Speaking Private Authority

Book excerpt: Speaking Private Authority: The Construction of Sustainability in Forests and Fisheries expands upon current understandings of the emergent global phenomenon that is private authority. As private authority is becoming increasingly important in the conduct of global governance, broadening our collective understanding of it will prove beneficial. Roberto J. Flores argues that private actors are not simply outgrowths of existent social structures or material conditions, rather they are purposive agents strategically pursuing an agenda. Therefore, explaining private authority requires an examination of the constitutive elements that underlie this social phenomenon––to which the author applies an analytical framework that combines social network theory with discourse analysis. The author applies these tools to two cases taken from the environmental sector––forests and fisheries—and finds that as environmental politics takes on an increasingly networked character the actors that are best able to generate and wield private authority are those that strategically place themselves in-between networks through the construction of discursive nodal points around which competing actors are forced to converge—at the level of identity. The case studies specifically look at how particular actors leveraged construction of the sustainable development concept in order to strategically place themselves in advantageous positions for exercising private authority.