906730

book-review2020
ISS0010.1177/0268580920906730International Sociology ReviewsReviews: Development

Reviews: Development
International Sociology Reviews
2020, Vol. 35(2) 185­–199
Reviews: Development © The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/0268580920906730
https://doi.org/10.1177/0268580920906730
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Tim Bartley,
Rules without Rights: Land, Labor, and Private Authority in the Global Economy, Oxford University
Press: Oxford, 2018; 351 pp.: ISBN 9780198794332, US$42.95 (hbk)

Reviewed by: John Aloysius Zinda, Cornell University, USA

Keywords
Asia, forests, globalization, labor, voluntary certification

Since the 1990s, environmentalists and labor activists have urged transnational corpora-
tions to adopt standards limiting exploitation of forests and workers. The Forest
Stewardship Council (FSC) began certifying timber operations that abjure clearcutting,
manage forests to protect soil and water, and respect the land rights of forest residents.
The system relies on brands like Home Depot and Ikea, responding to consumer pressure,
to press their suppliers to obtain certification as a condition of making orders. Similarly,
labor certification schemes like SA8000 have sought to certify manufacturing facilities
that assure workers decent wages, healthy working conditions, and organize indepen-
dently to bargain with their employer. Through these efforts, certifying organizations
attempt to hold firms accountable in situations in which states cannot or will not do so.
In Rules without Rights, Tim Bartley examines how such efforts at transnational pri-
vate regulation (TPR) have played out in forestry and apparel sectors in authoritarian
China and democratic Indonesia. Transnational private regulation draws on global
brands’ reputational investments to get firms to accept independent monitoring at pro-
duction sites. These practices promise to facilitate a ‘flow of rules’ into places where
states are unwilling or unable to uphold strong standards. Bartley argues that promoters
and analysts of TPR have erroneously assumed that states in the global South are ‘empty
spaces’ of ineffective governance, an assumption that results in unfounded expectations
for private regulation. Examining two sectors and two countries, he aims to show how
states and local contexts shape TPR, requiring a more ‘place-conscious’ approach to
private regulation. Bartley takes multiple points of entry: interviews, often on-site; anal-
ysis of documents; survey datasets; and news and other records combined into narrative
accounts. The book’s detailed accounts explain differing outcomes in forests and facto-
ries, China and Indonesia – and provide insights of general relevance to TPR efforts.
186 International Sociology Reviews 35(2)

Following the introduction and Chapter 2, which introduces theoretical propositions

specifying how a range of conditions shape certification outcomes, comes the first of
four country-sector case studies that form the heart of the book. Chapter 3 asks why FSC
certification fared poorly in Indonesia at a time when indigenous land rights and environ-
mental concerns were receiving major attention. The answer combines limited demand
from buyers, mobility of forestry firms, and the Indonesian state’s foot-dragging on land
rights. The US and the EU, the main sources of demand for certification, made up only
one-quarter of the market for Indonesian wood. Buyers from Japan and other markets
faced scant pressure to certify. The companies managing Indonesian forests, mostly
domestic, often cleared forest to use land for purposes like palm oil cultivation. Since
they were not committed to forestry in the long term, the benefits certification confers to
sustained forest operations had no appeal for them. For the few firms that did pursue
certification, it meant appreciable investments in environmental management systems
and community engagement. Still, protections for local and indigenous land users were
neglected. Tangled land claims often involving collusion between state and firms made
it difficult to verify land rights. Auditors often disregarded land conflicts. Villagers and
their advocates sometimes managed to secure responses to their grievances, but the result
was policies managing conflicts, not their resolution. Certification involved compro-
mises that countered its intent.
Chapter 4 recounts the FSC’s career in China, which started with eager uptake after
2000, peaked after 2010, and then fizzled out as the Chinese state pushed out non-domes-
tic certification schemes. Initially, more forests received FSC certification than in
Indonesia, by number and by proportion of eligible forest. Ikea pressed suppliers to get
certified. Local governments dispossessed villagers of household and collective forests
behind the scenes, presenting the assembled forestlands as certifiable. Auditors over-
looked these practices or failed to recognize they were only being shown the more pre-
sentable parts of large forest tracts. Without civil society organizations to press for land
rights and rigorous auditing, these problems went unchecked. Still, the FSC came into
friction with state agencies. A national policy of replacing forests of low commercial
value with ‘improved’ timber plantations violated FSC standards. Amid a broader tight-
ening around international organizations, Chinese authorities narrowed the space within
which the FSC could operate, displacing it with a state-run scheme linked to a compet-
ing, less stringent forest certification program.
In Chapter 5, Bartley examines how labor certification schemes, particularly the
SA8000 label, have played out in China. This account draws on the stories of Yueyuen,
which manufactures for major shoe brands, and other footwear and apparel producers, as
well as statistical analyses comparing certified and non-certified facilities. Because
Chinese law prevented independent unionizing, auditors accepted ‘parallel means’ of
communication between workers and employers. Workers could not bargain for better
wages or working conditions, but employers set up worker committees and methods for
conveying grievances. In this constraining context, auditors ‘constructed compliance,’
recognizing procedural performances where they judged full attainment of outcome
measures infeasible. While working conditions were not clearly better in certified than in
non-certified factories, certification appears to have diffused ‘managerialism’ – human
resources procedures and documentation – into Chinese factories.
Reviews: Development 187

With a vibrant labor movement and certain standards in place, Indonesia seemed a
promising site for certification, yet certification numbers lagged behind China and
Vietnam, despite their weaker labor protections. In this context the conflict between big
brands’ reputational interests in certification and their compulsion to find cheap and flex-
ible suppliers limited the adoption and effectiveness of certification. When workers
expressed grievances to brands or got advocates to put pressure on them, modest
improvements resulted. However, improvements in wages and working conditions raised
product costs, often resulting in loss of orders and closure or relocation of factories.
While the labor movement’s strength outside the workplace won national policy protec-
tions and minimum wage increases, unions were weak within workplaces, and thus
TPR’s focus on individual facilities limited its impact in Indonesia.
This book shows how states and sectors shape how TPR efforts play out, but it does
much more. In Indonesia, vigilant civil society groups ensured that getting certified took
effort. Because certification was costly, firms in competitive sectors eschewed it. In
China, the authoritarian state perversely made it easy to construct compliance, resulting
in more certifications but dubious achievements. Bartley forefronts the points that local
conditions matter, and domestic governance is not an empty space. Such arguments are
well rehearsed in critiques of globalization. This book’s most valuable contributions
come in showing the distinct convergences of certification schemes with the imperatives
firms face in timber and apparel sectors and specific, changing political economic cir-
cumstances in China and Indonesia. In one sense, it is a set of four case studies, showing
how broad distinctions between two sectors and regime types condition outcomes. But it
is also a collection of many accounts of particular forestry operations and labor struggles.
It is these narratives that substantiate Bartley’s theory, which addresses many things
beyond sector and regime type, such as relationships between buying brands and produc-
ing firms and the nature and content of private rules.
So, what has TPR achieved? A number of forests are managed better than they might
be otherwise, and an appreciable number of factories show improvements in health and
safety conditions. But these changes do not affect a majority of relevant forests and
facilities. Bartley concludes that transnational private regulation has brought reforms,
but these reforms rarely go far enough to be truly effective in conserving landscapes or
empowering people. Voluntarism, privateness, and countervailing interests of firms pre-
vent certification regimes achieving their goals. Reputational interests of buyers are not
strong enough to compel responsibility all the way along supply chains. Auditors make
superficial constructions of compliance that fulfill the letter but not the spirit of certifica-
tion rules. Effectively protecting workers and forests will require engaging states in
enforcing strong rules at sites of production. Bartley sees promise in efforts like the new
timber legality regime in which the United States and the European Union penalize prod-
uct retailers for violations anywhere in their supply chains and work with exporting
country governments on enforcement. To succeed, he argues, regulatory efforts need to
re-center the state’s role in regulation while slowing down the treadmills that compel
firms to cut corners.
This book arrives at an inopportune time. Recent years have seen massive peat burn-
ing and palm oil expansion, even as the Indonesian state attempted to ban clearing of
natural forest. Meanwhile, forced labor in China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region
188 International Sociology Reviews 35(2)

(Buckley and Ramzy, 2018; Zenz, 2019) has led the Worker Rights Consortium to call
apparel firms to drop suppliers located there. Such efforts may keep these garments off
US shelves, but neither fair labor labeling nor engaging the Chinese state is likely to end
the extrajudicial detention and coerced labor of Uyghurs. In some ways, these develop-
ments underline Bartley’s core argument: domestic forces, principally the state, inevita-
bly shape private regulation, usually constraining it. In this time of resurgent populist
authoritarianism and geopolitical rivalry, it is not clear how proponents of transnational
regulation, private or otherwise, might effectively engage with states. As national bound-
aries harden, will these efforts wither away? Will states co-opt them into endeavors at
power projection? What new directions will transnational civil society efforts to uphold
rights and safeguard landscapes take? Rules without Rights provides a valuable founda-
tion for contemplating these questions.

References
Buckley C and Ramzy A (2018) China’s detention camps for Muslims turn to forced labor. The
New York Times, 16 December. Available at: www.nytimes.com/2018/12/16/world/asia/xin-
jiang-china-forced-labor-camps-uighurs.html (accessed 9 November 2019).
Zenz A (2019) Beyond the camps: Beijing’s grand scheme of forced labor, poverty alleviation
and social control in Xinjiang. Epub ahead of print 12 July. SocArXiv. DOI: 10.31235/osf.
io/8tsk2.

Author biography
John Aloysius Zinda is Assistant Professor of Development Sociology at Cornell University.
Address: Cornell University, 240 Warren Hall, 137 Reservoir Avenue, Ithaca, NY, 14853, USA.
Email: jaz65@cornell.edu

Shaohua Zhan,
The Land Question in China: Agrarian Capitalism, Industrious Revolution, and East Asian Development,
Routledge: Abingdon and New York, 2019; 190 pp.: ISBN 9780415789103, US$150.00 (hbk)

Reviewed by: Tim Bartley, Washington University in St. Louis, USA

Keywords
Agricultural modernization, China, development, dispossession, sociology of land

Of all the social changes in China over the past three decades, land reforms have gar-
nered relatively little international attention. Labor exploitation, pollution, and rising
inequality have seemingly stimulated greater international concern. Meanwhile, con-
cerns about land grabs and dispossession have centered more on South and Southeast
Asia, Africa, and South America. And yet, as Shaohua Zhan examines in this interesting
and sophisticated book, China is in the midst of changes to land rights that have long
histories and far-reaching consequences.