firms think of them is not a top priority. The next chapter looks at forest product certification in China, where certification is highly dependent upon the state. Significantly, the author found that certification was easier there because the political economic context within which it was occurring – namely a one-party state – meant that some of the issues plaguing certification in Indonesia (such as difficulties in determining who owned land) could be avoided. Chapters 5 and 6 then explore the matter of labor standards certification in China and Indonesia, respectively, noting that adherence to the international SA8000 standard has been easier to obtain in China than in Indonesia. Part of the reason for this is that whereas the adoption of Western standards was once seen by the Chinese government as a form of interference by the outside world, as labor unrest has grown in recent years it has increasingly come to be seen as a way of furthering a more harmonious society, which is a central concern of the state. In the case of Indonesia, however, although workers are freer to put pressure upon their employers to adopt improved standards than are those in China, who must generally rely upon the state-controlled All-China Federation of Trade Unions, in practice the locus of Indonesian unions’ power tends to be outside the workplace rather than within it, thereby making it more difficult to bring about changes in the factories. In addition, Indonesian manufacturers are not as favored internationally as subcontractors as are Chinese ones, which means that their place in the global supply chain is more fragile and so the brand-name purchasers of their products have less sway over them. Furthermore, Indonesian firms tend to work more with US firms, which more typically subscribe to a set of certification standards that critics see as weaker than are the SA8000 ones and which Indonesian firms, perhaps naturally enough, prefer to follow because they are less onerous.
The final chapter brings things together, but also serves as a springboard for considering how corporate codes of conduct might be more effectively implemented. In particular, the author summarizes his findings by arguing that efforts to implement transnational private codes of conduct throughout various GPNs rarely succeed in bringing about enduring and transformative change because they are a one-size-fits-all model, which is typically ill-suited to addressing the varied social and political contexts in the countries in which they are imposed. Rather, the author avers, a better strategy would be to have international actors encourage governments to enforce the labor and environmental laws they already often have on the books (and/or to pass such, if they do not) as part of a ‘recentering of the state’ and to develop what he calls systems of ‘place conscious’ transnational governance. Although there are some challenges associated with each of these two approaches, both provide real opportunities for improving conditions in ways that private codes of conduct do not. Hence, in the case of the first, governments are less likely to see pressures to crack down on, say, illegal timbering as forms of eco-imperialism and impingements upon their sovereignty, but instead as extensions of that sovereignty, especially if doing so can bring in extra tax revenue. In the case of the second, more place-conscious interventions can allow for the development of strategies that take into much greater account the idiosyncrasies of the societies within which they are to be implemented.
In sum, this is a very interesting book. It is well written and a joy to read, despite some proof-reading issues here and there – there are a few instances of missing words and/or repeated text and the odd typo (on page 27 Indonesia is said to have suffered from an ‘El Niño-driven draught’ rather than ‘drought’). The book challenges us to think about the tensions between universalist strategies like externally imposed transnational codes and the local specificities of the countries within which such codes are to be implemented, as well as how the state, rather than being abandoned as per neoliberals in favor of market solutions to problems, is in fact central to improving environmental and labor protections. The book will be of use to researchers but is accessible to the general reader, whether researcher, student, or member of the public.