Competitive Third-Party Regulation: How Private Certification Can Overcome Constraints That Frustrate Government Regulation

Participatory Guarantee Systems: Alternative Ways of Defining, Measuring, and Assessing ‘Sustainability’

“…Second, we see the privileging of different types of 'expert' knowledge, which result in a range of hybrid actors: Farmer-experts -who are allowed/encouraged to experiment to find solutions to their problems; Farmer-auditors -who are required to conduct 'peer-reviews'; Producer-consumers (or 'prosumers') (Toffler 1980) -who are very knowledgeable about what they are eating and why; Consumer-citizenswho are creating democratic structures within civic and private relations. This apparent actor hybridity challenges some of our long-held visions about the separation of roles in agro-food chains and what constitutes a conflict of interest in their certification (see Lytton 2014). We see actions such as giving advice and controls by members of the same group transformed from conflicts to compromises and mutual interdependence.…”

“…For example, auditors can choose to accept or ignore some forms of evidence (Silva-Castañeda 2012) or they can decide to adapt their procedures and practices to the local conditions (Hatanaka 2010b). While there is an inherent conflict of interest in the third-party certification model (Lytton 2014), the need to overcome this conflict by increasing the normative and prescriptive character of standards has further eroded the assessor's ability to evaluate sustainability as the audits have become tick-box exercises that prohibit auditors from taking context and qualitative practices into account (McDermott 2012). Indeed, the formalisation, rationalisation and standardisation of control in the system eroded trust between producers, certifiers and standards-setters (Hatanaka 2014).…”

“…The governance model used by these standards follows a typical structure: independent standard-development organisations create sustainability standards and accredited third-party certifiers ensure suppliers' compliance with the standards (Loconto and Busch 2010;Fouilleux and Loconto 2017;Loconto 2017). The legitimacy of this structure is an outcome of the embeddedness of standards and audits in the scientific norms of objectivity, replicability, and validity (Porter 1995;Power 1997;Lytton 2014).…”

Coordinating intermediaries: The prospects and limitations of professional associations in decentralized regulation

“…Today's regulatory literature depicts a growing assortment of intermediaries that challenge this dualistic conceptualization. These intermediaries, defined as "any actor that acts directly or indirectly in conjunction with a regulator to affect the behavior of a target" (Abbot, Levi-Faur, & Duncan Snidal 2016, p. 19; see also Black 2008), range in form and function, from private-sector food safety auditors (Lytton 2014) to nonprofit enforcers of international fair trade standards (Auld 2014). In administratively decentralized regulatory situations, intermediaries serve as "third-parties," where regulatory agencies establish regulations, but authorize independent intermediaries to monitor regulatory compliance and sanction for infractions (Abbot et al 2017a).…”

Regulatory governance by contract: the rise of regulatory standards in commercial contracts

“…4 Other (often related) strategies include the introduction of private procurement procedures through which firms subject (foreign) suppliers to strict assessments before entering into contracts with them; the use of audit protocols to audit and inspect supplier premises during the term of the supply contract; and elaborate corporate social responsibility (CSR) policies. 5 See in general: Mayer & Gereffi 2010;Lytton 2014;Verbruggen 2014. scale, and legal forms of the use of commercial contracts as regulatory instruments by analysing the (empirical) studies that have described this development in different areas. Subsequently, Section 4 discusses the governance challenges related to the use of commercial contracts as regulatory devices to implement and enforce safety, social and sustainability standards in the supply chain.…”