The Pacific Institute’s first activity was to commission Real Reason to undertake a ‘situation assessment’ to try to answer three fundamental questions about standards and certification:
- How do people—both experts and non-experts— make sense of the complex and varied landscape of international voluntary social and environmental standards and certification?
- Are dominant conceptions of standards in alignment with those of the standards community itself? If not, what is needed to help people understand the importance and value of these standards?
- How might different ways of reasoning about standards impact efforts of the standards community to achieve their objectives?
The assessment quickly noted that practitioners and others referred to ‘international voluntary social and environmental standards’ in multiple ways, with somewhat different implications. The term ‘sustainability standards’ emerged later in the project, and now seems to be gaining general acceptance. This is the term that has been adopted for this website.
The full situation assessment report is available for download at the bottom of this page. The following sections provide a brief summary of the approach and the report’s the key findings.
Communication Goals
At the start of the assessment standards practitioners were interviewed to define the key communication goals they hoped that framing could help them achieve. Key goals that were identified were:
- Broadening awareness of standards and certification
- Identifying accessible lay terminology for communications
- Locating simpler models that clarify standards by analogy
- Distinguishing among standards systems on the basis of credibility
- Ensuring that people’s understandings of standards systems are accurate
- Establishing standards as something positive and beneficial
- Conveying the overall importance of standards and certification
No framing approach is likely to optimize all of these elements simultaneously. The project’s goal was to use framing to achieve as many of these goals as possible without compromising integrity or core values.
Three Contextual Framings
The ‘situation analysis’ identified three primary ways in which sustainability standards are discussed by practitioners and presented in their literature. These descriptions provide the backdrop against which conversations about standards are held, and create a conceptual landscape that will need to be navigated when standards are explained. In this project we subsequently refer to them as ‘contextual framings’.
The three contextual framings are a ‘market framing’, a ‘governance framing’ and a ‘communication framing’. Each framing reflects a different context in which sustainability standards may be discussed, but they also imply different cognitive models for thinking about sustainability standards, and for explaining what standards are about. These models will affect the ways that audiences understand standards, and the assumptions they make about how standards work and about the values they represent.
1. Market Framing
A market framing is invoked when practitioners talk of branding strategies, market access, improved pricing, demand for products and services and such like. A market framing imposes market reasoning on the discussion of standards. This means that beliefs about markets and market functions – not social policy or sustainability – frame the discussion and fill in any gaps in communication. A market framing has a number of advantages in some of the contexts in which sustainability standards are used, but also suffers from a number of disadvantages. A market framing:
- Speaks to business interests; it signals to businesses that they can think of standards as their “home turf”;
- Connects with people’s familiar consumer experiences and provides accessible language;
- “Makes sense” to many in contexts in which there is a strong orientation toward the primacy of the market.
But a market framing also has a number of disadvantages in terms of the communications objectives that practitioners had previously identified, particularly in conversation with civil society organizations:
- Market framing naturally highlights market principles—such as cost efficiency and profit seeking—rather than the ideals and values of the standards community; it also increases the overall credibility challenges that the standards community faces, by facilitating misunderstandings about the roles and motivations of different actors;
- A market focus is a focus on the strategy for achieving change, rather than on the motivation for change;
- Members of the public are viewed only through their roles as consumers; an overall market framing may even encourage a passive stance with regard to broader social and environmental action: once incentives are in place in the market system, change is understood to follow somewhat automatically.
2. Governance Framing
A governance framing is invoked when standards are described in terms of process and participation, transparency, inclusiveness and democratic decision-making. It is explicitly referred to when practitioners claim that standards systems are filling gaps in governance, or support better accountability. As for other framings, a governance framing has advantages and disadvantages. Some disadvantages are that:
- The concept of governance may be closely enough associated with an idea of institutionalized government as to be interpreted as undue by vocal individuals, groups, and institutions already opposed to “governmental interference.”
- Governance is not an everyday concept. Its understanding likely varies much more from person to person than does a more familiar concept such as “education.” Its current level of abstraction may make it elusive and hard to conceptualize—and therefore challenging to trigger in a controlled way.
- When applied to voluntary social and environmental standards developed and administered by NGOs, it requires a crucial missing idea, which is non-governmental governance.
But it also offers a number of advantages:
- It offers more than an individual consumer role for audience members (e.g.,citizen, leader, community member…);
- It supports the idea of power and authority residing in representative structures rather than private financial interests;
- It aligns closely with values of the standards community as represented in the data evaluated—values that have the power to connect with and motivate audiences.
3. Communication Framing
The third major contextual framing that was identified was a communication framing. This framing is invoked by language that focuses on standards (and labelling) as a tool for communication. Practitioners talk about labels as engaging consumers in a conversation, communicating a message, communicating expectations and requirements and such like. It is also typically supported by the use of visual imagery – face-to-face photographs of producers at work, looking to camera as if about to engage in conversation with the viewer.
A communication framing has a number of distinct advantages:
- It offers a simplifying perspective on standards and certification which draws on familiar language, including colloquial expressions, and is highly accessible to lay audiences;
- It supports and facilitates conversation about accountability
- It provides a tool for tapping into natural empathy
But this framing also presents challenges:
- It permits continued lack of clarity about the complex internal workings of standards and certification systems
- It may focus energy and concern on simulated connections with individual “others” rather than on broader structural problems—a potential kind of complacency
- It is missing a role with natural moral or political authority for standards systems to fill; interlocutors are underspecified.
Other less common framings
The situation analysis identified a number of additional, less common framings. Whilst these were not dominant at the time of the analysis, it would be possible to build on these to supplement another approach, or even to develop an alternative, dominant framing in future. These less common framings related to the concepts of
- Community Creation / Identification,
- Practice,
- Guideposts or Guides,
- Respect,
- Expectation, and
- Filter.
Two of these in particular (guideposts/guides and filter) gained salience during further discussion on potential proactive framing of standards, and were developed further later in the project.
Towards a proactive framing of sustainability standards
The analysis up to this point has been essentially observational – noting the language that is actually used to talk about standards and certification, and trying to understand the implications.
The ultimate objective is to move forwards, to use language proactively to improve the understanding of sustainability standards in the future.
But to do this, there needs to be agreement on what it is that the standards community is trying to communicate. What is the underlying story that the community wishes to tell? And in carrying out its situation analysis Real Reason observed that this was not yet clear.
In fact, Real Reason identified three major theories of change in the advocacy work of the standards community, each of which can be associated with one of the main framings discussed above:
- Market: market forces naturally select for best practices, so the best will naturally thrive
- Governance: governments will adopt quality standards that were originally voluntary into mandatory policy
- Communication: people will make good choices as long as we provide the best information, because people are basically good
Each of these change theories profiles a different key “actor” (i.e., “the invisible hand,” governments, individuals) and a different mechanism for change. Before moving forward to develop the language for communicating standards effectively, the community would need to agree on the story it is trying to tell. What are the values and vision that the community shares, and what route does the community believes it should take to reach its goal?
These questions set the scene for the next steps of the project.
The final step would then be to identify an overarching framing (or combination of framings) that would be suited to communicating the community’s values, vision and theory of change most effectively, and to develop the conceptual and linguistic tools to support this framing most effectively.
