The London meeting built on the platform established at Pocantico the previous year, clarifying key issues and exploring unresolved challenges for the social and environmental standards movement.
Following the London meeting the project team committed to two specific pieces of work to address these challenges: to commission research on the relationship between sustainability standards and public governance, and to develop a technical ‘meta-narrative’ that would identify and respond to the fundamental questions that the movement needs to answer to convince policy makers, civil society and the general public of the value of sustainability standards.
Clarifying an agreed technical narrative was seen as a necessary step towards more coordinated communication and potential collective action. In some cases the narrative would represent an agreed position, in others a recognition or clarification of an issue and a commitment to seek solutions in partnership with other stakeholders.
The Pacific Institute led the drafting of this ‘meta-narrative’, for subsequent review by the meeting participants. The current draft can be downloaded below.
The document does not have any formal endorsement by the individuals and organizations that participated in its development. It simply represents the project team’s best effort to articulate a consensus position of the participants’ extensive discussions in Pocantico and London. However, the project team believes that this narrative represents a widely shared vision of the sustainability standards movement’s objectives, identifies key challenges that the movement faces, and maps a pathway to help different actors in the movement to address these challenges successfully.
The meta-narrative is written primarily for the standards movement/ community and those familiar with standards systems. It is written in fairly technical language, and incorporates a level of complexity in trying to address complex issues.
However, it is also the intention that the technical narrative should provide a framework for communication with the wider public, including policy makers and civil society representatives who are not standards experts.
To serve this second audience, the project team returned to the project’s original proposition: “to use ‘framing’ to communicate the technical complexity of standards and certification in ways that are more easily accessible to stakeholders”.
The following pages describe the project team’s work to achieve this. A short summary of the meta-narrative document is given on the Theory of Change page, and a simplified account, using the communication tools developed as a result of the project’s work is presented on the Sample Narrative page.
