| In the 1980s, growing global concern over the health of tropical forest ecosystems prompted several international initiatives to be launched for their protection. In spite of the efforts of the Food and Agricultural Organization, the International Tropical Timber Organization, the Tropical Forestry Action Plan, and the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, the destruction of tropical rainforests continues. This study investigates why the expressed concern of the international community has not translated into a practical and effective strategy that achieves a balance between tropical rainforest utilization and conservation.;An innovative approach is adopted that deploys the regime concept within a neo-Gramscian theoretical framework informed by the work of Robert Cox. The critical regime perspective is applied to the case of the International Tropical Timber Agreement, 1983, negotiated under the auspices of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development's Integrated Programme for Commodities. The investigation reveals the struggles that have occurred among four global actors--producing-country governments, consuming-country governments, the tropical timber industry, and environmentalists--over the rights, rules, decision-making procedures and compliance mechanisms of the Tropical Timber Trade Regime (TTR). The thesis argued is that the lack of progress in balancing tropical forest utilization and conservation results from the formation of the tacit alliance between producing- and consuming-country governments and the tropical timber industry to block the negotiation of the norms, procedures and compliance mechanisms required to instantiate a genuinely sustainable TTTR.;The case of the ITTA, 1983 supports the dissertation's thesis. In the debates and negotiations that took place over guidelines for sustainable forest management, certification and labelling, and the ITTO Mission to Sarawak, the expressed concerns of the ENGO coalition were consistently overruled by other global actors intent on preserving industry profits, government revenues, and economic growth and development. The dissertation concludes that further, intensive, theoretical and practical political action by the environmental movement is required to break this government-industry alliance. Environmentalists must continue to deconstruct and reconstruct the three key sets of ideas that make the alliance possible--"sustainable forest management", modern economic theory, and unqualified state sovereignty. |
