ISEAL Alliance

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About Us

The ISEAL Alliance is the global association for social and environmental standards. Working with established and emerging voluntary standard systems ISEAL develops guidance and helps strengthen the effectiveness and impact of these standards.  We also work with companies, non-profits and governments to support their referencing and use of voluntary standards.

ISEAL members are leaders in their fields, committed to creating solid and credible standard systems that give business, governments and consumers the ability to choose goods and services that have been ethically sourced but most of all help the environment and guarantee producers a decent living.

Founding of ISEAL

At the end of the 1990s four certification organisations – FSC, IFOAM, Fairtrade and MSC – came together to discuss the feasibility and benefits of working in closer collaboration.  Although these organisations dealt with different goods – timber, fish, organic, socially responsible production – they were quick to recognise the high level of overlap in their systems and in 1999 signed an Agreement in Principle which led to them meeting regularly to learn about each other’s programs and to find ways to collaborate.

At a meeting in New York in November 2000 they further agreed to create a formal organisation that could co-ordinate the peer review of members and represent their common interests in governmental and inter-governmental forums. Soon the four certification organisations had grown to eight – see below – and in 2002 ISEAL was registered in the UK as a not for profit company. 

Codes of Good Practice

One of the outcomes of these early meetings was the development of a Code of Good Practice for Setting Social and Environmental Standards which was launched in 2004. It has become the global reference for good social and environmental standard-setting processes.

By adhering, standard setting organisations help to ensure that when they create or apply their standard it will result in measurable progress towards their social and environmental objectives, without creating unnecessary hurdles to international trade. (In fact the Code of Good Practice builds on WTO (World Trade Organisation) disciplines of openness, transparency and participation.)

In addition, a Code of Good Practice can serve as a minimum bar against which to evaluate the credibility of voluntary standards systems.

The Future

ISEAL is continuing to develop a suite of good operating practices with a new Code of Good Practice for Assessing the Impacts of Standards Systems (Impacts Code) that will be launched in mid 2010.  This will create a requirement for all credible standards systems to measure and demonstrate their contributions to social and environmental impacts using consistent methodologies.   The Draft Impacts Code will undergo its last consultation round in March and April 2010 – we would very much welcome your comments.  

We are also looking forward to starting a process to develop a Verification Code of Good Practice in 2010 that will define good operating practices in terms of accreditation, certification and auditing to social and environmental standards.  A key focus of the Code will be the balance between ensuring that certification to social and environmental standards is both rigorous in terms of meeting the needs of consumers but also accessible in terms of making sure that small scale enterprises can afford to enter into certification programmes see them as market enablers.

Founding Members of ISEAL (2002)