Arnie Saiki, Decolonize Accounting.
Liberating what has been captured by co-option, dismissal, obstruction, and the erasure of transformative frameworks.
As a follow up to the Black Paper, we have long been watching transformative frameworks not only being captured, but harmonizing into a winner-take-all accumulation of data through intermediaries and compliance. What I learned from that research, and what is contained in this document describes patterns by which institutions — including multilateral bodies, NGOs, certification systems, and government agencies — publicly embrace transformative frameworks while systematically hollowing them out. The examples are drawn from REDD+, organic certification, fair trade, biodiversity offsets, indigenous data sovereignty frameworks, and other fields where the gap between stated intent and operational reality is well-documented.
I think we’ve all witnessed these scenarios first hand and as we unpack this further, we can see how corporations normalize our slow erasure by capture culture .
The Anatomy of Institutional Capture
Institutional capture embraces with enthusiasm and then is followed by very slow, very technical adjustments that each seem reasonable in isolation. And by the time the original framework becomes just an empty logo, those who built it have been incorporated into the structure that consumed it — often as advisors, consultants, or working group members who become invested in defending what replaced their original vision.
Asset stripping, financial engineering, and value extraction– the dismantling or good business practice by vulture investors– may just be what investors learn in top-tier business schools, as the mechanics of what Eddie Lampert did to Sears has now become textbook.
The following examples are drafted so that we can manage our expectations as we consider what it means to create intermediaries across many multiple sectors.
An Enthusiastic Heartfelt Embrace, aka the Kiss of Death
Institutional adoption often begins with public endorsement. Senior leaders reference a new framework in speeches, policy documents, strategic plans, and funding announcements. The framework’s originators are invited to conferences, highlighted in communications, and recognized for their contributions. At this stage, broad agreement is easy because the framework remains defined at a high level of generality.
The more significant questions emerge later when governance, standards, funding, and implementation are established. Early endorsement can create the appearance of alignment before these questions have been resolved. Institutions may begin incorporating the framework’s language into existing programs, policies, and initiatives, suggesting continuity between the new framework and established practice. Meanwhile, the individuals and communities that developed the framework often occupy visible symbolic roles without possessing equivalent influence over how it is defined, administered, or applied. Recognition and authority become increasingly undermined, with the former arriving well before the latter.
Technical Annexation, aka the Standards Process
Standardization is often presented as a necessary step for expanding a framework beyond its original context. Institutions establish working groups, commission experts, and develop operational definitions intended to make concepts measurable, comparable, and administratively manageable. The stated objective is consistency, credibility, and wider adoption.
In practice, the standardization process often privileges forms of knowledge that institutions already know how to measure, audit, and regulate. Quantitative indicators, technical methodologies, and established reporting systems gain prominence because they fit existing administrative structures. Knowledge rooted in relationships, local context, oral traditions, or community practice is frequently deferred, simplified, or treated as supplementary.
Participation by the originating community may continue throughout the process, but decision-making authority increasingly shifts toward those with technical expertise, regulatory influence, or institutional standing. Individual compromises can appear modest when considered separately. Taken together, they can gradually redefine the framework in ways that align it more closely with institutional requirements than with its original purpose.
The Certification Hustle
Certification often emerges as a mechanism for ensuring consistency, accountability, and public trust. Over time, however, the certification process can become a separate source of authority. Recognition depends less on participation in the originating community and more on compliance with standards defined, interpreted, and enforced by external institutions. The ability to navigate audits, documentation requirements, legal procedures, and certification fees becomes increasingly important.
As this process develops, barriers to participation tend to rise. Small-scale practitioners, subsistence communities, and locally governed initiatives may struggle to meet administrative and financial requirements that were not designed around their circumstances.
Larger organizations with greater resources are often better positioned to secure certification and expand under the framework’s banner.
Appeals and governance processes frequently remain within the institutions that administer certification, limiting community influence over how standards evolve. The result is a gradual shift in authority from the communities that developed the framework toward the organizations responsible for managing, verifying, and scaling it.
Market Absorption as Enshitification
Market absorption occurs when a framework attracts investment, institutional support, and pressure to expand. Growth brings visibility and resources, but it also changes what the framework must become in order to move across large organizations, regulatory systems, and financial markets.
Elements that can be standardized, audited, compared, and reported are elevated. Elements rooted in local context, community authority, and place-specific relationships become more difficult to accommodate and gradually lose influence. This has become more commonly seen as enshitification, a result, according to Cory Doctorow who wrote the book on this principle, “of a system that is good to its original users first, then abuses them to benefit business customers, and finally abuses those business customers to claw back all the value for itself.”
The transition is often described as maturation, professionalization, or scaling. Success is increasingly measured through aggregated indicators that demonstrate growth across regions, sectors, or portfolios while obscuring local variation and unintended consequences.
Practitioners entering the field learn the institutionalized version as the accepted model and may never encounter the original debates, objectives, or constraints. Those who continue to raise concerns about what has been lost are often characterized as unrealistic, resistant to change, or attached to an earlier stage of development. The result is not necessarily the abandonment of the framework, but its adaptation to the requirements of the systems that adopted it.
Entrenchment
Entrenchment occurs when organizations absorb criticism without changing their underlying practices. Critical research and alternative perspectives may be acknowledged, but they are treated as peripheral to the work that institutions consider important or practical. Calls for reform are often directed into review processes, advisory groups, or consultations that can discuss problems but lack the authority to address their causes. Over time, the appearance of engagement replaces meaningful change, allowing existing structures, incentives, and assumptions to remain intact.
Case Studies in Detail
REDD+ — The Forest That Became a Financial Instrument
REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) began as a mechanism to keep forests standing by compensating countries for avoided deforestation. The original proposal, from Papua New Guinea and Costa Rica at COP11 in 2005, was built on the principle that forest communities should be the primary beneficiaries.
What happened: The World Bank’s Forest Carbon Partnership Facility, established in 2008, routed all REDD+ finance through national governments. The Cancun Safeguards of 2010 required countries to ‘promote and support’ indigenous rights but created no binding measurement, reporting, or verification mechanism for whether rights were actually upheld. By 2015, multiple independent assessments found that less than 1% of REDD+ finance had reached local communities. The framework’s language — ‘community consent,’ ‘benefit sharing,’ ‘safeguards’ — remained intact while its operational structure systematically excluded the communities it named.
The specific mechanism, and this is deciding outcomes for forest communities right now: governments were made the unit of accountability, and governments hold sovereign authority to define what counts as “adequate consultation.” The party being regulated writes its own definition of compliance. This is not a historical footnote from the Cancun talks. It is the standing arrangement under which REDD+ finance is still flowing in [2026], and no independent body currently has the authority to override a government’s own account of whether it consulted a community properly. The community consent principle reads as real in the safeguard text and functions as absent in practice, because the verification mechanism was controlled by the party whose behavior it was meant to constrain. Every carbon credit sold under a REDD+ project today rests on a consultation record that the government issuing the credit also gets to certify as adequate. Communities living in these forests, and anyone buying carbon offsets tied to REDD+ projects, need to treat that consultation record as unverified until an independent party, not the government being regulated, has the power to check it.
Organic Certification — The Capture of a Movement
The organic farming movement emerged from the 1970s as a critique of industrial agriculture — not merely a set of input restrictions but a philosophy of soil health, community food systems, and farmer autonomy. The USDA National Organic Program, established under the Organic Foods Production Act of 1990, took seven years to implement and was the product of sustained industry lobbying that progressively narrowed the original framework.
What happened: The NOSB (National Organic Standards Board) was established with farmer and consumer representation, but its recommendations became advisory rather than binding. The ‘Big Three’ exemptions — hydroponics, confined animal feeding operations, and synthetic materials added through the National List — each represented a fundamental departure from the original framework’s intent. By 2020, the largest ‘organic’ operations bore no resemblance to the farming philosophy that created the label. The label had been successfully separated from the practice.
The specific mechanism, and this is happening on farms carrying the organic label right now: compliance is defined by inputs, what a farm does not use, rather than by outcomes, what the farm actually produces ecologically. A large-scale operation can meet that standard today simply by avoiding a list of banned substances at industrial scale. Soil health, the relationships between farmer and land, and the community infrastructure the organic movement was built to sustain have no measurement system attached to them under this standard. Nothing without a measurement system can be certified, and nothing certified drives what buyers see on the label. Every dollar spent on organic food right now is rewarded on the basis of a substances checklist, not the ecological outcome the checklist was supposed to stand in for. Shoppers, regulators, and certifying bodies are operating on the assumption that the label still measures soil health and community practice. It does not, and the gap is widening every year the National List grows and every year NOSB recommendations stay advisory.
Anyone who cares about what organic was built to mean needs to push now, in comment periods, in NOSB hearings, in purchasing decisions, for outcome-based ecological standards, before input compliance finishes becoming the only definition of organic that the system recognizes.
Fair Trade — The Plantation Problem
Fair Trade emerged from Nicaraguan coffee cooperatives in the late 1980s as a mechanism for small-scale farmer cooperatives to access premium markets with guaranteed minimum prices. The cooperative model was not incidental — it was the financial instrument. Cooperatives captured the premium collectively, distributed it through democratic governance, and used it to fund community infrastructure.
What happened: Fair Trade USA’s 2011 split from Fairtrade International (FLO) was precipitated specifically by the question of whether large-scale plantations employing wage labor could be certified. Fair Trade USA argued that certifying plantations would dramatically increase volume and market penetration. FLO refused. Fair Trade USA proceeded independently and now certifies plantation-grown products under the same label that the cooperative movement created. In some commodity categories, the majority of ‘Fair Trade’ volume now comes from sources that the original framework was designed to compete against.
The specific mechanism: the label was separated from the governance model it was created to protect. Under the cooperative structure, farmers collectively owned the price premium and voted on how it was spent, using it to fund schools and clinics they built themselves. Once certification could be earned through compliance with input standards, such as minimum wage requirements or documented working conditions, a plantation could meet those standards without changing who owned the land or controlled the business. A shopper buying a certified product may reasonably assume the purchase moved economic power toward the people who grew the crop. The land tenure remained unchanged. The governance remained unchanged. The decision over how surplus value gets used remained with the same owners it always had. A worker on a certified plantation may earn somewhat more than before certification, though that worker still answers to the same employer, under the same ownership structure, with no vote over how the business is run. The certification process did not redistribute the economic power the original framework was designed to redistribute. Rather, it produced a label that makes the difference between a farmer who owns the enterprise and a worker who is merely employed by it difficult to see at the point of sale, which is exactly where that difference was supposed to matter to the buyer. In other words, typical corporate profiteering through duplicitous compliance certification.
Indigenous Data Sovereignty now has a Platform Problem
Indigenous data sovereignty frameworks — including the CARE Principles and the work of the Global Indigenous Data Alliance — assert that indigenous communities have the right to govern data about their peoples, lands, and cultures. The principles are well-developed, internationally endorsed, and increasingly cited in government and institutional data policies.
What is happening now: The institutional response has been to create ‘indigenous data portals’ and ‘community data platforms’ — typically hosted on infrastructure owned by universities, government agencies, or NGOs. Communities are invited to upload their data to these platforms, to set access permissions, and to govern what is shared. The data sovereignty principle is operationally present. The data itself is on someone else’s server, under someone else’s terms of service, in a jurisdiction the community does not control.
The specific mechanism: sovereignty is enacted at the permission layer while ownership is quietly transferred at the infrastructure layer. This is the most technically sophisticated form of capture because it produces documentation, access logs, consent records, governance protocols, that appears to demonstrate compliance with the data sovereignty principle while the underlying platform makes genuine sovereignty structurally impossible. The CARE Principles and similar frameworks need to state this requirement directly: data sovereignty means a community owns the servers its data lives on, controls the legal jurisdiction that data falls under, and holds standing to refuse a university’s, a government’s, or a company’s claim on it. Community control over who is permitted to view data is not a substitute for that ownership. A platform can grant a community every permission setting it asks for and still leave real control with whoever owns the infrastructure. Frameworks should require infrastructure ownership as a condition of calling something data sovereignty, and should stop treating access logs and consent records as sufficient evidence that the principle has been met.
To Consider: Capture-Proof Architecture?
No framework is capture-proof. But certain structural decisions dramatically increase resistance. The following principles are drawn from the cases above — specifically from what the original frameworks either lacked or lost during their capture.
Governance Before Standards
The community that originates a framework must control the governance body before any standards process begins. If the institution controls the working group, it will control the outcome regardless of who else is in the room. Governance membership, quorum rules, veto rights, and amendment procedures must be established in community-controlled form before any invitation to ‘collaborate on standards’ is accepted.
Infrastructure Sovereignty, Not Just Permission Sovereignty
Data sovereignty, measurement sovereignty, and financial sovereignty require owning the infrastructure, not just controlling the permissions layer on someone else’s infrastructure. This is expensive and technically demanding, but it is the only form of sovereignty that survives institutional engagement over time. Permissions can be renegotiated. Infrastructure ownership requires negotiation to transfer.
Community Recall Over Intermediary Roles
Any intermediary role — certifier, translator, data steward, financial agent — should be subject to community recall without destroying the instrument the intermediary was managing. If removing an intermediary requires unwinding the financial or certification structure, the intermediary has de facto captured the community’s dependency. Recall mechanisms must be designed in advance, before any kind of financial value of the intermediary role makes recall structurally costly.
Outcome Measurement, Not Input Compliance
Frameworks that define compliance in terms of prohibited inputs (what you don’t do) are far more vulnerable to capture than frameworks that define compliance in terms of outcomes (what the land, community, or ecological system produces). Input compliance can be achieved at any scale by any actor. Outcome measurement, especially when outcomes are place-specific and community-defined, resists commodification because the measurement itself cannot be standardized away from the place.
Translation Documents, Not Compliance Documents
When engaging international standards bodies, the correct document to bring is a translation document — one that shows where the community framework maps onto international standards where overlap exists, and where it intentionally diverges and why. A compliance document accepts the international standard as the reference point. A translation document asserts the community framework as the reference point. That is the difference between engaging the standard and being absorbed by it.
Name the Capture Cycle Explicitly
The most effective protection against capture is the ability to name what is happening in real time, at the working group table, before the cumulative effect of small compromises has become irreversible. This requires that community representatives in standards processes are briefed on the capture cycle — that they know when they are standing just above a cesspool, and can say so.
Liberating What Has Been Captured
Liberating transformative frameworks has become possible because the unipolar arrangement that made institutional capture uncontested no longer holds without challenge. BRICS expansion, and China’s stewardship of the World Data Organization (WDO) and the World AI Cooperation Organization (WAICO), has opened a second forum for certification, data governance, and standard-setting, one built outside the institutions that have repeatedly captured these frameworks to begin with. To be clear, these new bodies may not adopt every certification standard our movements originally intended, and that is a realistic expectation rather than a concession. What matters is structural. The frameworks captured by Western compliance institutions, organic certification, Fair Trade, REDD+ safeguards, Indigenous data sovereignty principles, now have an alternative governance path available to them for the first time since their capture began. A framework separated from its governance model by one set of institutions can be rebuilt inside another, provided the actual seat at the standard-setting table goes to the communities the framework was designed to serve, not to a new set of intermediaries repeating the same mechanism under a different flag.
The lesson from decades of institutional capture applies directly here: outcomes are determined by who holds governance authority, not by the language a framework uses. A multipolar institutional landscape is the first material condition in decades under which the communities described throughout this document can recapture that authority, rather than continuing to appeal to institutions that were never accountable to them in the first place.
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