North-South Parity in Global Governance: The Affirmative Procedures of the Forest Stewardship Council

As a pioneer among global governance arrangements, the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) bases its decisionmaking on an explicit parity of Northern and Southern stakeholders. This article examines the organizational procedures of the Forest Stewardship Council as well as the practical implementation of those procedures. It concludes that, contrary to common assumptions, affirmative procedures alone are insufficient to guarantee that the representation of Southern interests is strengthened. Moreover, the analysis of the FSC reveals significant disparities in the quality of representation of stakeholders from different geographical regions. In the end, it is therefore not so much the affirmative procedures themselves that make the FSC an interesting model for other global decisionmaking processes, but rather their combination with a multilevel system of standard setting in which national and regional standards are used to specify the meaning of globally developed principles and criteria.