Throughout the last decades, environmental law has increasingly focussed on private governance mechanisms such as private sustainability standardisation and certification systems. The expectation was that rules and standards set up by practice itself and driven by market forces would provide for better accepted and thus more effective environmental protection, and in particular for a framework for a (more) sustainable transnational economy.
The chapter critically analyses the capacity of the European sustainability certification of bio-fuels and the ‘Forest Stewardship Council’ to ensure sustainable production patterns and a sustainable (transnational) production chain. Hereby, the role of law, legal challenges and constraints, in particular in the relevant (public or private) framework systems as a safeguard for adequate substantive as well as procedural standards are explored.
The chapter concludes that shortcomings and challenges of private environmental governance can only partly be remedied through amendments to concrete private systems and an ‘ideal’ public and private law framework; rather they are inherent in the (market) logics of these systems. Thus, they cannot replace but only complement encompassing public law resource management and ecosystem protection.