Forest Stewardship Council’s contributions to sustainable development: conjugation of interests by governance mechanisms

Abstract

In the context marked by transnationality, new modes of environmental standardization appear, not marked by state power with its traditional legal instruments of command and control. Private instruments stand out, such as the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), which aim to tackle complex issues, such as the environmental ones, for which conventional instruments alone have not been effective in many cases. The purpose of this article is to demonstrate that the way the FSC is structured has positive impacts for sustainable development. Based on broad governance, with equal participation of representatives from the three pillars: social, environmental and economic, it manages to combine the interests of several stakeholders, contributing to global environmental governance, as a soft law instrument. In addition, its actions are guided by ten broad principles and standards that also align with the Agenda 2030 SDGs. The research was exploratory, bibliographic and documentary, so that the data collected were analyzed using the dialectic and deductive method. It is concluded that, in the search for sustainable development, as one of the first collective emergencies, the FSC has played an important role in inducing changes in the environmental paradigm of forest management and the chain of custody of wood. Lessons learned at the FSC case study can be taken as inspiration to other initiatives on complex sustainability issues.