The Politics of Beginning traces the formation of the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), now the most authoritative private organization for forestry certification. It starts with recounting the highly politicized forest politics of the late 1980s, when activists protested human rights abuses and deforestation while experimenting with sustainable forestry practices. The book then follows the people who became the founding members of the Forest Stewardship Council. By using live audio recordings of the FSC founding assembly in 1993, this book provides an in-depth analysis of a constitutional moment for private authority in world politics.

To explore how timber merchants, indigenous communities, and social and environmental NGOs engaged in private institution-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 with metaphors of theatre such as stage, script, and performance. This methodology can be used to analyze the ways in which activists and others translate 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 Lecturer in the Working Group Political Sociology at Bielefeld University, Germany.