The world of corporate responsibility standards can seem large and confusing. With so many different standards, it is often bewildering. Sustainability standards feed into a broad spectrum of other standards and finding the appropriate standard for your organization's needs is vital.
This short book cuts through the confusion. It explains: 1. The pros and cons of using standards to improve sustainability performance 2. The variety of standards out there 3. A map showing how some of the most prominent sustainability standards relate to each other 4. A decision tree to help with choosing the type of standard that will be most helpful to you 5. For some of the most influential standards, a thumbnail description of what they are actually about 6. Some tips for putting standards into practice.
The world of corporate responsibility standards can seem large and confusing. With so many different standards, it is often bewildering. Sustainability standards feed into a broad spectrum of other standards and finding the appropriate standard for your organization's needs is vital.
This short book cuts through the confusion. It explains: 1. The pros and cons of using standards to improve sustainability performance 2. The variety of standards out there 3. A map showing how some of the most prominent sustainability standards relate to each other 4. A decision tree to help with choosing the type of standard that will be most helpful to you 5. For some of the most influential standards, a thumbnail description of what they are actually about 6. Some tips for putting standards into practice.
Making the Most of Standards: The Sustainability Professional's Guide
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Overview
The world of corporate responsibility standards can seem large and confusing. With so many different standards, it is often bewildering. Sustainability standards feed into a broad spectrum of other standards and finding the appropriate standard for your organization's needs is vital.
This short book cuts through the confusion. It explains: 1. The pros and cons of using standards to improve sustainability performance 2. The variety of standards out there 3. A map showing how some of the most prominent sustainability standards relate to each other 4. A decision tree to help with choosing the type of standard that will be most helpful to you 5. For some of the most influential standards, a thumbnail description of what they are actually about 6. Some tips for putting standards into practice.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781351275781 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Taylor & Francis |
| Publication date: | 09/08/2017 |
| Series: | DoShorts |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 80 |
| File size: | 532 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Making the Most of Standards
The Sustainability Professional's Guide
By Adrian Henriques
Do Sustainability
Copyright © 2012 Adrian HenriquesAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-909293-26-7
CHAPTER 1
The Variety of Standards
A STANDARD IS AN AGREED SET OF CHARACTERISTICS, including ways of behaving or doing something. Often the agreed way of doing something arises out of common practice – standards for technical areas like the specification of screw threads are an example. But when talking about sustainability, often standards are a way of trying to achieve common practice in an area in which it may not yet widely exist, such as the measurement of carbon dioxide emissions.
The topic of standards is complex as there are many varieties and ways of classifying and understanding them. This section takes a functional approach, asking questions such as 'what do they do?' and 'how do they do it?'
Who says so?
Perhaps the most important aspect of a standard is 'who says' that it is a good way to do things. This governs the legitimacy of the standard.
By numbers, the majority of standards have been produced by ISO (the International Standards Organisation) or its members, the national standards bodies. There are tens of thousands of ISO standards alone, mostly covering technical activities that have been agreed principally by commercial organisations. However, there are some important ISO standards very relevant to sustainability, including ISO 14001 on environmental management systems and ISO 26000 on organisational social responsibility.
Other standards have been produced by civil society. These include many of the prominent standards for particular aspects of sustainability. Fairtrade (principally for ensuring socially acceptable standards of production) is an example.
The public sector can also produce standards. Some of these concern the operational activities of the public sector itself, while others are the result of the political process. Those standards resulting from the political process are called 'laws' or regulations. (Standards produced by non-state actors are therefore often described as 'voluntary regulation' or 'self-regulation'.) At the international level, the laws become treaties. For sustainability, some of the most important standards include the human rights and the ILO (International Labour Organisation) conventions labour rights.
Standards can sometimes 'move' from one sponsor to another. Standards for organic food were originally produced by civil society but are now supported by governments. Other standards produced by civil society will incorporate elements such as labour rights within them: SA8000 on labour conditions is an example.
Given that the answer to the question 'who says so' governs the legitimacy of the standard, it follows that the most powerful standards, from the point of view of legitimacy, are those which have included all sectors and many different parties in their development and maintenance. The FSC standard (for sustainable wood products) is a good example.
What do they say?
There are two big groups of standards: guidance standards and specification standards. Most people naturally assume that all standards dictate certain practices. Standards that don't dictate something may not really feel like standards. However, many standards relevant to sustainability are guidance standards of just this kind. That means they provide recommendations, but do not specify requirements that have to be met. And there is no mechanism for proving that you have abided by the standard.
Guidance standards include types of standard like industry (or civil society or government) Codes of Practice. Others express aspirations for ideal behaviour. The Global Compact, which sets out a series of economic, social and environmental aspirations, is an example of this type.
Specification standards set requirements for how things must be. These have to be written very precisely so that it is possible to tell whether or not things have actually been done as prescribed. This makes them especially boring, technical documents – whatever their worth in relation to sustainability. ISO 14001 and OHSAS 18001 (for health and safety systems) are specification standards. Many specification standards also contain elements of guidance.
Another useful distinction between different standards is between those that concern the process of managing something and those that describe the actual sustainability performance of a company. An example of a process standard would be ISO 14001, which is concerned with how environmental performance should be managed, but does not cover what performance should be aimed at. An example of a standard that describes actual performance would be ISO 26000 (at least in some areas). ISO 26000 covers many substantive issues including human rights, consumer marketing and community development.
What are they about?
The 'subject matter' of a standard is the set of characteristics that the standard is trying to standardise. For sustainability standards these may be social issues (such as the labour conditions of those cutting flowers), environmental issues (like the quantity of pollution an industrial process emits) or economic issues (including the extent of corruption). There are many standards that deal with very specific issues and products only, such as the Roundtable for Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO).
How do you know?
The process for discovering whether or not an activity or product conforms to a specification ('requirements') standard, or complies with the law, is called variously 'monitoring', 'auditing' or 'providing assurance'.
The auditing process may result in a statement or certificate that gives the auditor's opinion on whether or not the standard has been followed. Such standards are called 'certifiable'. See the box below on whether this is a good idea.
The whole idea of applying standards may appear somewhat recursive. So, there are standards for auditing, such as AA1000 AS for auditing sustainability reports. Moreover, the process for determining who is qualified to be an auditor is sometimes itself standardised, when it is generally called 'accreditation'.
Having parties
Sometimes an organisation may check on its own performance in relation to a standard, as is required by ISO management systems. This is sometimes called 'first party' auditing. Large organisations may well have an internal department concerned with providing such 'internal audits'. When another organisation does it, it becomes a second party audit. This can happen when a purchasing organisation checks up on the sustainability performance of one of its suppliers. When someone who is independent of both organisations, in the sense that they have no direct interest in the outcome, does the auditing, it may be called 'third party' auditing.
However, the independence of an auditor will never be complete. Someone will be paying, and that is usually either the organisation itself or one of their suppliers.
Labels and initiatives
Labels are miniature, logo-like certificates typically attached to products, websites or reports. The organic label on a carton of milk is an example. The legal and commercial conditions for the use of a label are usually tightly controlled. Often a key condition of the use of a label is that the product has been sourced, manufactured or produced in accordance with a standard. This book is not concerned with labelling schemes directly, although two standards that underpin labels (Fairtrade and FSC) are described later.
Sustainability initiatives are projects with a sustainability purpose in mind. Sometimes that purpose will include the development of a standard that contributes to the ends that the initiative would like to achieve. Sometimes the standard is the sole product that the initiative is aiming at. Most of the standards described in this book are the result of the activities of an initiative.
Types of standard
There are many different sorts of sustainability standard that may be relevant to an organisation. This section describes some of the more prominent standards in brief. There is no single, completely satisfactory way to classify standards. For example, a standard may be broad in one sense (covering all aspects of sustainability) but designed only for a particular sector; or designed for all sectors but focusing only on one aspect for sustainability.
CHAPTER 2Pros and Cons of Standards
SUSTAINABILITY STANDARDS HAVE DETRACTORS as well as champions. There are cogent arguments on both sides. The advantages and disadvantages are summarised below.
The advantages of standards are:
• Good advice. They provide a source of good practice. In whatever the area of standardisation, the advice or requirements within the standard can help with sound ways of dealing with sustainability issues. Depending on the particular standard, this could include environmental issues, human rights or labour practices, for example.
• Gain business. They can be a condition of doing business. If your customer demands adherence to a standard (or else they won't buy from you) then following a standard becomes a condition of business. This sort of pressure tends to follow the supply chain. The international standard on environmental management systems, ISO 14001, has propagated in this way down the supply chain, and labour standards such as SA8000 are becoming increasingly important for the same reason.
• Discipline. They often provide a systematic and disciplined way of operating in some area. It is always possible to develop an effective in-house way of doing things. But where standards provide a ready-made approach to follow, they can short-cut the work involved.
• Learning and innovation. The process of understanding and adopting a standard can be an important learning process for both individuals within an organisation and the organisation itself. The adoption of a standard can provide a new perspective with which to view the relevant business area, which can have unexpected spin-offs.
The disadvantages of standards are:
• Obscure. Standards are usually written to be precise. As a result they are often obscure documents that are difficult to understand. This will usually result in a few individuals within the organisation becoming experts and championing the standard.
• Tick-box mentality. The practice that standards suggest or prescribe is often rather bureaucratic and heavy on documentation. Attention can get diverted to following the checklist, rather than to promoting the behaviour (and spirit) that the standard intended.
• Don't work. It is not always clear that standards deliver what they say they will. Do environmental management system standards actually deliver better environmental performance, for example? There are cases where they do and cases where they don't. The jury, so far, is out.
CHAPTER 3A Map of Standards
Standards Map
The map of standards shows some of the key relationships between different types of standard.
CHAPTER 4Standards
THIS SECTION PRESENTS STANDARDS in four groups. The first group are the two 'fundamental standards' that underlie the social aspect of almost all other sustainability standards: human rights and labour rights. The second group consists of broad-ranging standards that cover all aspects of sustainability, typically at a high level only. The third group are those that directly address sustainability-related organisational practices, including their management and reporting. The fourth group are 'special purpose' standards. These address a particular issue or problem in more detail and may include aspects of labour rights together with corresponding management practices, for example.
Fundamental standards
Human rights
Background and purpose
Human rights are unlike most of the other standards in this book: they are not voluntary agreements between companies and stakeholders or even statutory regulations. Human rights derive from agreements between states. The seminal document is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) developed by the United Nations in 1948, which covered a range of issues including discrimination and property rights as well as political rights. The UDHR led to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) in the mid-1960s – and also to the European Convention on Human Rights in the 1950s. However, there are a great many human rights treaties and conventions dealing with particular human rights issues in detail.
The conventions, when they have been adopted and translated into national law, provide rights for citizens in relation to states; those states then have a duty to satisfy the rights. The conventions do not, directly, describe any specific obligations on companies.
The various human rights conventions are embodied and referred to by many of the other standards covered in this book, including ISO 26000, the Global Compact and the GRI.
Development and governance
The implementation of the human rights conventions is monitored by the UN Human Rights Council, composed of 47 members elected from UN member states, which reviews the human rights records of all member states.
It is important to note that a number of countries have not adopted various human rights conventions or parts of them. To date, the United States has not ratified the ICESCR and China has not ratified the ICCPR.
Nature of standard
There has been considerable debate between companies and civil society as to the applicability of human rights to companies. In 2011, after global consultations by Special UN Representative John Ruggie, the UN adopted the 'Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights for implementing the UN "Protect, Respect and Remedy" Framework'.
The framework includes all human rights, including those labour rights defined in the Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work, within the definition of human rights. It states that:
1. the state has a duty to protect human rights
2. companies have a duty to respect human rights
3. states should ensure that where human rights abuses occur, there are effective remedies available.
The standard in practice
The principles for implementation state that businesses should:
• avoid contributing directly or indirectly to human rights abuses
• develop human rights policies
• publicly state their commitment to respect human rights
• conduct due diligence assessments of their actual and potential human rights impacts and track the effectiveness of their responses to such impacts
• publicly report on how human rights are addressed, where risks of abuse are severe
• co-operate with state-based remediation
• establish their own grievance mechanisms available to all affected stakeholders.
Note that while human rights might appear to address only the social dimension of sustainability, some human rights instruments directly concern economic issues. In fact, all aspects of sustainability, including environmental issues can give rise to human rights issues and possibly abuses.
Websites.
http://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/Business/Pages/ SRSGTransCorpIndex.aspx
http://www2.ohchr.org/english/law/
Labour rights
Background and purpose
Labour rights, like human rights, are not agreements with individual companies directly. Labour rights result from the labour standards produced by the International Labour Organisation (ILO). The ILO is a tripartite body representing governments, workers and employers at an international level to promote 'decent work for all'. International labour standards are legal instruments drawn up by the ILO's three constituencies that set out basic principles and rights at work.
There are numerous ILO conventions and agreements of which eight are regarded as fundamental and are summarised in the Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work.
Development and governance
International labour standards are developed through the ILO's tripartite structure. Employers and workers as well as governments are represented at every stage. However, to be effective, the conventions need to be incorporated into national law in each country. To date, neither the USA nor China has ratified all of the fundamental conventions.
Nature of standard
The eight fundamental principles cover the following six issues (some are covered by more than one):
• freedom of association
• the right to organise
• abolition of forced labour
• minimum working age
• elimination of child labour
• non-discrimination.
However, there are many other conventions covering numerous special circumstances, such as working conditions appropriate at sea or in agriculture, health and safety and non-discrimination at work.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Making the Most of Standards by Adrian Henriques. Copyright © 2012 Adrian Henriques. Excerpted by permission of Do Sustainability.
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