The ultimate objective of this project was to develop tools to help communicate the aims and objectives of sustainability standards more effectively to civil society, policy makers, businesses and the general public.
The project began with a ‘cognitive linguistic analysis’ of the language that practitioners and others use to explain the aims, objectives and practices of sustainability standards and certification. The subsequent focus of the work with practitioners and civil society representatives at the Pocantico and London meetings was on identifying, understanding and resolving fundamental ‘technical’ issues facing the movement. This work resulted in the technical outputs of the project: the literature review, research on sustainability standards and governance, and the sustainability standards meta-narrative described elsewhere on this site.
In the final stages of the project, the team returned to the issues of ‘framing’ and communications.
Real Reason, the organization that carried out the original cognitive linguistic analysis for the project back in 2009, worked with us again to help us identify better ways to convey the critical nature and value of sustainability standards based on the discussions that had now been completed.
Real Reason facilitated a series of structured conference calls over a three-month period, working with the Pacific Institute and OneWorldStandards to boil the technical work down to its essence, and help us use this to inspire improved communications.
Early discussion focused on the core elements of the movement’s vision, and its motivational value. The fundamental vision that emerged from our process was one of ‘sustainability’. The movement struggles to agree a single definition of the word, and can acknowledge that its meaning is contested and (in part in consequence!) difficult to communicate clearly to the public. But there is still broad and strong agreement that ‘sustainability’ is the ultimate objective.
Moreover, there is broad agreement about the key elements of sustainability. At the most basic level possible, sustainability means respecting both people and the planet. Its elements include:
- Behaving fairly and giving opportunity to people today (including people who produce the things that we consume; people in our own, local communities; as well as people beyond our local communities and in other countries);
- Behaving fairly and giving opportunity to future generations (recognizing that our current activities affect the lives of future generations and that we have a responsibility to allow future generations the opportunity to enjoy their lives at least as fully as we enjoy our own);
- Recognizing that the quality of peoples’ lives are bound to the health of the planet, both as a matter of self-interest (through the provision of clean water, clean air, food and materials) and through the continuing opportunity to enjoy the natural world as a value in its own right;
- Recognizing that we have choices to make, and that we have to balance the differing interests of people and planet over time. This requires systems of governance, and doing it fairly requires good governance.
Sustainability, and the expression of its key elements, can provide the underlying ‘motivational framing’ for the communication of sustainability standards and certification. They explain why the community does what it does: what it is trying to achieve, and why it believes it is important.
The project proposes that linking the work the movement’s work consistently to ‘sustainability’, and to the key elements of sustainability, should be an important step towards its effective communication.
Sustainability is of course a broad cause. The second part of the framing challenge was to identify ways to communicate the special role of sustainability standards and certification within this general context.
To do this we returned to the three primary framings of markets, governance and communication that had been identified back in 2009. As noted in the original research, each of these framings represents reasonable and valuable ways of thinking about sustainability standards and certification, but each has a number of drawbacks. Moreover, they not only represent three different ways of discussing standards and certification, but three different contexts in which the discussion takes place. We cannot choose one or other context as taking precedence: they are all essential. We need some other way to talk about standards and certification that we can apply in all these contexts.
Over the process, we identified two different metaphors that we found useful for explaining sustainability standards more generally: one of standards as Maps, and another of standards as Filters.
In this model, standards and certification can be viewed from two perspectives. From one perspective they are all about providing guidance, providing maps, helping people understand and navigate complexity. This is perhaps the perspective that is most obvious to producers, to manufacturers and people who have to actually implement or follow standards. It’s more of an ‘experts’ view. It recognizes that sustainability is complicated, and it’s hard to know how to navigate the complexity. ‘We want to do the right thing – if only we knew how.’ In this model standards and certifications are tools to help people find their way.
The second perspective is perhaps more focused on the outcomes of standards and certification. Standards and certification have acted as a filter. I don’t need and may not want to know how they did it, but I know that I’m now getting the good stuff. Standards and certification have filtered out the confusion and cleared up the complexity. Thanks to standards and certification I can be confident that the products and services I use are ok. They are more likely to be sustainable (treat people fairly, treat the planet fairly) because unsustainable products and services (which don’t do this) have already been filtered out.
In addition to the development of a basic conceptual model, a preliminary ‘word bank’ was developed, together with basic guidance on the model’s application. The word bank includes phrases and examples of their use as they could be applied to the communication of sustainability standards in markets-, governance- and communications contexts.
We hope standards practitioners and civil society groups will find the tools useful, and will use them in support of their own communication work.
The ultimate test, of course, is whether these ideas work in practice. Do they make the communication of sustainability standards and communication more effective? The project’s final work, therefore, was to apply the tools in the development of a demonstration sustainability standards website.