Journal of Law and Political Economy

This article investigates the rise of the global tropical timber trade in the post–World War II era by focusing on two key actors, Japan and Malaysia. It probes into the rise of corporate capitalism in Japan in the 1950s and 1960s and state developmentalism in Malaysia in the 1970s and 1980s, followed by the creation of the International Tropical Timber Organization. It then turns to Malaysia’s defense of tropical logging both during and after the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development, leading up to the internationalization of the Malaysian timber industry. The article argues that the development of international norms governing the tropical forests of the South in the 1990s was made possible by the assimilation of both the developing states’ aspirations for economic growth and the industrialized world’s environmental demands into neoliberal environmentalism as underpinned by technological fix and a retreat from the earlier narratives of “limits to growth.”