ISEAL Alliance

How voluntary standards measure the impact of what they do is becoming more and more important to the standards themselves and the business world that adopts them. On eve of the launch of our Impacts Code, we give an explanation as to why it’s needed.

Voluntary standards and certification have become ubiquitous tools to recognise and improve production practices across most industries and sectors. At ISEAL we see the growth in this movement first hand through the growing number of new initiatives that approach us to learn about how to set standards systems in ways that are credible. Voluntary standards systems are not a magic bullet but they are useful market-based tools to drive improved social and environmental performance. The question is how useful are they and how can they be made more effective?

The ISEAL Alliance worked with our members and other stakeholders in a two year consultative process to figure out how to answer these questions. The result is the ISEAL Code of Good Practice for Assessing the Impacts of Social and Environmental Standards Systems (Impacts Code for short) which was approved in June of this year and which will be formally launched at an event in Sao Paulo, Brazil on 16 November.

The ISEAL Impacts Code responds to the need for a common approach to measuring sustainability impacts. It is no longer sufficient to say that a standards system is successful because there are this many hectares certified or that many workers in certified facilities. We need to know what the social, environmental and economic impacts have been on the ground and we need to know the extent to which certification has been a driving force behind those changes. Essentially, we need to know where certification is working, why and how we can improve its impacts.

The challenge is that this is not easily done. As anyone who has sought to measure the impacts of an action in any real life situation knows, it is difficult, if not impossible to isolate the changes due to that intervention from all the other factors that are affecting the situation. Did the uptake of better agricultural practices result from an increase in producer capacity building support, changes in environmental conditions, peer pressure or the market incentive of certification? Or something else entirely?

The ISEAL Impacts Code provides the framework to start to answer that question. It requires standards systems to put a monitoring and evaluation programme in place through which they can measure their immediate and medium-term results and begin to show how their programmes address critical global sustainability challenges. Standards systems will work with their stakeholders to define which sustainability issues they seek to address, map out how they intend to bring about the desired change, assess whether and how well they are progressing towards that desired change and learn from their assessment to improve the relevance of their standard and effectiveness of their strategies.

This is a long-term process – making lasting change does not happen overnight. However, with the ISEAL Impacts Code we now have the framework to measure our progress. Standards systems recognise the importance of knowing how well their programmes are working, are eager to develop their monitoring and evaluation capacity and, in some cases, are already collecting data.

The Fairtrade Labelling Organization has been collecting data through their certification system for the past three years and is now beginning to produce evaluations. The results are interesting and the knowledge gained is being used for strategic development of the organisation. Similarly, the Rainforest Alliance has been monitoring aspects of its forest, agriculture and tourism programmes for a number of years and has been publishing evaluations based on monitoring data.

All ISEAL members are required to comply with the ISEAL Impacts Code over a three year period, with the first assessment of progress by the end of 2011.