Sustainable palm oil as a public responsibility? On the governance capacity of Indonesian Standard for Sustainable Palm Oil (ISPO)

By Nia Kurniawati Hidayat, A. Offermans, Pieter Glasbergen. 2018

148 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper is motivated by the observation that Southern governments start to take responsibility for a more sustainable production of agricultural commodities as a response to earlier private initiatives by businesses and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Indonesia is one of the leading countries in this respect, with new public sustainability regulations on coffee, cocoa and palm oil. Based on the concept of governance capacity, the paper develops an evaluation tool to answer the question whether the new public regulation on sustainable palm oil (ISPO) may become a viable alternative to private regulation. ISPO embraces a tremendous governance challenge as thousands of companies and millions of smallholder farmers are expected to participate. It is concluded that, although ISPO has initiated a process of change, it has not yet developed its full potential. The main reason regards ISPO’s rather loose problem definition, weak authority of the implementing organization, and the fact that the reliability of ISPO is still too low to convince (parts) of the global market. ISPO may therefore face difficulties in meeting its own targets and solving palm-oil related problems, such as deforestation, biodiversity loss, greenhouse gas emissions, and social conflicts between big plantations and local communities. The main governance challenge regards combining a more authoritative implementation mechanism with a convincing balance between sustainability objectives and economic interests of the sector.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Ecology, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/cc7e547528bb39088baeaf2cfb65f71f22f23b46

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Biomedical Engineering

1. Kibrom T. Sibhatu
2. M. Qaim
3. I. Grass
4. Hermanto Siregar
5. G. Schoneveld

In Ecology

1. Kibrom T. Sibhatu
2. I. Grass
3. M. Qaim
4. Hermanto Siregar
5. B. Okarda
6. P. Pacheco
7. H. Komarudin

In Strategy and Management

1. Kibrom T. Sibhatu
2. B. Okarda
3. P. Pacheco
4. M. Qaim
5. H. Komarudin

Citations in the corpus

• Environmental, Economic, and Social Consequences of the Oil Palm Boom (2020, background): “From a social perspective, local rural communities are often claimed to suffer from the oil palm expansion driven by large companies due to conflicts over land and worker rights (Hidayat et al. 2018, Overbeek et al. 2012, Pye 2019).”
• Certification, good agricultural practice and smallholder heterogeneity: Differentiated pathways for resolving compliance gaps in the Indonesian oil palm sector (2019, background): “The limited authority of the ISPO Commission may further empower district governments to thwart effective ISPO implementation (Hidayat et al., 2018).”