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Ecuador’s National Interpretation of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO): Green-Grabbing through Green Certification?

This paper analyzes a new collaborative ‘green’ governance arrangement known as the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) in Ecuador and how this space can be a new site of institutionalizing environmental policies that sanction cases of land dispossession and facilitate incentives for new forms of land enclosures. In Ecuador, the RSPO has emerged as a collaborative governance institution that aims to address the adverse social and environmental effects that can accompany legal and illegal land acquisitions for palm cultivation. The initiative involves a variety of ‘stakeholders’ and calls for actors to prioritize ‘sustainability’ as a non-negotiable condition for palm oil development. Increasingly, however, evidence suggests that instead of ameliorating inequalities in the palm oil industry, the RSPO is a mechanism that merely ‘greens’ an already ‘shady’ business. Furthermore, many point to the RSPO as establishing terrain for ‘green grabbing’ practices. This paper argues that certain disciplining processes that the RSPO regime promotes, such as land-titling schemes, exclusionary participation, and capitalist meeting culture, can further exacerbate social and environmental conflicts by structuring collaborative debate while establishing qualifying criteria that encloses upon certain opportunities for the future. These processes can increasingly structure policy and ultimately encourage and legitimize the material practice of green land acquisitions in Ecuador.