Setting the Standard chronicles the emergence and implications of an ambitious experiment in civil-society-led global governance: the Forest Stewardship Council. The FSC was born in 1993 as a grassroots initiative to promote "environmentally appropriate, socially beneficial, and economically viable management of the world's forests" through an international system of forest certification.

The recent establishment of an FSC standard for British Columbia was achieved only after difficult and protracted negotiations at the regional, national, and global levels. Drawing on a...

In a 1994 decision known as Howard, the Supreme Court of Canada held that the Aboriginal signatories to the 1923 Williams Treaties had knowingly given up not only their title to off-reserve lands but also their treaty rights to hunt and fish for food. No other First Nations in Canada have ever been found to have willingly surrendered similar rights.

Peggy J. Blair gives the Howard decision considerable context. She examines federal and provincial bickering over "special rights" for Aboriginal peoples and notes how Crown policies toward Indian rights changed as settlement pressures...

Globalization has challenged taken-for-granted relationships of rule at all levels. This unsettling of legitimacy raises some serious questions. Under what conditions do individuals and communities accept globalized decision making as legitimate? And what political practices do individuals and collectivities under globalization use to exercise autonomy?

To answer these questions, the contributors to Unsettled Legitimacy explore the disruptions and reconfigurations of political authority that accompany globalization. Arguing that we live in an era in which political legitimacy...

Globalization has challenged concepts such as local culture and cultural autonomy. And the rampant commodification of cultural products has challenged the way we define culture itself. Have these developments transformed the relationship between culture and autonomy? Have traditional notions of cultural autonomy been recast?

Cultural Autonomy showcases the work of scholars who are exploring new ways of understanding the critical issue of globalization and culture. By defining culture broadly -- as a set of ideas or practices that range from skateboarding to the work of public...

Observers and students of globalization struggle with two questions. Why are globalizing processes so unevenly distributed between poor and wealthy countries? What effect does this uneven distribution have on the everyday lives of ordinary people?

The contributors to this volume find answers to these questions in the Mediterranean, a region divided between the relatively wealthy people of the north shore, who are engaged with Europe and modernized, and their poorer neighbours to the south, who strive daily to meet the same standards of living and modes of governance as their more...