Rebalancing Life Cycle Assessment (LCA): A Development-Just Framework for Palm Oil and the Global South

Abstract

Life cycle assessment (LCA) is indispensable for identifying environmental hotspots, improving production systems, and supporting credible climate action. Yet its results are never independent of choices about system boundaries, data, allocation, temporal horizons, land-use history, and responsibility. This article develops a qualitative literature review of how those choices can distribute burdens and benefits unevenly between the Global North and the Global South, using Indonesian palm oil as an analytically revealing case. The review synthesizes recent scholarship on LCA methodology, life cycle sustainability assessment, climate justice, carbon accounting, palm-oil production, certification, and smallholder livelihoods. It finds that current practice can become development-blind when global databases inadequately represent tropical systems, historical land-use emissions are applied without contextual differentiation, producer-country mitigation is absorbed into downstream claims, and social or developmental functions are treated as external to the assessment. The article does not argue for weaker environmental standards or preferential treatment for palm oil. Instead, it proposes a Development-Just LCA framework built on procedural co-governance, local data sovereignty, geographical and temporal representativeness, symmetric system boundaries, transparent uncertainty, coherent treatment of national and product claims, distributional incidence reporting, and safeguards for the right to development. Applied to Indonesian palm oil, the framework would distinguish expansion from replanting, recognize methane avoidance and productivity improvement, and reduce disproportionate compliance burdens on smallholders. A fairer LCA would improve scientific credibility, policy legitimacy, and environmental effectiveness by making global sustainability assessment more representative, contestable, and accountable.