The Pocantico Meeting in October 2009 agreed on the need to develop a coordinated strategy and plan of action to address key issues relating to sustainability standards and certification. It also identified some fundamental confusions and tensions that needed to be resolved in order to develop such a plan. During 2010 and the early part of 2011 the Pacific Institute and the ISEAL Alliance undertook further research to understand better some of these key issues, as a first step towards their resolution.
In parallel with the ‘framing’ project, ISEAL developed its comprehensive ‘Scaling Up Strategy’ and ‘Ten Trends’ report. Participants from the Pocantico meeting were interviewed between March and May 2011 on two key questions:
- How do certification systems bring about desired social and environmental change?
- What are the major issues/ trends that the sustainability standards community needs to address to move forward?
The results of the interviews showed considerable convergence in understanding of the ways that sustainability standards achieve change, for example by:
- harnessing the profit motive to drive more sustainable practices;
- providing tools which can work where there are public policy gaps and/or failures of implementation;
- engaging and empowering affected stakeholders in the definition of more sustainable practices;
- providing campaigners and the public with new ‘solutions-oriented’ tools to promote positive change;
- raising awareness, building knowledge and engaging consumers, civil society and politicians, as a precursor for greater long-term change.
However, key areas of divergence were also identified, including:
- disagreement on the most effective approach to influence markets, with some considering the targeting consumers to be fundamental, whilst others believing that the focus should be on producers, buyers and retailers;
- differences of understanding of the relationship between government/ policy-making and the use of non-governmental standards, with some believing that private sustainability standards may undermine the proper role of government in setting sustainability requirements and validate an inappropriate role for ‘the market’, whilst others believe that standards may be a better mechanism to meet sustainability challenges given the demonstrated failure of governmental and intergovernmental processes;
- different opinions about the relative merits of ‘minimum requirement’, ‘universal good practice’ and ‘best practice’ standards, and the relationships between them.
Key trends and challenges that were identified at this stage included:
- the increasing demand of business users to lead the development of standards designed to meet their needs for both comprehensiveness and simplicity, and the conflict this may create with more ‘democratic’ multi-stakeholder models for standards development, and single issue or single commodity focused standards systems.
- the growing political and economic importance of key emerging economies such as the ‘BRIC’ countries, and the implications for sustainability standards systems in relation to both production and consumption.
- the need to understand better the appropriate role of the state in engaging with, supporting or using ‘non-governmental’ standards, for example in the context of international, regional and bilateral trade agreements, as well as in state regulation.
- the concern of some civil society organizations that ‘sustainability standards’ may be used to legitimize practices that they consider to be unacceptable, even if they result in improvements compared to earlier practices.
These results were documented and used as preparation for a second meeting of standards practitioners and civil society organizations, scheduled to take place in London in June 2011.
ChangeTheoryEmergingIssuesSynopsis.pdf