Certification dispositifs and land conflicts: the case of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO)

By Laura Silva Castañeda

The expansion of oil palm plantations in Indonesia, the largest producer of palm oil in the world, has generated a huge amount of conflict over land. In response, a number of Indonesian NGOs defending local communities’ rights are adopting a dual strategy. They call, on the one hand, for profound reforms of the legal system and they advocate, on the other, for short-term strategies, including conflict resolution mechanisms, to help local people while broader legal reforms are underway. Accordingly, in order to promote conflict resolution, some national NGOs joined the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), a multi-stakeholder certification initiative. In order to explore the effects of this strategy, I propose to discuss the notion of the dispositif. This concept was first developed by Foucault and later re-emerged with the actor network theory and the French pragmatic sociology. In this paper, my argument is twofold. In the first section, my aim is to demonstrate theoretically that an analysis in terms of the “dispositif” would gain from a reconnection with the foucaldian heritage of this concept that has been overlooked in French sociology. In the second section, I demonstrate the heuristic potential of this concept to analyse the plural and sometimes contradictory effects of certification processes such as the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil.