Mainstreamed voluntary sustainability standards and their effectiveness: Evidence from the Honduran coffee sector

Abstract

Voluntary Sustainability Standards have become a popular private governance framework for more sustainable agri‐food value chains. Yet, amid increasing concerns over the decoupling of standards and practices, it is still unclear to what extent agricultural standard requirements are implemented on the ground, and what may account for such differential implementation. This study employs a novel dataset of 659 Honduran coffee producers to examine this puzzle, focusing on the most widely used standards in the coffee sector (Common Code for the Coffee Community, Fairtrade, Fairtrade/organic, UTZ Certified, and Rainforest Alliance). It first presents results on implementation and behavioral change, based on matched groups of certified and non‐certified farmers, for eight representative social and environmental sustainability practices. Analyzing determinants of implementation success, it finds that the stringency of rules – if they are known by farmers – and the level of farm‐gate prices are significantly correlated with farmers’ performance and lower levels of decoupling across a majority of indicators. These results speak to the importance of supporting small‐scale actors’ awareness of and financial capacity to comply with proposed sustainability rules.

Ensuring Economic Viability and Sustainability of Coffee Production

“…12 More generally, farmworkers on both non-certified and certified farms can be vulnerable to exploitation, and many are not paid the required minimum wage. 13 These endemic sustainability challenges, and the fact that coffee producers face particularly dire prospects due to current coffee prices, will not come as a surprise to anyone familiar with the industry. Coffee producers have publicly urged action on today's historically low coffee price.…”

Cross-Sector Partnerships for Sustainability: How Mission-Driven Conveners Drive Change in National Coffee Platforms

“…The coffee sector has been a popular context for organizational scholars for some time, with research mostly focused on certification as a means to strengthen sustainability in the sector. Most of these studies mirror the general (scientific) debate on (the shortcomings of) certification, for example, elaborating on the emergence of certification in the coffee industry [28,51], zooming in on the roll-out of certification in specific coffee-producing regions through case studies [52][53][54], or scrutinizing the impact and effectiveness of certification [55,56] and the poor connection between the 'Northern' voluntary sustainability standards with the 'Southern' reality of smallholder farmers [57]. Recently, Glasbergen [57] argued that by focusing on the effectiveness of certification, researchers fail to acknowledge the 'real' question of whether certification is the most appropriate means to increase sustainable production of coffee (and other sectors).…”

Governing complex societal problems: The impact of private on public regulation through technological change

“…In light of increasingly complex societal problems, various research streams have investigated the shift "from government to governance", that is from sole state-authority in governing to the involvement of nonstate stakeholders (Cashore 2002;Potoski & Prakash 2005;Levi-Faur 2012;Steurer 2013;Eberlein et al 2014;Fukuyama 2016). Generally, most studies investigate the nature and effectiveness of private regulatory instruments (Szulecki et al 2011;Auld et al 2015;Darnall et al 2017;Dietz et al 2019;van der Heijden 2020). The debate regarding whether private regulatory instruments have a positive, neutral, or negative effect on governance performance is still ongoing (Howlett & Rayner 2007;Carrigan & Coglianese 2011;Hoffmann 2011;Matschoss & Repo 2018;Chan et al 2019).…”

“…A growing research stream therefore specifically focuses on these interactions (Gulbrandsen 2014;Andanova et al 2017;Bartley 2018;Dietz et al 2019;Trencher & van der Heijden 2019), showing that the emergence, implementation, and enforcement of private regulation is strongly influenced by existing public regulatory instruments (Héritier & Lehmkuhl 2008;Vogel 2008;Verbruggen 2013;Auld et al 2014;van der Heijden 2015). Although this research has provided important insights into instrument interaction, existing studies primarily focus on "one-way interactions" from public to private regulation (Trencher & van der Heijden 2019).…”