در بازار اما نه از بازار: نمایشگاه قهوه و صدور گواهینامه شورای نظارت جنگل به عنوان تغییرات مبتنی بر اجتماعی بازار

This paper discusses two well-known market-based social change initiatives, Fair Trade coffee and Forest Stewardship Council certification, which harness market forces to pursue social and environmental objectives. A serious challenge for both is to operate in the conventional market without undermining their original objectives. A global commodity chain analysis approach is combined with insights from economic sociology embeddedness theory to explore the social, cultural and organizational factors shaping the initiatives’ governance structures. Both initiatives are seen to move along opposite organizational trajectories, but face similar pressures from conventional market logics, practices and dominant actors. A preliminary framework is proposed for comparative assessment, focusing on distribution of benefits, how conventional market institutions may be questioned, and how internal governance manages diverse stakeholder interests and influence.

Certification and labeling initiatives worldwide gain growing attention as promising market-based instruments which harness globalization’s own mechanisms to address the very social injustice and environmental degradation globalization fosters. Initiatives such as Fair Trade and Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certification are being hailed as innovative “win–win” responses to seemingly intractable economic and environmental struggles (WWF, 2001b). Certification and labeling today are particularly interesting because, to paraphrase Bass, Markopoulos, and Grah, they operate at the boundary between globalization processes which put market interests first, and localization commitments which prioritize people and development. They lie, therefore, “at the heart of many of today’s greatest economic, social, environmental and political challenges, which involve getting the tradeoffs right for sustainable development” (Bass, Markopoulos, & Grah, 2001, p. xi).

The Fair Trade coffee and FSC initiatives struggle with contradictions posed by the fact that if they are to make meaningful progress toward their goals, they can neither isolate themselves from mainstream markets nor abandon their alternative visions of the market. The organization of Fair Trade coffee’s commodity chain and the nature of its product have facilitated the shortening of the chain, the development of a more diversified powerbase and the promotion of more direct, personalized ties between Northern consumers and Southern producers. Fair Trade moves toward mainstreaming in order to generate benefits for more impoverished coffee farm families. Yet it must work with powerful corporate actors the Fair Trade movement was established to critique.