ISEAL Alliance

By Lara Koritzke, ISEAL's Director of Development and Communications

How does a standard understand if its strategies are working? How does it know that the practices being transformed in order to reach compliance with that standard are actually delivering an impact on poverty, on biodiversity, on the climate, on water? How can a standard ensure that it has a monitoring and evaluation system that allows for refinement of those strategies over time, in order to improve effectiveness? If sustainability is an ever-evolving concept, standards must capture the changing landscape of what constitutes good practice by improving their standards over time. We call this Learning and Continual Improvement and it is one of the thirteen Credibility Principles that ISEAL promotes for sustainability standards.

Since 2004, ISEAL has been defining good practice for sustainability standards, distinguishing and promoting credible standards, and ensuring that people understand the difference. At the heart of this is a set of core Principles that define the foundations of credible standards.

The Credibility Principles bring together concepts and actions to define credible standards. They represent the characteristics of high quality standards, such as those that have achieved full ISEAL membership. ISEAL provides additional guidance to interpret and apply the Principles through the ISEAL Codes of Good Practice that ISEAL full members commit to.

ISEAL members are now working together in a project, Demonstrating and Improving Poverty Reduction Impacts, funded by the Ford Foundation to understand the contribution that certification has made towards sustainable rural livelihoods and poverty reduction. This includes agreement on a set of common indicators to track impacts on poverty, and the development of monitoring and evaluation systems that will allow sustainability standards to improve their impacts over time.

Over the next five years, ISEAL and its members will utilise data on impacts to demonstrate that standards can alleviate poverty and foster improved livelihoods for smallholder producers and labourers working primarily in agriculture and forestry. In the first two years and with funding from Ford, members will work reach agreement on indicators, integrate M&E systems into their organisations, test data collection and analysis strategies, and examine existing knowledge. Throughout the project, ISEAL will promote innovation across the leading standards systems. ISEAL members who will be involved in the project include Forest Stewardship Council, Fairtrade International, 4C Association, Rainforest Alliance/Sustainable Agriculture Network, the Union for Ethical Bio Trade, and UTZ Certified.

While some ISEAL members have robust M&E systems today, others are developing or improving their systems at this time and the Ford-funded project will help with this process. For example, members working in agriculture are looking at ways to streamline and improve data collection from certified farms. Data collection might include such measurements as the amount of pesticides used, the number of serious accidents occurring at the farm, the amount of waste reduced and water used, etc. Some ISEAL members are also working with other sustainability initiatives to do deeper impact monitoring in specific project sites, such as determining increased income over time and at the farm level. Overall, the leading sustainability standards are focused now on demonstrating their impacts and improving their effectiveness, so that they may continue to effectively transform practices for social and environmental sustainability.

IMAGE: Ivan Vega, a coffee farmer in Colombia, inspects the waste water treatment system. © David Dudenhoefer, 2011, Rainforest Alliance