Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Thailand is currently using existing leading regional sustainability standards as a reference while it develops regional and national standards for its smallholder dominated and proliferating palm oil production. This paper asks if smallholder voice is equitably represented in current dominant sustainability standards for oil palm to critically evaluate Thailand’s benchmark for future mechanisms that develop sustainability standards. Key global sustainability roundtables for oil-palm production like the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) and existing national roundtables in Indonesia and Malaysia (ISPO and MSPO) currently dominate the process of arriving at sustainability standards as well as defining and enforcing currently predominant sustainability standards. Specifically, each roundtable has a targeted strategy and program for including smallholder voice, but the effectiveness of these is contested. Conceptualizing smallholder voice inclusion as a function of equality of standing- i.e.-power relations amongst stakeholders and the ‘justness’ of the formal inclusion mechanism in sustainability roundtables, this analysis will be grounded in Bryan Norton’s conceptualization of sustainability and related indicators as arising from an iterative process of shared consensus from stakeholder discourse. Using logic analysis, the paper will map out proposed and expected outcomes of smallholder inclusion mechanisms and strategies in key sustainability roundtables from critical evaluation of policy documents and stakeholder interviews in Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia. The analysis will then compare the proposed and expected outcomes against equity criteria developed from Norton’s shared consensus in the context of pluralistic values underpinning his pragmatism rooted theory on adaptive ecosystem management.

Given Thailand’s ambitious biodiesel mandate and resulting expansion of oil palm production on predominantly smallholder farms, Thailand is looking to develop local and regional (ASEAN) standards for sustainable palm oil production. Thailand’s efforts are an opportunity for change and focus in the current dynamic of smallholder inclusion in sustainability criteria for oil palm production, and in global networks for food and fuel security owing to crucial food and fuel uses of palm oil. Establishing such criteria is set to become increasingly urgent as the EU, a major export destination for palm oil, is increasingly concerned about sustainability of oil palm production in S.E. Asia. Drawing on the literature on governance for sustainability and including ethical criteria in policy decision making, this paper provides a set of criteria for evaluating the capacity of a stakeholder inclusion mechanism to be just and evaluate if current regional processes can equitably include smallholder voice in the context of regional power relations amongst stakeholders.

Using Norton’s ideas of weak vs. strong anthropocentrism, and his focus on spatial and temporal scales of environmental problems, this paper provides a case of how societies can use social processes to better define, understand and communicate problems and solutions regarding sustainability in the context of existing pluralistic environmental values. In doing so, it provides an assessment of normative considerations underlying the establishment of institutions that foster collaborative and iterative learning on multiple scales and contribute to the literature on developing more sustainable stable production networks at all scales from an enriched conception of fuel and food security.