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 ) – who are very knowledgeable about what they are eating and why; Consumer‐citizens – who 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 ). 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 ) or they can decide to adapt their procedures and practices to the local conditions (Hatanaka ). While there is an inherent conflict of interest in the third‐party certification model (Lytton ), 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 ). Indeed, the formalisation, rationalisation and standardisation of control in the system eroded trust between producers, certifiers and standards‐setters (Hatanaka ).…”

“…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 ; Fouilleux and Loconto ; Loconto ). 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 ; Power ; Lytton ).…”

Multiple paths for being recognized as a high impact firm in the banking sector

“…Although the project is still at a very early stage, it can be very beneficial for sustainable development (Cao et al, 2017) with more than 3.200 companies across 71 countries and 150 industries already certified 1 . Those firms may certify to provide socioeconomic agents with otherwise hidden information about their positive impacts in society and environment, as well as a mean to mitigate regulatory risk, signal their quality to consumers and/or to improve efficiency (Lytton, 2014). However, considering that there are more than 500 private sector national and transnational non-governmental organizations involved in globally certifying for-profit and non-profit ventures by conducting voluntary, third party social and environmental audits of their activities and impacts (Moroz et al, 2018), the use of some other approaches as assurance on sustainability reporting to better understand how companies build their corporate reputation (Simnett et al, 2009) and generate impacts should not be disregarded.…”

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 , p. 19; see also Black ), range in form and function, from private‐sector food safety auditors (Lytton ) to nonprofit enforcers of international fair trade standards (Auld ). 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 .…”