The Politics of Beginning traces the formation of the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), a transnational private certification organization for sustainable forestry. It starts with recounting the highly politicized forest politics of the late 1980s, when timber boycotts and radical protests existed alongside human rights violations, deforestation, and experiments with forestry practices that were designed to be less harmful for people and the environment. The book then follows the people who became the founding members of the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC)—the most authoritative private organization for forest certification that exists today.

To explore how concerned wood consumers, timber merchants, human rights activists, indigenous communities, and environmental NGOs engaged in private institution-making, this book focuses on the three-day founding assembly of the FSC in Toronto in 1993. By using live audio recordings of the assembly, this book provides an unprecedented, in-depth analysis of a constitutive moment for private authority in the making. Alejandro Esguerra works with the concept of translation developed in Actor-Network Theory—a process in which knowledge about governance is continuously recontextualized—and introduces it to International Relations theory. He develops a dramaturgical methodology that can be used to analyze the ways in which translators transform knowledge about governance and the practices of inclusion and exclusion that appear during this process. The environmental crisis requires a transformation in the ways societies value and govern human–nature relations, and The Politics of Beginning reveals the conditions under which even formerly antagonistic actors start developing a common political project.

Alejandro Esguerra is Senior Researcher in the Working Group Political Sociology at Bielefeld University, Germany.