Selection of sites

The selection of sites for this study aimed to satisfy the necessary criteria to form

similar groups of organizations, that is, construct credible “counterfactual-like” cases (between certified and non-certified firms). Hence, six Chilean regions (see Figure 1.3 in Chapter 1) were selected: VII (Maule), VIII (Biobío), IX (Araucanía), X (Los Lagos), XII (Magallanes), and XIV (Los Rios), based on the following criteria:

Level of forestry activity: the level of forestry activity considered the geographical areas (regions) where native and plantation forestry is mostly concentrated and economically relevant. This predominantly happens in the southern and south-central17 _{regions of the country,} concentrating the greatest mass of temperate native forests in the southern hemisphere here, as well as those intensively-managed pine and eucalypt plantations (CONAF, 2013). However, the VI (O’Higgins) and IX (Aysén) regions were not selected because their level of forestry activity was insufficient to form groups of certified and non-certified organizations similar to those found in other regions.

Variety of forest types: this criterion entails the – ideal – presence in the same region (or at the very least, belonging to the same vegetative and climatic zone) of the two main forest types: native and plantation forests. In Chile, native temperate forests are mainly found in its southern territories: IX, X and XI regions, while plantation forests are mostly concentrated within the VIII region but range between the VI and IX regions (Neira et al., 2002; INFOR, 2015c). Plantation forests are made up of monocultures of hardwood (mostly, Eucalyptus globulus and Eucalyptus nittens) or softwood (mostly, Pinus radiata) species, covering 93% of the total planted area (INFOR, 2015c). Native forests are classified in the Chilean legislation in twelve recognised types, each comprising a mix of different species. From those, at least six types were present in the researched regions.

Characteristics of forest operations: the selection of sites considered the construction of matched pairs of organizations with very similar characteristics and level of organizational and technological sophistication. Thus, I aimed to match these in very similar groups in terms of:

(a) Scale: large, medium and small forestry businesses (in number of hectares). (b) Market orientation: domestic, export, or both.

17 _{Taking Santiago de Chile (the nation’s capital) as a reference point, all regions below Santiago’s latitude are}

classified as “southern” and “south-central”. This includes the VI (O’Higgins), VII (Maule), VIII (Biobío), IX (Araucanía), X (Los Lagos), XI (Aysén), XII (Magallanes) and XIV (Los Rios) regions.

(c) Business structure: individual, corporate or cooperative.

(d) Professionalization of the business: high or low degree, including factors such as staff qualification, machinery used and counselling by technical experts.

It is important to note two facts here: the first is that practically all commercial production in Chile originates from private forests (INFOR, 2015a); and second, that the Chilean plantation forestry sector is highly concentrated in very few companies due to government reforms in the 1970s (Frêne and Núñez, 2010). This contrasts with the situation of native forests’ landowners, who are – in general – much smaller, less vertically integrated and unable to generate a similar level of economic benefits.

Presence of ongoing environmental issues and social conflicts: it is central to this research to know the capacity of forest certification in addressing environmental and social issues in the regions being sampled. Environmentally, most Chilean native and temperate forests have suffered ecological degradation due to different causes and in varying degrees. In the late 19th _{century, German colonizers extensively cleared native forests in southern Chile by} burning so that the land could be used for agriculture (Armesto et al., 1994). More recently, the Decree Law 701 (1974 Forest Development Law) also had the unfortunate indirect effect of using as much forestlands as possible, replacing significant areas of native forests (Reyes and Nelson, 2014). All these cycles of degradation and destruction of native forests have occurred across most of the central-south and southern regions of the country.

Socially, I selected the VIII and IX regions as study sites not only because they are where most plantation forests in the country are concentrated, but also because they are regions where ongoing and violent Indigenous conflicts over land tenure still persist, directed against large forestry enterprises. Overall, large forestry corporations have faced strong opposition from local Indigenous communities and also from the forestry workers of their contractor companies, who claim they should receive the same benefits and wages as those received by workers directly hired by the companies (Reyes and Nelson, 2014).

Credible construction of “counterfactual-like” cases: based on the criteria above, the aim of this study was to construct approximate matched groups rather than “identical” sets of pairs. To illustrate this point, in the VII and VIII regions, it was not possible to find non- certified large plantation forestry corporations as all are FSC and/or CERTFOR certified. Instead, I compared those companies with medium-sized forestry enterprises who had very similar species being cultivated, market orientation, professionalization of their businesses and geographical scope. In addition to those external comparisons, it is noteworthy that some of

those large forestry businesses had dual certification and that they initiated their FSC certification process quite a long time after being CERTFOR certified. This phenomenon allowed me to employ the before-after approach (Romero et al., 2013) so as to obtain fruitful insights about this internal comparison in such large enterprises. In those cases, both in-depth interviews and CAR analysis across different periods of time were useful methods to obtain data from those organizations. The final set of matched groups obtained in this research, as well as detailed descriptions of the study sites (regions) and their sampled organizations, are shown in the Appendixes 3 and 4, respectively.

Practical considerations: practical considerations were important for selecting regions as study sites. A major consideration was not the access to the central-south and southern regions of the country, but the feasibility of obtaining sufficient sub-cases of organizations to appropriately construct comparable groups. Otherwise, the time and resources invested in carrying out effective fieldwork on those study sites could not be justified.