The Quality of Standards - An Assessment Framework to Measure the Quality of Organisations Producing and Maintaining Voluntary Sustainability Standard Systems

Abstract

This research paper has tried to create an assessment framework for good governance in voluntary sustainability standard systems. After introducing standard systems and the good governance principle as well as the development and history thereof, the paper moves on to describe the usefulness of a combination of these two elements. Having identified a dominance of good governance assessments from the public and private sector, the research proceeded to analyse those existing initiatives, effectively extracting individual criteria that seemed, based on a review of the functioning of standards, suitable to the standards context. With a collection of twenty-seven public and private initiatives and researches with an uncountable number of criteria, the process of creating the actual framework was initiated, eventually leading to a set of 38 criteria that were split into five categories created and named after the five good governance principles of the UNDP; Legitimacy and voice, direction, performance, accountability and transparency and fairness. Finally, to test how accurate this first version of the framework was, it was tested on the FSC, PEFC, UTZ/RA and GCP all of which are large standards operating in either the forestry or coffee sector. Despite a planned two-round assessment phase of which the first would be based on publicly available information and the latter based on expert input from those organisations, it was only possible to do the first round of this assessment due to time constraints of the research. In the end, the assessment framework that has been created before the assessment phase is evaluated and, although it is quite incomplete at this point, should be able to provide an objective good governance assessment for any type of voluntary sustainability standard. Once more input from experts and the conclusions of this paper are incorporated, a more complete version of the framework could be produced and made universally applicable as an objective tool to evaluate good governance in voluntary sustainability standard systems.