ISEAL Alliance

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

How does a standard make sure that when its auditors start working in a new country that the criteria fits the local situation? What if a standard used first in family-owned cocoa farms in Ecuador tried to apply the same criteria to grapple with child labour in cocoa farms in West Africa? How can a standard used in boreal forests in Canada apply its criteria to assess a forestry operation facing alleged human rights abuses in Borneo? We call this Local Applicability and Global Consistency and it is one of the thirteen Credibility Principles that ISEAL promotes for sustainability standards.

Since 2004, ISEAL has been showing what good practice should look like for sustainability standards. At the heart of this is a set of core Principles that define the foundations of credible standards systems. 

The Credibility Principles bring together the concepts and actions that underpin effective standards. They represent the core values and characteristics of top-notch standards, such as those that have achieved full ISEAL membership.  ISEAL provides additional guidance and information about the interpretation and application of these Principles through the ISEAL Codes of Good Practice that ISEAL full members must commit to.

In a new series of articles, we focus on each of the thirteen Credibility Principles. First, we look at the concept of Local Applicability and Global Consistency and what it means. You see, standards must show that they can be relevant in any country or region that audits will be performed in. For natural resource based standards, they also have to show that they will achieve equivalent results across different ecosystem types. 

Take the example of the cocoa farms, where problems such as child and forced labour are still sadly found in some parts of the world. ISEAL full member, Sustainable Agriculture Network / Rainforest Alliance (SAN/RA), has a generic Standard for Sustainable Agriculture that is used for more than 100 crops globally. But SAN/RA must create Local Interpretation Guidelines to help users understand the binding criteria for a range of local conditions or a specific crop (in the case above, SAN/RA provides a set of additional guidance on child and forced labour for audits taking place on farms and in countries where the issue is prevalent). The development of these Local Interpretation Guidelines is done by local workgroups under the guidance of local SAN representatives, and must be completed before audits in a new country or crop can begin. The balance of interests among the different stakeholders possibly influenced by these guidelines is assured and approved by SAN’s Board of Directors, and the final version is approved by SAN leadership.

While the ultimate aim of a global standard should be to harmonise performance so that certified enterprises in one part of the world are complying with equivalent practices to those in other parts of the world, there is a need to recognise and account for variation in a range of natural and social systems. This is critical to a standard being credible, and is enforced through a standard’s compliance with the ISEAL Codes, which ISEAL’s full members all adhere to. 

Further information

For more information on the ISEAL Codes of Good Practice click here.

For the list of full ISEAL members that adhere to our Credibility Principles, visit our members page.

For more information on the SAN standard used in Rainforest Alliance certification, download their Standards and Policy Development Handbook (PDF).