Recursivity by Organizational Design: The Case of the Forest Stewardship Council
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12413 |
| Published date | 01 September 2017 |
| Date | 01 September 2017 |
Recursivity by Organizational Design: The Case
of the Forest Stewardship Council
Olga Malets
University of Freiburg
Abstract
This article examines recursive processes in the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), a nonstate forest standard-setting and accredi-
tation organization. The FSC has developed numerous organizational structures and procedures that help it pool and analyze
stakeholder input and feedback in standard-setting and implementation. We conceptualize recursive processes of stakeholder
input and feedback and organizational responsiveness as recursivity by design. The article focuses on organizational legitimacy
as a driver of recursive processes. The FSC’s extensive participation procedures and structures present opportunities for incorpo-
rating stakeholder input and feedback in standard-setting and make it a responsive, legitimate, and effective governance
scheme. It also enables the FSC to deal with challenges to its legitimacy and effectiveness. Whereas challenges associated with
stakeholder participation and on-the-ground standard implementation are conceptualized in the literature as sources of organi-
zational fragility and crisis, we argue that FSC’s recursive structures help it accommodate criticism of and information about its
performance and adjust its system to continuously emerging demands for more credibility and quality.
Policy implications
•Governance organizations should design structures and procedures for stakeholder participation at different organizational
scales that set into motion recursive cycles of feedback and organizational response.
•In order for recursive processes to foster organizational learning and adaptation to emerging challenges, governance orga-
nizations should design a system of performance monitoring and evaluation.
•Governance organizations should view stakeholder grievances and criticism as opportunities for organizational reflection
and adaptation.
1. Recursivity by organizational design: A
conceptualization
This article examines recursive processes in the Forest Ste-
wardship Council (FSC), a transnational multistakeholder sus-
tainability standard-setting and accreditation organization in
the forest sector.
1
FSC has received considerable attention in
the scholarly literature and public debates as an exemplary
case of participatory, transparent, and democratic governance
systems based on continuous participation of its members
and stakeholders in the organizational decision-making, stan-
dard-setting, and accreditation, and certification programs.
For instance, Gale (2014, p. 20) compares four modes of inter-
est mediation represented by four global governance organi-
zations and concludes that FSC ‘performs best in terms of
effectiveness and legitimacy’. The FSC has developed struc-
tures and procedures facilitating stakeholders’involvement
with the organization, partly in response to internal and public
criticism. Participatory features of FSC organizational design
provide channels for stakeholder feedback on standard-set-
ting and implementation and make the FSC a typical case of
what we call recursivity by design in this special section.
The critical characteristic of this type of recursivity is that
transnational standard-setting organizations strategically
develop various procedures and technologies to enable
stakeholders to provide input in standard-setting and feed-
back on organizational performance, communicate their
implementation experiences, express concerns, and file grie-
vances and complaints. Why do standard-setting organiza-
tions design recursive systems and what are the implications
for their organizational trajectory over time? The concept of
legitimacy stands at the center of sociological approaches to
transnational standard-setting. Tamm Hallstr€
om and Bostr€
om
(2010, p. 110) argue that actors construct multistakeholder
participatory arrangements to gain legitimacy for their stan-
dard-setting initiatives. However, participation creates chal-
lenges for multistakeholder organizations and makes them
fragile (Bostr€
om and Tamm Hallstr€
om, 2013). In the FSC, the
participation of actors with divergent interests and ideas
results in continuous intensive negotiations. These negotia-
tions lead to the emergence of compromises that reconcile
and internalize contradictions, but these compromises are
brittle and must be continuously renegotiated (Bostr€
om and
Tamm Hallstr€
om, 2013). Since stakeholders also have differ-
ent material, social, cognitive, and symbolic resources, actors
with fewer resources may be disadvantaged and unable to
participate meaningfully in standard-setting (Bostr€
om and
Tamm Hallstr€
om, 2013; Dingwerth, 2008; Moog et al., 2015).
Global Policy (2017) 8:3 doi: 10.1111/1758-5899.12413 ©2017 University of Durham and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Global Policy Volume 8 . Issue 3 . September 2017 343
Special Section Article
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