What do biofuels, fisheries, fair trade, and organics have in common? They are subject to environmental and social regulation both by public policies and by private certification agencies. Yet the relationship between public and private governance has not been well-studied as it applies to environmental regulations.
Stefan Renckens, a 4th year Ph.D. candidate, was awarded the NSF grant for his doctoral research with Ben Cashore as his advisor, to study how different regulatory institutions interact. His doctoral research focuses on the interaction between EU public policy and private environmental and social regulation.
Between 2003 and 2008, Renckens worked as a researcher and teaching assistant at the Political Science department of the University of Leuven, where he became interested in private governance institutions. In the fall of 2007, he came to Yale FES as a visiting researcher to study certification programs with Ben Cashore and he was admitted to the Ph.D. program in 2008. While developing his perspective on private certification, he found there was little research on how private certification agencies interact with public policy. For instance, as Renckens interviewed decision-makers who develop policy for organic agriculture and fisheries, he found they know very little about each other’s work. Furthermore, public policy sometimes incorporates guidelines originally developed by private certifiers— for example in forest management practices and in developing biofuel standards—yet very little research exists for understanding the process by which these policies influence and inform one another.
Being from Belgium, Renckens is interested in studying the interaction between private and public regulation in the European Union (EU). His dissertation project examines the following research question: Why has the EU responded to existing private environmental and social regulation in different issue areas in diverse regulatory ways? Exploring the EU’s response in four issue areas (organic agriculture, biofuels, fisheries, and fair trade) will help explain why in some cases the EU has responded strongly by developing its own public certification program, while in other cases it has decided not to intervene at all, or only in a very limited way.
The main contribution of his dissertation is its focus on an underexplored dependent variable, and its potential policy implications. Renckens hopes that his research will help to understand the regulatory responses of public authorities to private environmental and social regulation and will contribute to generating policy relevant knowledge on how public authorities can attain a better integration of public and private policy instruments. Furthermore, it is hoped that this research will generate useful information for initiators of private regulatory programs regarding their design and functioning, resulting in improved policy instruments.
Renckens holds an MPhil from Yale, and MA degrees in Political Science (2002) and Conflict and Peace Studies (2005), and a Complementary Degree in Economics (2003), all from the University of Leuven in his native Belgium. At the Political Science Department of the University of Leuven, he worked as a research and teaching assistant between 2003 and 2006, and as a research fellow of the Flemish Research Foundation (FWO) between 2006 and 2008. As a fellow of the Belgian American Educational Foundation he was a visiting researcher at Yale in the fall of 2007 and at the University of California, Berkeley in the spring of 2008.
--Alisa May
Forests are critical to mitigating the effects of global climate change because they are large storehouses of carbon, but there are significant uncertainties about the actual behavior of many of their sinks and sources, according to arecently published textbook, Managing Forest Carbon in a Changing Climate.
The book, written by researchers at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, is a comprehensive review of the science of carbon sequestration in forests, management of forests for carbon mitigation and poverty alleviation, and the socioeconomic and policy implications of managing forests for carbon. Read more
Managing Forest Carbon in a Changing Climate grew out of a series of seminars that were organized by faulty, students and alumni of the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies. The book is published by Springer and can be read online.
