This book provides a balanced critique of a range of international sustainability certification schemes across nine agricultural and natural resource industries. Certification schemes set standards through intramarket private and multi-stakeholder mechanisms, and while third-party verification is often compulsory, certification schemes are regulated voluntarily rather than legislatively. This volume examines the intricacies of certification schemes and the issues they seek to address and provides the context within which each scheme operates. While a distinction between sustainability certifications and extra-markets or intrabusiness codes of conducts is made, the book also demonstrates how both are often working towards similar sustainability objectives. Each chapter highlights a different sector, including animal welfare, biodiversity, biofuels, coffee, fisheries, flowers, forest management and mining, with the contributions offering interdisciplinary perspectives and utilising a wide range of methodologies. The realities, achievements and challenges faced by varying certification schemes are discussed, identifying common outcomes and findings and concluding with recommendations for future practice and research. The book is aimed at advanced students, researchers and professionals in agribusiness, natural resource economics, sustainability assessment and corporate social responsibility.

Environmental certification is an effective tool for managing the environmental impact of companies, leveraging their competitive capabilities and ensuring their compliance with environmental principles. A growing number of countries across the world are adopting this practice and the growth of new environmental standards – with different scopes, aims and roles – calls for a clear and updated systematization of the issue. This book provides a comprehensive, up-to-date overview of the different environmental certification tools. As well as examining practical methods of implementing the standards for each type of certification, the book discusses their added value from a corporate management perspective. In identifying the most important requirements and standards for the issuing of environmental certification of both products and processes, the book demonstrates how companies can use operational methods to develop an environmental management system or a product certification in practice. Balancing a complete theoretical presentation of the issue with an operational perspective, the book supports the adoption and implementation of environmental certification tools. It will be a valuable resource for professionals as well as students and scholars of environmental management, sustainable business and corporate social responsibility.

Sustainability certification is generally seen as a promising tool to improve environmental, social, and economic activities along global value chains of commodities. Relying on theories of new institutionalism, this book locates sustainability certification programs as forms of private governance in the broader categorical framework of global governance and compares two prominent programs. It studies commonalities and differences of Fairtrade and the Rainforest Alliance on the program level and analyzes their implementation and impacts on the livelihoods of cocoa farmers in Ghana. (Series: New Cologne Cooperative Science / Neue Kolner Genossenschaftswissenschaft - Vol. 8) [Subject: Sustainability Studies, Agricultural Studies, Environmental Studies, Business, African Studies]

This book provides a balanced critique of a range of international sustainability certification schemes across nine agricultural and natural resource industries. Certification schemes set standards through intramarket private and multi-stakeholder mechanisms, and while third-party verification is often compulsory, certification schemes are regulated voluntarily rather than legislatively. This volume examines the intricacies of certification schemes and the issues they seek to address and provides the context within which each scheme operates. While a distinction between sustainability certifications and extra-markets or intrabusiness codes of conducts is made, the book also demonstrates how both are often working towards similar sustainability objectives. Each chapter highlights a different sector, including animal welfare, biodiversity, biofuels, coffee, fisheries, flowers, forest management and mining, with the contributions offering interdisciplinary perspectives and utilising a wide range of methodologies. The realities, achievements and challenges faced by varying certification schemes are discussed, identifying common outcomes and findings and concluding with recommendations for future practice and research. The book is aimed at advanced students, researchers and professionals in agribusiness, natural resource economics, sustainability assessment and corporate social responsibility.

An expert workshop on sustainability certification of tourist destinations was held at the Swedish EPA (Naturvêrdsverket) in Stockholm Tuesday the 11th of September 2012. The workshop in Stockholm built on a study, conducted in 2011 by Environice for the Nordic Council of Ministers. The aim was to explore and widen the recommendations from the earlier study with the target to create a professional and reliable foundation for further decision and policy making. The workshop was commissioned by the Nordic Council of Ministers' group on small communities (Smêsamfundsgruppen). This report includes a summary of the workshop's group discussions, followed by revised recommendations for future work, based on the workshop results. The main conclusion of the workshop was that the Nordic countries should develop a common Nordic system for sustainability certification of tourist destinations.

Evolving international sustainability norms demand greater environmental and social responsibility from business across global commodity chains – from countries of origin to countries of consumption. Conventional commandand-control regulation has had limited success in addressing negative environmental and social impacts. As a result, advocacy groups and NGOs have championed a diversity of market-based and multi-stakeholder governance approaches aimed at shifting the private sector towards delivering more sustainable business models. Multiple non-state, market-driven social and environmental standards have emerged for palm oil. Through interviews with growers and key stakeholders in the Indonesian palm oil industry this occasional paper explores the motivations driving the uptake of sustainability standards, as well as the factors supporting and preventing implementation of sustainability standards, and asks, what model of “sustainable” oil palm agriculture is ultimately being built?