China's economy has grown rapidly over the last four decades. Its market, measured by purchasing power parity, is top among nations, with continued growth expected in the coming decade.Footnote 1 Its middle class, by some estimates, constitutes a quarter of China's population, making it twice the size of the United States (US) middle class in absolute terms.Footnote 2 This growth in the absolute number of middle-class consumers matters for scholars of political consumerism as these consumers constitute a significant source of buying power, which may or may not demand sustainable and ethical consumer products.Footnote 3 Thus, China's current market position, as Yixian Sun explains, makes China a critical jurisdiction to study for anyone interested in the success of transnational private sustainability governance or eco-certification schemes. If Chinese firms and consumers do not support eco-certification schemes by becoming certified and/or demanding certified products in a range of sectors, transnational eco-certification programmes will be less able to address sustainability issues at the global scale. What is key in ensuring the uptake of eco-certification in China? According to Sun, the answer is the Chinese state: ‘to rapidly spread their standards in China, transnational certification programs need to proactively engage with potential supporters in the Chinese state’ (p. 158).
Certifying China sets up its analysis in Chapter 1 by underscoring the significance of the Chinese market as a producer, manufacturer, and consumer of goods, and detailing the research approach; this involves a comparison of eco-certification uptake in three sectors – seafood, palm oil, and tea – which exhibit variation in the characteristics that extant research suggests will affect firm participation. Chapter 2 provides a framework, associated hypotheses, and observable implications which capture the specific drivers and intervening conditions that are posited to affect the adoption of eco-certification by Chinese firms. Chapters 3 to 5 draw on interviews, surveys, statistical analysis, and document analysis to trace the uptake in the three case studies in relation to the study's hypotheses and associated observable implications. Chapter 6 offers a synthesis of the findings and suggests future research specific to China and other emerging economies.
The framework and hypotheses central to the analysis are logically derived from existing research. Firstly, Chinese firms with sales to and investments from multinationals based in global north countries (such as the US or European countries) are expected to be more likely to have adopted certification. This is because these multinationals have long been the key source of demand for certified products given the pressure they receive from non-governmental organizations (NGOs) via naming and shaming campaigns (pp. 37–8).Footnote 4 Secondly, eco-certification programmes that communicate with Chinese stakeholders and build local capacity are expected to have greater success in garnering firm support (pp. 38–40). Thirdly, firms in capital-intensive, commodity-focused industries are likely be more receptive to adopting eco-certification because the size, practices, and capabilities of these firms make certification easier to attain at lower costs per unit (pp. 40–3).Footnote 5 Finally, and most importantly, support from subnational governments in China will increase uptake, as will support from quasi-state national industry associations (pp. 43–9). In the case of subnational governments, local officials may see win-win opportunities from promoting eco-certification in the form of potential for foreign investment in local industry and the potential for eco-certified firms to signal good local performance of China's national commitments to sustainability objectives (like the Sustainable Development GoalsFootnote 6).
As much as this book positions itself as a new take on eco-certification, it clearly builds on existing research. The sustainability commitments of multinationals based in the global north have long affected the timing and extent of firm interest in eco-certification.Footnote 7 What is a welcome contribution in Sun's analysis is the careful attention to specific industry segments, value chains, and end-markets, which help to pinpoint why, in the same general sector, some Chinese firms have taken up eco-certification and others have not. For instance, China's seafood sector, Sun explains, has three discernible segments (pp. 65–8): (i) a traditional domestic market that favours fresh fish and involves short, informal supply chains; (ii) a recently developed premium domestic market that favours frozen and fresh seafood caught abroad for sale to consumers through e-commerce platforms, high-end hotels, and supermarkets; and (iii) an export market, through which seafood processed in China is sold to foreign buyers and retailers. The case shows that the latter two segments have seen comparably greater uptake of eco-certification than the traditional domestic market. This finding aligns with patterns in other sectors and jurisdictions where small-scale producers that are close to markets use other mechanisms to communicate product qualities to customers. One such example is the case where farmers opt for personal trust rather than organic certification to communicate sustainable practices to consumers in local farmer markets.Footnote 8 The book, therefore, bolsters the view that transnational eco-certification rarely attracts small-scale firms, because of both the costs of audits and the misalignment of their products and supply-volumes with the interests of certain value chains that seek out the assurances offered by eco-certification.Footnote 9
Proactive communication and outreach strategies have also been hallmarks of transnational sustainability governance schemes. Sun details what happens when outreach does not occur, and when programmes lack local capacity to engage national stakeholders. Friend of the Sea, for instance, had done no outreach in China during the timeframe of Sun's analysis, and uptake of its programme to date has been marginal, with only one Chinese flagged vessel currently certified.Footnote 10 National reactions to the apparent infringement of a country's sovereign rights to make policy decisions are a recurrence in the history of transnational sustainability governance. My own work with Cashore and Newsom suggested that the claims of domestic actors that eco-certification programmes infringed on sovereignty would have limited traction when the buyers demanding eco-certification were in export markets.Footnote 11 Conversely, and as Sun's analysis suggests, questions of sovereignty and local buy-in, particularly from members of the Chinese state, will matter more, given that production and consumption occur within the same jurisdiction. Interestingly, although research is currently framing these tensions as relevant to developing and emerging economies responding to transnational sustainability governance initiated in the global north,Footnote 12 similar forms of resistance or indifference by national stakeholders have emerged (sometimes successfully) in similarly structured value chains in producer countries in the global north.Footnote 13 Further comparisons and theorization about these patterns would be a beneficial avenue for future research.
In addition to the refinements to existing theories, Certifying China offers key new insights into the existing (and potential) role of the Chinese state and quasi-state industry associations in spreading eco-certification. Sun usefully outlines how opportunities for transnational sustainability governance in China are constrained in ways that are not consistently present in liberal market economies. The more limited operating space for civil society organizations precludes certain tactics like market campaigns used against multinationals in the global north. This acts to dull a major incentive for participation in industrial segments that supply China's domestic market or are exported to other developing or emerging economies where buyers have yet to prioritize sustainability sourcing (for example, African countries are the destination for more than 50% of China's tea exports; see p. 121). Support from parts of the Chinese state is thus an alternative that can raise awareness among firms and nudge them towards participation. Support from local governments in Yunnan and Guizhou, for instance, were critical for tea growers adopting eco-certification in those regions (pp. 130–2).
Raising awareness is ostensibly important but achieving widespread uptake may require stronger state intervention. Sun proposes three scenarios for such scaling in the book's conclusions (pp. 166–72): (i) undifferentiated support by the state; (ii) careful steering by the state; and (iii) takeover by the state. The final option, arguably, takes away the central feature of transnational sustainability governance as based on evaluations by market actors.Footnote 14 Moreover, state takeover may raise new challenges of mutual recognition and acceptance within international markets for those segments of Chinese industry that export to and engage with multinationals from the global north. Conversely, such national programmes, on occasion, have been successful. Finland's forest certification programme, for instance, was accepted by the British retailer B&Q when the company had previously only accepted the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC).Footnote 15 Similarly, the other two scenarios create their own distributional consequences, either by creating a potential for a race to the bottom in the first scenario, or creating winners and losers in the second scenario, with the Chinese state, like other jurisdictions (such as the approach of the European Union (EU) to sustainable biofuels), having to evaluate what constitutes acceptable eco-certification schemes. If this second scenario does come into force, much could be learned from a careful reading of the experiences of the EU, as documented in several recent books.Footnote 16
The discussion of quasi-state industry associations is an additional contribution. Sun explains that the Chinese state, since the 1978 reforms, has a two-part bureaucracy ‘consisting of bureaus (jiguan danwei, literarily translated as “administrative units”) and extrabureaucracies (shiyae danwei, literarily translated as “serviced units”)’ (p. 47). The extrabureaucracies are, in many cases, like industry associations. They lack regulatory authority, but they are led by civil servants and can have authorities delegated to them by their oversight bureaus. The seafood and palm oil cases both illustrate the significance of support from these quasi-state industry associations, and they align well with past research that shows how the position of industrial associations can affect the level and nature of firm engagement with eco-certification, even in the absence of state oversight.Footnote 17 This finding and its supporting argument, however, also reveals an interesting omission in the analysis, which merits further attention. Previous research shows that national competition law can affect firm support for industry-wide initiatives promoting sustainability in different ways.Footnote 18 Important questions in the Chinese context are what competition law has meant for eco-certification in the country to date, and what (constraining or enabling) role it might play in the future, should eco-certification schemes expand.
Equally, the policy decisions of the transnational sustainability programmes are not central to Sun's analysis, even though there are good reasons to expect that they may have mattered. In Sweden, for instance, changes made by the FSC in the late 1990s to introduce percentage-based claims for certified products enabled greater participation of forest product companies because the policy change accommodated a wood-sharing arrangement that occurred among processing facilities.Footnote 19 Policy changes could also make eco-certification less fit for certain national contexts. For instance, the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) – the leading eco-certifier for wild-capture fisheries addressed in the book – faced pressure in the late 2000s to address consistency problems across fishery assessments; this led to an MSC policy change that standardized assessments and limited auditor discretion.Footnote 20 Arguably, this policy change reduced the ability of the programme to adapt to the national and local contexts of fisheries in China, a possibility that remains to be explored.
None of these omissions diminish the central contributions that Certifying China provides. Sun has enriched our understanding of eco-certification by re-examining certain previously studied factors and adding helpful specifics on the unique business-government relations in China that have mattered significantly for explaining when and how transnational private sustainability governance has found support from Chinese firms. Key lessons from this analysis are sure to inform further work on how eco-certification may become more successful in the future.
