Michael Vandenbergh is a member of a 12-member multi-sector expert panel that has released a report on sustainability certification.
The report, Toward Sustainability: The Roles and Limits of Certification, describes what is known and what is most important to learn about the performance and potential of voluntary standards and certification.
In addition to Vandenbergh, an environmental law expert who directs Vanderbilt University’s multi-disciplinary Climate Change Research Network, members of the steering committee that produced the consensus report included 11 other experts from businesses, universities and nongovernmental organizations: Mike Barry (Marks & Spencer), Ben Cashore (Yale University), Jason Clay (World Wildlife Fund), Michael Fernandez (Mars, Incorporated), Louis Lebel (Chiang Mai University), Tom Lyon (University of Michigan), Patrick Mallet (ISEAL Alliance), Kira Matus (London School of Economics), Peter Melchett (Soil Association), Jan Kees Vis (Unilever), and Tensie Whelan (Rainforest Alliance).
The process was chaired by Patrick Mallet of the ISEAL Alliance and facilitated by RESOLVE, a nonprofit collaboration and mediation organization.
Through a consensus-based process that came to be called the State-of-Knowledge Assessment of Standards and Certification, the committee found substantial evidence of improvements in social, environmental, and economic practices resulting from certification at the site level, as well as some instances of unintended effects, positive and negative. However, they also found that the evidence of broader or longer-term impacts is more limited. In many cases, the committee discovered, research has difficulty attributing outcomes directly to certification. Consequently, committee members believe that additional coordinated research on the impacts of certification, as well as greater collaborative effort to systematically collect data, is a top priority.
The committee also found that the indirect impacts of certification are substantial and probably greater than the direct impacts. Voluntary standards and certification may be most effective, they believe, as part of a suite of integrated public and private sustainability tools. Standards and certification are useful complements to regulatory policies and other private voluntary sustainability initiatives, filling gaps and to introducing incentives for supply chain innovation. This speaks to the need for designing voluntary standards to work better in concert with other approaches.
“Certification and other private environmental governance systems are an increasingly important way to complement public regulation and fill gaps at the global and domestic levels,” Vandenbergh said. “The emergence of these private governance systems represents a major new development in environmental law and policy.”
To produce the report, the committee commissioned four in-depth academic reviews of the peer-reviewed and gray literature focused on the certification of forestry products, wild-caught and aquaculture seafood, and agricultural farming systems. Additional commissioned reviews examined business drivers for engaging with certification, a typology of private governance tools, methodological approaches for improving research on the impacts of certification, and other research contributing to analysis. Based on the preliminary, combined review findings and subsequent outreach meetings, members of the committee drafted and refined the main chapters of the report in 2011. These chapters were then subject to peer review late last year and have been finalized, along with report recommendations and an executive summary.
The Toward Sustainability report explores:
- The current state of knowledge regarding the environmental, social, and economic impacts of voluntary certification;
- How the design of certification systems has evolved, and design elements common to successful systems;
- How businesses, governments, NGOs, foundations, and consumers make decisions about using or supporting certification;
- Interacting approaches such as government regulation – and how they affect certification outcomes;
- Trends that could significantly impact standards and certification systems in the future; and
- Recommendations for improving the performance of certification systems, and outlining priority areas for future research.
“This report will help scholars, policymakers and funders evaluate existing certification systems and identify new uses for these systems,” Vandenbergh said.
“This report marks a significant achievement,” said committee chair Patrick Mallet. “For the first time, the body of evidence for what we know about voluntary standards and certification has been pulled together and synthesized in one place. Voluntary standards are becoming increasingly prevalent, and this report provides directions for how we can make them more effective.”