International Coordination Action on Voluntary Sustainability Standards for United Nations Forum on Sustainability Standards

In 2015, the international community committed to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to address global crises such as climate change and deforestation and promote sustainable economic development. These goals have to be attained in an increasingly integrated global economy that is characterised by global value chains (GVCs). In this context, there has been a rapid proliferation of sustainability certification schemes, now commonly known as Voluntary Sustainability Standards (VSS). The United Nations Forum on Sustainability Standards (UNFSS) defines as “standards specifying requirements that producers, traders, manufacturers, retailers or service providers may be asked to meet, relating to a wide range of sustainability metrics, including respect for basic human rights, worker health and safety, the environmental impacts of production, community relations, land use planning and others. ” Through standard-setting, third-party verification and labelling, VSS aim to make GVCs more sustainable. According to the International Trade Centre (ITC) Standards Map, the number of VSS increased tenfold between 1989 and 2024, now reaching 342 VSS. With such proliferation, VSS have been instrumental in gearing markets toward more sustainable GVCs for commodities such as cocoa, coffee, palm oil, wood, textiles and many others which are crucial sources of economic growth for many countries. With such growing importance, there has been an acute interest among producers, consumers, policy makers, academics and corporations about questions such as: whether VSS are effective in achieving their purported sustainability objectives; what other unintentional changes they generate; how they differ and how this matters for their credibility and adoption; and how to incorporate them into other policy instruments. Over the past decade, a growing number of studies have investigated these diverse concerns but several gaps remain. On VSS effectiveness, large-scale meta-reviews of VSS impact studies report heterogeneous and highly context-specific results. This partly stems from a lack of understanding of the determinants of effectiveness and a lack of rigorous, evidence-based and standardized research on the topic. Currently, VSS effectiveness is approached by different disciplines and theoretical perspectives which focus on different dimensions of effectiveness. A first dimension focuses on the impact of VSS on a wide range of social, economic and environmental indicators. A second dimension analyses the degree to which VSS are adopted by economic operators and the drivers thereof. There is thus a pressing need to gain more comprehensive and integrated insights into the effectiveness of VSS.