Benjamin Cashore

National University of Singapore | NUS · Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy

For over two decades, scientists have documented the alarming decline of global Peatland ecosystems, regarded as the planet’s most crucial carbon sinks. The deterioration of these unique wetlands alongside their policy attention presents a puzzle for policy scientists and for students of anticipatory policy design. Two contrasting explanations have...

Deforestation is a complex environmental problem that has eluded a series of public policies and private sector interventions. The need to develop effective solutions to this problem is urgent because unabated deforestation exacerbates climate change, biodiversity loss, human rights violations, displacement of Indigenous communities, and breakouts...

While policy design scholars have made significant conceptual and empirical advances in identifying and evaluating procedural tools, there has been a little focus on understanding how they interact with the more traditional “substantive” elements of a policy mix and their critical functions in policy mix designs. As a result, there is uncertainty a...

The EU's Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade Action Plan (FLEGT) adopted in 2003 includes bilateral trade agreements known as Voluntary Partnership Agreements (VPAs) signed between the EU and timber-supplying countries. The EU has invested more than 1.5 billion euros in VPAs; however, only one of the seven concerned countries has managed t...

To tackle the manifold crises of our times, most notably the environmental crises we face, ambitious policy change is urgently needed to achieve the necessary radical transformation of our industrialised societies. Yet, while there is increasing demand for public policy scholarship to provide guidance on how policy should be designed to achieve suc...

The formalization of citizen participation in public policy processes is now widespread. Despite its popularity, just how to design these initiatives to simultaneously create legitimate arenas for deliberation on the one hand, and substantive problem solving on the other hand, remains hotly contested. This Special Issue on Participatory Policy Desi...

Contrary to calls for increased relevance, the discipline of political science has had lasting impacts in shaping environmental policy analysis. The ideas and approach advocated by former APSA president Elinor Ostrom, most comprehensively articulated in Governing the Commons , have diffused to shape or reinforce generations of sustainability schola...

In contrast to its Assessment Reports, less is known about the social science processes through which the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) produces methodologies for greenhouse gas emissions reporting. This limited attention is problematic, as these greenhouse gas inventories are critical components for identifying, justifying, and...

COVID-19 has caused 100s of millions of infections and millions of deaths worldwide, overwhelming health and economic capacities in many countries and at multiple scales. The immediacy and magnitude of this crisis has resulted in government officials, practitioners and applied scholars turning to reflexive learning exercises to generate insights fo...

Deforestation and forest degradation remain huge global environmental challenges. Over the last decades, various forest governance initiatives and institutions have evolved in global response to interlinked topics such as climate change mitigation, biodiversity conservation, indigenous rights, and trade impacts – accompanied by various levels of ac...

In this paper, the Cashore first reviews his individual and collaborative research on public policy, private governance, and global affairs over the last decade to reflect on the underlying conditions and techniques for engaging in “fit for purpose” policy analysis. Second, based on this, he develops principles and corresponding strategies for poli...

This is the introduction to a special issue on ‘Sustainable Commodity Governance and the Global South.’ A broad range of transnational governance initiatives have emerged to respond to social and environmental challenges caused by commodity production. These initiatives – like voluntary sustainability standards and certifications – tend to target c...

Private organizations play a growing role in governing global issues alongside traditional public actors such as states, international organizations, and subnational governments. What do we know about how private authority and public policy interact? What are the implications of answering this question for understanding support for, and effects of,...

Contrary to calls for increased relevance, the discipline of political science has had lasting impacts in shaping environmental policy analysis. The ideas and approach advocated by former APSA president Eleanor Ostrom, most comprehensively articulated in Governing the Commons, have diffused to shape, or reinforce, generations of sustainability scho...

What problems can private regulatory governance solve, and what role should public policy play? Despite access to the same empirical evidence, the current scholarship on private governance offers widely divergent answers to these questions. Through a critical review, this paper details five ontologically distinct academic logics – calculated strate...

In the last 25 years, a range of scholars have endeavored to understand the creation of a myriad of transnational finance and market driven (FMD) governance interventions aimed at countries in the Global South who are asserted to suffer from "weak state" capacity or contain areas of "limited statehood". This class of policy tools remains the domina...

ABSTRACT: Thirteen years ago we coined the term “super wicked” to define a class of particularly pernicious policy problems that seemed to defy effective solutions. While inspired by Rittel and Weber’s class of “wicked problems,” we derived four additional features of the climate change crisis: time is running out; no central authority; those causi...

Policy feedback research faces a potential pivot point owing to recent theoretical and substantive advances. Concerted attention now spans new scientific communities, such as climate focused socio-technical transitions literature, as well as reinvigorated attention to environmental politics or policy. Rather than being interested in abstractly expl...

This note reviews the origins and evolution of Cashore and Howlett’s policy classification framework (2007: 536) published in the American Journal of Political Science. An earlier version of the 2007 AJPS table (Cashore and Howlett 2007: 536) appeared in Cashore and Howlett (2003), Cashore and Howlett (2004: 10) and Cashore and Howlett (2006: 150)....

Disagreements on how to manage the COVID-19 outbreak can be traced back to four distinct ways of thinking about critical problems that have informed policy making for decades. Benjamin Cashore and Steven Bernstein argue that policy makers need to be more self-conscious and transparent about which problem conceptions guide their choices when million...

I apply Clapp and Dauvergne’s (2005) “four environmental world views” framework to argue that the inspiration in 1960s and 1970s for championing of professional graduate environment management training can be traced back to “bio-environmentalist” ethical obligations, which focuses attention on ways to reverse human economic activity in general, and...

Due to inconsistent concepts of regulatory stringency, scholars offer conflicting accounts about whether competing private governance initiatives “race to the bottom,” “ratchet up,” “converge,” or “diverge.” To remedy this, we offer a framework for more systematic comparisons across programs and over time. We distinguish three often-conflated measu...

From the climate crisis that threatens unparalleled catastrophic ecological impacts, to ongoing rapid extinctions of flora and fauna around the word, to ocean degradation, the overwhelming amount of scientific evidence tells us that humans are not doing enough, at almost any scale, to significantly dent these ecological crises. At the same time, th...

The importance of greenhouse gas inventories cannot be overstated: the process of producing inventories informs strategies that governments will use to meet emissions reduction targets. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) leads an effort to develop and refine internationally agreed upon methodologies for calculating and reporting g...

The Paris Agreement emphasizes regional “bottom-up” policy solutions to address climate change. We argue that efforts to develop these regional solutions require treating ecological and policy processes as interacting together. Through this approach, policy decisions affect ecological processes, and subsequent ecological changes create feedbacks in...

A growing scholarship on multistakeholder learning dialogues suggests the importance of closely managing learning processes to help stakeholders anticipate which policies are likely to be effective. Much less work has focused on how to manage effective transnational multistakeholder learning dialogues, many of which aim to help address critical glo...

The ‘circular bioeconomy’ may be a promising pathway to achieve multiple Sustainable Development Goals. The participation of private firm is critical for successful implementation of circular bioeconomy initiatives, which is often sought through a competitiveness logic. Many propose the circular bioeconomy will enhance firm competitiveness through...

In countries marked by the growing uptake of non-state market driven (NSMD) governance for agricultural commodities (i.e., eco-labels and certification systems), forested areas are steadily decreasing while crop lands are growing. This deforestation continues despite NSMD rules aimed at prohibiting the conversion of forested land to agriculture. In...

This article begins by situating forest certification within a broader set of forest governance institutions and innovations. It then examines how certification has been practiced to date, before investigating whether, when, and how it has achieved its intended impacts. Doing so reveals a number of gaps in existing knowledge that stem from narrow c...

Numerous inter-governmental conservation initiatives have failed to halt the loss and degradation of forests. This paper explores the role of policy processes in developing and delivering desired future forest outcomes that meet both global environmental goals and the needs of local forest users. There is a clear disconnect between global commitmen...

[Discussion paper presented to the Economics & Environmental Policy Research Network] Climate policy stability is often considered to be instrumental in redirecting significant financial flows toward climate action by minimizing risk and uncertainty for investors. The logic is that uncertain climate policies create too many risks for private sector...

In the last decade illegal logging has triggered the attention of policy makers and scholars of international forest governance. The issue is multifaceted, involving aspects of social and environmental sustainability, development, trade, access to markets and competitiveness. A vivid academic debate has resulted, exploring the nexus between markets...

This paper reports and reflects on the pilot application of an 11-step policy learning protocol that was developed by Cashore and Lupberger (2015) based on several years of Cashore's multi-author collaborations. The protocol was applied for the first time in Peru in 2015 and 2016 by the IUFRO Working Party on Forest Policy Learning Architectures (h...

For over a generation, global environmental governance efforts to address deforestation and degradation have turned increasingly to market-based policy mechanisms. Beginning with boycott campaigns in the 1980s, followed by the International Tropical Timber Agreement in the late 1980s, followed by forest certification as non-state market driven gove...

The Protocol focuses on stakeholders operating at multiple levels of governance to generate a better understanding of the causal processes through which global governance initiatives might help lead to influential and durable results “on the ground” .

Transnational private governance initiatives that address problems of social and environmental concern now pervade many sectors. In tackling distinct substantive problems, these programs have, however, prioritized different problem-oriented logics in their institutionalized rules and procedures. One is a “logic of control” that focuses on ameliorat...

How might forest institutions be designed to encourage long-term and collective natural resource management, while also addressing the needs of local people? This chapter sheds light on this question by reviewing insights of ‘good forest governance’ scholarship, with a focus on ongoing developments in Southeast Asia. It is argued that building endu...

The purpose of this paper is to shed light on the emergence and institutionalization of a unique form of transnational business governance (TBG): legality verification (LV) systems, which track products along global supply chains. Instead of imposing wide ranging global standards commonly applied through “gold standard” certification systems, LV he...

Preface Introduction: Pluralistic Actor Configurations and International Environmental Governance: Best and Worst Practices for Improving Environmental Governance Peter M. Haas, Steinar Andresen and Norichika Kanie 1. Agenda Setting at Sea and in the Air Stacy D. VanDeveer 2. Lessons Learned in Multilateral Environmental Negotiations Pamela S. Chas...

Policy-making involves both a technical and political process of articulating and matching actors’ goals and means. Policies are thus actions which contain goal(s) and the means to achieve them, however well or poorly identified, justified, articulated and formulated. Probably the best-known, simple and short definition of public policy has been of...

This review analyzes the methods being used and developed in global environmental governance (GEG), an applied field that employs insights and tools from a variety of disciplines both to understand pressing environmental problems and to determine how to address them collectively. We find that methods are often underspecified in GEG research. We und...

Illegal logging has negatively impacted environmental, economic, and social conditions in forests around the world. Various policies have been stymied owing to the complex web of timber harvesting, processing, manufacturing, and consumption cutting across developed and developing countries. We examine the potential impacts of new initiatives that d...

In the past two decades, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have targeted international customers of Canadian staples, intent on cajoling and coercing them to favour exporting firms certified as practising responsible fisheries and forestry management. The link between these campaigns and the adoption of these non-state market driven (NSMD) mech...

We review certification programs targeting sustainable bioenergy production and identify common features and differences with sustainable forest management (SFM) certification programs. SFM programs are compatible with bioenergy certification programs except for greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, air quality, and food security requirements. Program co...

In the past two decades, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have targeted international customers of Canadian staples, intent on cajoling and coercing them to favour exporting firms certified as practising responsible fisheries and forestry management. The link between these campaigns and the adoption of these non-state market driven (NSMD) mech...

Fundamental trade-offs exist between different land uses for carbon, livelihoods, economic development, biodiversity, agriculture and energy (especially biofuels). This article analyses the scientific debates on REDD+ trade-offs, co-benefits and safeguards, and shows how the development and expanded scope of REDD+ mechanisms have shaped these debat...

Most policy-relevant work on climate change in the social sciences either analyzes costs and benefits of particular policy options against important but often narrow sets of objectives or attempts to explain past successes or failures. We argue that an “applied forward reasoning” approach is better suited for social scientists seeking to address cl...

Standard works on international environmental governance assume single-issue regimes with binding obligations designed to govern the behaviour of states. Yet many of the most pressing global environmental problems, including climate change, forest degradation and biodiversity loss, are governed by an array of mechanisms—legal, non-legal, government...

The United Nations conference in Rio de Janeiro in June is an important opportunity to improve the institutional framework for sustainable development.

The current institutional framework for sustainable development is by far not strong enough to bring about the swift transformative progress that is needed. This article contends that incrementalism—the main approach since the 1972 Stockholm Conference—will not suffice to bring about societal change at the level and speed needed to mitigate and ada...

Science assessments indicate that human activities are moving several of Earth's sub-systems outside the range of natural variability typical for the previous 500,000 years (1, 2). Human societies must now change course and steer away from critical tipping points in the Earth system that might lead to rapid and irreversible change (3). This require...

We an overview of the role of tropical forests in the international efforts to negotiate a new global climate treaty. Under the existing treaty, the Kyoto Protocol and its “flexible mechanisms” – particularly the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) – have succeeded in building a billion dollar market for emission reduction projects in developing coun...

Scholars have started to grapple with what might be termed “new”, or second-wave, global environmental governance. It is problem-focused, requiring careful attention to theory. The study of global environmental governance has increasingly identified complexity, scale, and linkages as core characteristics, yet few scholars directly tackle these chal...

For those championing an international institutional solution to climate change, the forest-climate linkage through reduced emissions from deforestation and forest degradation and forest enhancement (REDD+) may be one of the most promising strategic linkages to date. Following a series of forest-focused interventions that did not live up to their p...

The anticipated benefits and co-benefits of REDD+ generated considerable enthusiasm and momentum prior to the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference, and the lack of agreement of a global mechanism for REDD+ at that Conference generated corresponding disappointment. However, experience from earlier forest-related initiatives, and from recent research...

Those supplying private regulation in the global economy face two fundamental challenges if they are to ameliorate the problems for which they create these systems: targets must conform to, while demanders must have proof of, regulatory compliance. This paper explores an important area absent from assessments as to whether, when, and how, private r...

Market globalization and the globalization of environmental concerns have spurred demand for greater international accountability for forest stewardship. In response, a range of multi-lateral governmental and non-governmental initiatives have emerged to redefine the rules of global trade, and demand verification of the legality and/or sustainabilit...

The ultimate goal of many international and transnational attempts to address global problems is to influence domestic policymaking processes rather than simply to constrain or modify the external behaviour of states. This chapter reviews existing scholarship on the impacts that global forest governance arrangements have had on domestic policymakin...

What types of institutional configurations hold the most promise in fostering efforts for long-term amelioration of enduring environmental, social, and economic challenges facing the world’s forests? This chapter presents, and applies an analytical framework with which to review research findings and analyses that shed light on what appear to be th...

THE WAYS IN WHICH FORESTS ARE PERCEIVED AND USED HAVE CHANGED DRAMATICALLY OVER RECENT YEARS. FORESTS ARE NO LONGER SEEN SIMPLY AS A SOURCE OF TIMBER, BUT AS COMPLEX ECOSYSTEMS WHICH SUSTAIN LIVELIHOODS AND PROVIDE A RANGE OF PRODUCTS AND ENVIRONMENTAL SERVICES. IT IS NOW WIDELY RECOGNISED THAT FORESTS CAN CONTRIBUTE TO RURAL DEVELOPMENT AND POVERT...

This Policy Brief summarizes the findings of a comprehensive assessment of scientific information about international forest governance carried out by an Expert Panel of over 30 of the world's leading scientists working in the areas of environmental governance and international forest law. It aims to provide policy and decision makers with essentia...

To date much of the global-scale comparative research on environmental forest policy has focused on ‘macro-level’ policy goals and objectives. Although it is important for identifying broad trends, such research overlooks the specific policy settings that serve to ‘set the bar’ for on-the-ground environmental performance. This article helps to fill...

Introduction The failure of states and intergovernmental processes to address some of the most important environmental problems facing the planet – explanations of which can often be traced back to “tragedy of the commons” or “collective action” dilemmas (see Delmas and Young in their Introduction to this volume) – has resulted in the proliferation...

The new orthodoxy in studies of policy dynamics is that policy change occurs through a homeostatic process. “Perturbations” occurring outside of an institutionalized policy subsystem, often characterized as some type of societal or political upheaval or learning, are critical for explaining the development of profound and durable policy changes whi...

This article was submitted without an abstract, please refer to the full-text PDF file.

In the past decade and a half, interest in non-state market driven (NSMD) governance has grown so that it is now championed to cover virtually every major global problem including forest deterioration, fisheries depletion, mining destruction, tourism, industrial factory conditions in developing countries, e-waste, and climate change. Existing resea...

The last half decade has witnessed a remarkable resurgence of attention among practitioners and scholars to understanding the ability of corporate social responsibility (CSR) to address environmental and social problems. Although significant advances have been made, assessing the forms, types, and impacts on intended objectives is impeded by the co...

For two generations, policy makers, environmental groups, industry associations and other stakeholders have given global forest deterioration concerted and sustained attention. Widespread disappointment over the failure to achieve a binding global forest convention at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit has been followed by frustration over the relatively li...