Greening the networked economy - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 173

other repercussions on companies in the lesser developed parts of the
world. Although exporting companies in developing countries expe-
rience the need to upgrade their environmental management (and
arguably performance) through these dynamics, there are also back-
sides and inequalities for third world companies. When ISO standards,
with their informational requirements, are becoming the legitimised
tickets (or barriers) for global market access, this especially affects
domestic developing country producers. As Di Chang-Xing ( 1999 ) has
analysed for China, governments and local industries often do not have
sufficient experience and capacity to implement (certified) corporate
environmental information and management systems and the costs of
introducing such systems, as well as the independent auditors to cer-
tify them, are relatively high. Developing country governments and
companies (and environmental NGOs) have been - and still are - only
marginally involved in the drafting of, for example, the ISO 14000
series - and come often too late to make an effective contribution
(Krut and Gleckman, 1998 ; Clapp, 2005 ). 13 All of this makes it at least
understandable when some developing country representatives inter-
pret informational requirements, such as included in ISO standards, in
terms of protectionism and trade barriers, rather than as a fruitful basis
for global environmental reform. And it does clarify why some scholars
criticise these systems as 'privatization of environmental governance'
(cf. Clapp, 2005 ).

4. Private governance in economic networks

Lately, especially convention theory (cf. Ponte and Gibbon, 2005 )
has reconceptualised the governance perspective on global value or

13

For instance, of the 141 developing countries, only 50 were full members of
International Standard Organisation (ISO) in the late 1990s and only
25 participated in Technical Committee 207 on environmental management
(and its various subcommittees), which deals with most environmental
standards (only five to six played an active role in the Committee until 1995
and a few more in 1996 and 1997). In contrast, all developed countries were
members and almost all were actively involved in TC 207 negotiations from its
establishment in 1993 onward (cf. Krut and Gleckman, 1998 : 40-62). In 2006,
the situation improved: 103 countries were members of ISO, and 69 of TC
207 of ISO (of which some 35 are developing and transitional economies). For
similar data on the Codex Alimentarius standards, see Henson and Jaffee
( 2007 ).