概要

The Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) has been around for more than a decade but its alleged shortcomings have justified, in the eyes of civil society and the private sector, their efforts toward the creation of alternative (and complementary) mechanisms. This process led to the creation of the high-profile Indonesian Palm Oil Pledge (IPOP) in 2014, which gathered six companies in order to make progress on their sustainability commitments through collaborations, communication with the government and other parties, support to smallholders, and others. At the same time, other initiatives led by specific companies emerged with their own approaches to sustainability and associated methods of implementation, and the government pushed its own sustainability standard created in 2011 with the initial purpose of ensuring the legality of company operations, namely the Indonesian Sustainable Palm Oil (ISPO). These concomitant initiatives, standards, methodological innovations and mechanisms have made this field very complex – and all the more so with a high number of stakeholders participating in the debates and contributing to forging the solutions. Besides, the financial stakes as well as the political sensitivities of these issues have resulted in complementary, overlapping or opposing strategies that have added to the confusion about the paths toward sustainable palm oil production. Therefore, the present study aims at clarifying the positions taken by the great variety of stakeholders with respect to sustainable palm oil, and their perceptions about the various initiatives and standards. It also assesses the level of political support for the most prominent and promising initiatives, and the functioning of the policy networks.