The RSPO and RTRS are global private partnerships that have been set up by business and civil society actors from the North to curb de-forestation and to promote sustainable production of palm oil or soy in the South. This article is about the launch of new national standards in Indonesia and Brazil that are look-alikes of the global standards but have been set up and supported by government or business actors from the South. The two main questions of this article (...) are: do the new national standards in Indonesia and Brazil provide a fundamental challenge to the RSPO and RTRS, or do they demonstrate the successful diffusion and adoption of global private rules into national contexts? Do the new national standards help or undermine the RSPO and RTRS in their efforts to reduce de-forestation? Combining the theoretical notions of proto-institution and rival governance network, a comparative analysis is offered of the launch of the new national standards in Indonesia and Brazil. The conclusion is that, whilst the RSPO and RTRS have served as models for the general design and principles of the national standards, they really differ from the global standards in terms of normative contents: the national standards offer more room to palm oil plantations and large-scale soy producers to expand production at the expense of forests and other high conservation areas. Governments and producer associations in Indonesia and Brazil have not launched national standards to implement the RSPO or RTRS but to challenge these interventions from the North. (shrink)

In 2009 the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil established a conflict resolution mechanism to help rural communities address their grievances against palm oil companies that are RSPO members. This article presents the broadest ever comprehensive assessment of the use and effectiveness of the RSPO conflict resolution mechanism, providing both overviews and in-depth analysis. Our central question is: to what extent does the RSPO conflict resolution mechanism offer an accessible, fair and effective tool for communities in Indonesia to resolve conflicts with (...) companies? Our aim is not only to provide a ‘reality check’ of this mechanism but also to contribute to the wider debate on how communities can seek access to justice when engaged in intractable conflicts with palm oil companies. For data collection, we took three steps. First, we used our own database of 150 conflicts between communities and companies in Indonesia. We identified 64 conflicts that involved RSPO member companies, of which 17 prompted communities to convey their grievances to the RSPO’s conflict resolution mechanism. Second, we used the database of the RSPO, which handled 85 complaints against companies in Indonesia in the period 2009–2020. Third, we conducted fieldwork, in total, about 6 months of fieldwork and extensive interviews on three conflicts involving RSPO companies to identify mechanisms leading to both failed and successful instances of conflict resolution. For our assessment, we used three criteria to assess the conflict resolution mechanism of the RSPO: accessibility, procedural justice, and the outcomes of the process. We conclude that—on all counts—the conflict resolution mechanism is biased in favor of companies. The result of these biases is that the actual capacity of the RSPO’s mechanism to provide a meaningful remedy for rural communities’ grievances remains very limited. This unequal access to justice sustains conflicts between companies and communities over land. (shrink)

Whereas hundreds of social movements and NGOs all over the world have embraced the concept of food sovereignty, not many public authorities at the national and international level have adopted the food sovereignty paradigm as a normative basis for alternative agriculture and food policy. A common explanation of the limited role of food sovereignty in food and agriculture policy is that existing power structures are biased towards maintaining the corporatist food regime and neo-liberal thinking about food security. This article sets (...) out to provide an alternative explanation for this limited role by critically reflecting on the debate about food sovereignty itself. The main argument is that this debate is characterized by deadlock. Two mechanisms underlying the deadlock are analyzed: confusion about the concept of sovereignty and the failure of the epistemic community to debate how to reconcile conflicting values, discourses, and institutions regarding food. To overcome this deadlock and organize meaningful debate with public authorities, it is proposed that the food sovereignty movement uses insights from legal pluralism and debates on governance and adopts the ending of “food violence” as a new objective and common frame. (shrink)