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Abstract
Forest certification has become one of the most widely used market-driven mechanisms for forest management and conservation, but it is not clear yet whether the different standards are having any impacts on the discourse and environmental outcomes. The goal of this dissertation is to explore the changes in the forest management (FM) standards of Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) and Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI) and the environmental impacts of these two most widely used forest certification systems in the world. The central questions are a) where FSC and SFI FM standards have made changes to be convergent with the international sustainable forest management (SFM) protocols, b) whether SFI-FS has impacts on forestry best management practice (BMP) implementation rates, and c) whether FSC-FM impacts on biodiversity outcomes. The scale of the study area in the latter two, local and global respectively, is dependent on the availability of comparable long-term on-the-ground data of not only the environmental outcomes (i.e., BMPs and threatened species) but also certification locations and areas. By using a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods as well as incorporating the political ecology and socio-economy variables into the analyses, the results of this dissertation show that FSC and SFI have clear convergences with the international SFM protocols in ecological and socio-economic spheres of standards. Moreover, both FSC and SFI have positive associaions with the environmental outcomes, albeit with some constraints and contexts.