The accountability of market-driven sustainability governance has long been controversial, reflecting the deeply political processes through which accountability contests shape governance transformations. Drawing on illustrative examples from internationally traded agro-commodity sectors in the critical case of Indonesia, this paper examines the contested processes of accountability that have accompanied a recent period of institutional change in sustainability governance. Amidst rising critiques of global certification, there has been a parallel expansion of governance approaches that prioritise capability development over regulatory enforcement and engage more intensively with governments in commodity-producing countries. As alternative governance models gain influence, tensions between competing governance stakeholders and agendas are mirrored and amplified through parallel accountability contests, in which distributional conflicts between global and local stakeholders are intensified by pressures to adopt contentious systems of compliance verification. While accountability gaps associated with contrasting institutional models produce strong pressures for partial institutional convergence, such convergence coexists with new forms of institutional fragmentation, as competition between global and national certification expands to encompass competition with localised capacity-building and jurisdictional approaches. Analysis highlights the often-neglected role of accountability politics in shaping institutional change, while raising pressing questions about the distributional implications of contemporary shifts away from global certification governance models.
Policy Implications
- As the legitimacy of global certification is increasingly called into question, global policymakers need to become conversant with a broader repertoire of governance models to promote sustainable agro-commodity production, including national sustainability certifications, capacity building sustainability partnerships and jurisdictional approaches.
- As contrasting governance models compete for acceptance, policymakers must make contentious choices between accountability models that prioritise responsiveness to global (downstream) versus local (producer country) stakeholders. Such choices are often particularly controversial in those schemes embracing stringent standard-setting and verification systems, which frequently become a flashpoint for conflicts between local and global stakeholders.
- While policymakers with narrowly defined constituencies can manage such pressures by clearly prioritising a single governance model, many global sustainability governance programs are answerable to multiple stakeholders with heterogeneous preferences. Policymakers in such programs can benefit from exploring hybrid models such as jurisdictional approaches, which seek explicitly to accommodate both global and local stakeholders, and regulatory and programmatic policy instruments.
- Policymakers designing hybrid governance models should consider not only the potential benefits of facilitating greater responsiveness to producer-country stakeholders, but also the risk that weakening established commitments to third-party compliance verification may enhance the discretion of powerful companies and governments to control interpretations of what constitutes ‘sustainable’ commodity production.
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