Combining world-system and world polity approaches to analyze international environmental governance: a case study of forest governance in Chile

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper analyzes an important facet in international environmental governance: the development and implementation of Chile’s national forestry strategy. As a national program designed to reduce emissions from deforestation and forest degradation, and to enhance the role of conservation, sustainable management of forests, and forest carbon stocks (i.e., a national REDD+ program), Chile’s national forestry strategy demonstrates the norm diffusion and institutional structuration commonly exhibited in world polity approaches to global and transnational sociology. Yet, world-system analysis of Chile’s forest conservation program highlights the role of power and positionality along the global division of labor in its implementation. The organized hypocrisy of the Chilean state leads to means-ends decoupling in which the practices of the global institutional order are faithfully executed but have an opaque relationship to climate governance goals. This paper, then, joins a growing scholarship that combines these divergent approaches to highlight advances in environmental governance born from connection to the global institutional order of environmentalism while simultaneously explaining structural issues that hinder efforts to achieve global climate targets.